St. John Vianney

St. John Vianney - Patron of Parish Priests - August 9th

John Mary Vianney was born in France. He grew to be a little shepherd of his father’s sheep, a devout boy who loved to pray, but also loved to play horseshoes. When he was eighteen, he told his father he wanted to become a priest, yet it took him two years to obtain his father’s permission, because they were poor and there was much work to be done on the farm. Then the next problem John met was Latin. He just could not seem to learn it! He became so discouraged that he decided to walk sixty miles to the shrine of St. John Francis Regis to beg God’s help. After that, although he had as much trouble as ever with his studies he never again grew discouraged.

John’s next big problem came when through some mistakes, he was drafted into the army! But about a year later he was finally able to enter the seminary. There again, he had a very hard time. He kept working humbly, yet he never did well in his studies. And when the final examination came, he was so upset that he broke down in the middle of it. Yet, because John Mary was a saint and full of common sense, he knew the right answer when he was asked what should be done in this case or that. From Latin books he could not learn, but he was ordained, anyway, because he was a model of goodness.

In his parish of Ars, a little, out-of-the-way village, Father Vianney fasted and did hard penance for his people. He did all he could to make them stop sinning by their drinking and dancing, to come to church and not work on Sunday, and to stop swearing. Pretty soon, the taverns had to close down because they had no business and people began living much better lives. “Our priest is a saint,” they said, “and we must obey him.”

God gave this Saint the power to see into people’s souls and to know the future. Because of this gift, he converted many sinners and helped people to make the right decisions. He became so famous that about three hundred souls came to Ars every day to go to confession to him. Although he would have liked to live in peace in a monastery, St. John Vianney stayed in Ars until he died, and even heard confessions as he lay dying.

We are to seek God’s aid when we find things hard. God never refuses to hear our prayers. He always grants our wishes if they are for our best; otherwise He gives us what is better for us.

Feast of Corpus Christi

Feast of Corpus Christi
Thursday after the Feast of the Holy Trinity
Taken from, “Divine Intimacy,” by Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, O.C.D., pp. 599-600.


PRESENSE OF GOD – “The eternal tide flows hid in living bread. That with its heavenly life too be fed...” (J.C. Poems).


MEDITATION


1. We have gone, step by step, in the course of the liturgical year, from the consideration of the mysteries of the life of Jesus to the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity, whose feast we celebrated last Sunday. Jesus, our Mediator, our Way, has taken us by the hand and led us to the Trinity; and today is seems as though the three Persons Themselves wish to take us back to Jesus, considered in His Eucharist. “No man cometh to the Father but by Me” (Fn 14, 6), Jesus said, and He added, “No man can come to Me except the Father...draw him” (ibid. 6, 44). This is the journey of the Christian soul: from Jesus to the Father, to the Trinity; from the Trinity, from the Father, to Jesus. Jesus brings us to the Father, the Father draws us to Jesus. A Christian cannot do without Christ; He is, in the strictest sense of the word, our Pontiff, the great Bridge-builder who has spanned the abyss between God and us. At the end of the liturgical cycle in which we commemorate the mysteries of the Savior, the Church, who like a good Mother knows that our spiritual life cannot subsist without Jesus, leads us to Him, really and truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar. The solemnity of the Corpus Domini is not just the simple memorial of an historical event which took place almost two thousand years ago at the Last Supper; rather, it recalls us to the ever-present reality of Jesus always living in our midst. We can say, in truth, that He has not “left us orphans,” but has willed to remain permanently with us, in the integrity of His Person in the fullness of His humanity and His divinity. “There is no other nation so great,” the Divine Office enthusiastically sings, “as to have its gods so near as our God is present to us” (RB). In the Eucharist, Jesus is really Emmanuel, God with us.

2. The Eucharist is not only Jesus actually living among us, but it is Jesus become our Food. This is the chief aspect under which today’s liturgy presents the mystery to us; there is no part of the Mass which does not treat of it directly, or which does not, at least, make some allusion to it. The Introit refers to it when it mentions the wheat and honey with which God once fed the Hebrews in the desert, a miraculous food, and yet a very poor representation of the living, life-giving Bread of the Eucharist. The Epistle (1 Cor 11, 23-29) speaks of it, recalling the institution of this Sacrament, when Jesus “took bread, and giving thanks, broke, and said, ‘Take ye, and eat; this is My Body’”; the Gradual chants, “’The eyes of all hope in You, O Lord, and You give them meat in due season”. The very beautiful Sequence, Lauda Sion, celebrates it at length, and the Gospel (Fn 6, 56-59), echoing the Alleluia, cites the most significant passage in the discourse when Jesus Himself announced the Eucharist. “My Flesh is meat indeed, and My Blood is drink indeed”. The Communion Hymn repeats a sentence of the Epistle, and reminds us that we receive the Body of the Lord worthily. Finally, the Postcommunion tells us that Eucharistic Communion is the pledge of eternal communion, in heaven. But in order to have a better understanding of the immense value of the Eucharist, we must go back to the very words of Jesus, most opportunely recalled in the Gospel of the day, “He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood, abideth in Me and I in him”. Jesus made Himself our food in order to assimilate us to Himself, to make us live in His life, to make us live in Him, as He Himself lives in His Father. The Eucharist is truly the most convincing proof that God calls us and pleads with us to come to intimate union with Himself.