A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When Jesus came to the neighborhood of Caesarea, Philippi, that's up north beyond the lake, he asked his disciples this question, who do people say that the son of man is? They replied, well, some say John the baptizer. Others, Elijah. Still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.
And you, Jesus said to them, who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God. Jesus replied, blessed are you, Simon, son of John. No mere man has revealed this to you, but my heavenly father. I, for my part, declare to you, you are rock.
And on this rock, I will build my church, and the jaws of death shall not prevail against it. I will entrust to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you declare bound on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you declare loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Then Jesus strictly ordered his disciples not to tell anybody that he was the messiah.
That's very mysterious. From then on, Jesus started to indicate to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem to suffer greatly there at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and the scribes, and finally to be put to death, and then raised up on the third day. At this, Peter took Jesus aside and began to remonstrate with him. May you be spared, master. God forbid that any such thing as this should happen to you.
And Jesus then turned to Peter and said, get out of my sight, you Satan. You are trying to make me trip and fall. You are not judging by God's standards, but by man's. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. That last sentence, you are not judging by god's standards but by man's certainly does apply to the man whose feast we are celebrating today. Saint John Vianney, the the parish priest of ours, ARS, not too far south of Paris. That I think the most miraculous thing about the is that he has been formally, officially, legally, canonically declared a saint.
It's my private opinion that the number of anonymous saints is numberless. I think there are many more honest to god saints than we think or imagine, and they are anonymous. We don't even know their names. They lived, they had their being, some of them maybe even left a rather tumultuous weight in their lives, but they died and have been forgotten. They have not been canonized in the formal sense of the word.
Now the has been. There's a say there's a saying among the clergy that there's nobody deader than a dead parish priest except a bishop. Well, I don't know how much truth there is in that, but once you have died, you are quickly forgotten, you've passed on as we say. There's nothing wrong about that at all, the world keeps on going. But the fact is the jury of ours has been formally, officially, canonically, legally declared a saint.
And of all people who might be picked out for that, he probably would be the the least possible candidate or the least promising candidate. It was a miracle that he ever got himself ordained. He he just flunked out of the regular procedures. He he was even he even flunked out of the army, the French army. He sort of forgot where he was supposed to be.
There's a little mystery about it, but anyway he was AWOL. He became a priest only because one man, one man had confidence in him. One man thought he ought to be a priest in spite of the the lack of the qualities that ordinarily, I mean ordinarily, are required for a man to be ordained. He didn't have them. But finally, he got ordained.
Be by one of the main reasons the bishop finally agreed to ordain him was he had common sense. He didn't have much common sense about how he conducted his own life, but when it came to giving advice to people, to handling the affairs of the parish, to doing the work of a pastor, he had a great measure of common sense. He may not have been very intellectual, he may not have been very academic, He may not have known his Latin or his Greek or his Hebrew, much less some Arabic or Aramaic. But he had, as these ordinaries saw, common sense as regards other people. He didn't exercise much of it as regards himself.
Now, so he got ordained by a very curious concatenation of circumstances. Then, almost at once, he's put into a parish, well, you can call it that, all alone by himself. A rundown, neglected, almost abandoned, small parish. And being a man of great common sense, he did the obvious. First thing he tried to do was to build the church.
This is significant. This man was a highly spiritual man. If anyone if if ever a parish priest was spiritual, he was. Yet the first thing he did was to try to renovate the little church. And then he did two other things.
He insisted upon catechetics, upon teaching. Teaching the truth. Catechetics doesn't mean teaching feeling or comfort or fulfillment. It means passing on doctrine. Passing on doctrine.
That's the aim of catechetics, which we have almost totally forgotten these days. We are become a church of illiterates. It's going to get worse. But the of ours, the man who didn't seem to have enough brains to be ordained, he saw clearly you had to transmit the truth of Jesus Christ. And so next to the pulpit, had a tiny little pulpit where he had his catechetics classes.
And the third thing he did was to visit his parishioners. Visited every one of them. That wasn't a big job, but he did it. Now the point I want to make I don't recommend him for imitation. As I say, he had no common sense.
He admitted this about himself. And despite his absolute disregard for ordinary ideas of food and sleep and drink, he lived a fairly long life. The point I wanna make is this, none of us have less going for us than the jury of ours had. I don't care what you wanna be, he had less going for him than any of us have for the things we wanna be, we wanna achieve, or what have you. And yet, he succeeded magnificently.
He became an international figure, not merely a national figure, not just a parochial figure. He rebuilt that parish. It wasn't as bad as some people make it out to be, but it was certainly a very indifferent group of people he went into. Religion was at a very low air, and he single handed transformed it, transformed that little parish. Now the point I wanna make is for all of us, you for you and for me.
Don't ever let us face a problem and say we can't do it. Well, the truth is maybe we can't do it, but have we asked god to help us? Have we had enough confidence in god to look upon him as a partner in doing our job? We are you out in the pews aren't called upon to build a church in the sense that the cure was called upon to build a church. He didn't try to be a parishioner.
He didn't ask his parishioners to be a priest. He worked with them for the common cause of the church of Jesus Christ. It took all of them to do it. But they weren't trying to to play each other's roles. So here's a man who was thrown into an almost hopeless situation where nobody would have blamed him for saying this, I can't face.
I can't do anything here. There's nothing here to work with. Instead of that, he did what he could day after day and succeeded in the end magnificently. So magnificently that the church celebrates him universally as a saint. And as I said in the beginning, there's nothing deader than a dead parish priest except a bishop.
So the fact that he had became a canonically canonized saint to me is as much a miracle as anything could be. But we have to the point I wanna make is we, each of us, have a calling, And it usually is not as hard to find as we make out to be. When I see, as I did in last June, and met a number of these young graduates who are saying, going to take off a year to find myself. I don't know what I want to do. Notice that word, what I want to do.
I didn't hear one of them saying what God wants me to do, not a single one. Yet they were all Christians, and some of them are Catholics. Not a one said, what does God want me to do? As if they're looking around as if they did not have a calling, a vocation when they got it, when they were baptized. Let none of us say I can't do it.
I cannot achieve it. The only way you can say that and be telling the truth is if you exclude god almighty as your partner. God doesn't ask you to do it alone. As a matter of fact, you know what Jesus told you? Without me, he said, you can do nothing.
And yet we try to prove him wrong all the time. We'll show him. We'll show him we can do it without him, and we flop dismally, dismally. And so this feast of the cure of ours, it's a feast for the parochial clergy, you know, but it's a feast for all of us for this very significant great truth that the cure teaches all of us. You have a calling.
It's on your doorstep. God's work is there. With his help, you can do it. Name of the father, the son, holy spirit. Amen.