A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When our lord heard of the death of John the baptizer, Jesus withdrew by boat from where they were to a deserted place all by himself. The crowds heard of it and followed Jesus on foot from the towns. When he got out of the boat and saw the vast throng that had gathered, his heart was moved with pity, and he cured their sick. Then as evening drew on, his disciples came to Jesus with this suggestion.
This is a deserted place, and it is already late. Dismiss the crowds so that they may go to the villages and buy some food. Jesus said to them, there is no need for them to disperse. Give them yourselves something to eat. They replied, we have nothing but five loaves and a couple of fish.
Well then, said our lord, bring them here. Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, took the five loaves and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed them, broke them, and gave the loaves to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the people. All those present ate everything and all they wanted until they had their fill. The fragments which remained when gathered up filled 12 baskets. Those who ate were about 5,000, not counting women and children.
And this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Attractive, almost compulsory as a few words should be on this excerpt from our lord's life, the feeding of the multitude, which of course is a source of great wonderment and even difficulty and scandal to some people. How can there be a miracle?
You know, that's the problem. I want to talk today about Saint John Vianney, the parish priest of a little town near Lyon, Southern France named Arce. It is pronounced Arce. I want to bet with a Frenchman on that because I happen to have a French dictionary with me. It's very curious why it's pronounced that way.
The Saint John Viennet, and he also was called Marie and Baptiste. And he is in the liturgy, he is called simply priest. Simply priest. That's all he was. Just a plain, simple parish priest.
He died just before our civil war, 1859. I mean the war between the states, pardon me. Saint John, yesterday in my well chosen remarks, I referred to to the fact that with a great panoply of saints in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, we have a saint for every time, place, person, taste, you name it, we've got it. As I said, some were so dumb that they couldn't even learn learn Latin, and everybody can learn Latin, you know. And of course I had in mind my friend Saint John Vionnet, because due to the confusion in France following the revolution and the constitution for the clergy and there was a terrible mixed up situation.
He got very little schooling, very little. But he learned something about life by being a member of a family, a pretty devout family when all is said and done, by going to work tending cattle in the field. You can learn a lot about life in the field. A lot of people learned a lot about life at Ocean City yesterday, when lightning killed a couple of several of them. You don't have to go to school to learn a lot about life.
Life itself teaches us a great deal, and you can't spend a lot of time close to nature without learning something very real, very real. Even if you are dumb as Saint Jean Vionnet was. I put dumb in quotation marks. It's a fact he could not learn Latin, or he didn't. It's a fact that he became a priest only by extraordinary intercessions of an abbe ballet.
It's a fact that he couldn't pass these examinations. It's a fact that he was looked upon as a failure. These are and when he did finally get ordained, thanks to his patron who thought there was something in this man, he became his own assistant in another little parish, which happened to be ours. That was a rundown parish. It was not a very godly parish.
The total number of Catholics was about two thirty. So he went down there as an associate sort of, and found the abandoned church falling into ruins. The people were making Sunday a real great holiday, spelt with an eye. They weren't unusually bad or anything like that, but they were had just simply ceased to be practicing Catholics. And here you had a had a man who finally got ordained a priest in spite of everything, going to a parish who was practically on the verge of extinction.
Now that's a you know, that wouldn't put fire into any young man's heart. I can just imagine that stepping out into that kind of a situation. Now he did three things right down the line. See, he came from the farm, he came from the earth, he came from nature, he came from the realities of life, in spite of the fact that he lived almost entirely on boiled and moldy potatoes. And that's no that's how he lived.
Why cook every day when you can cook once a day and eat potatoes? And we know penicillin is a mold, so great he was great he was really ahead of his time I guess. Anyway, here's this man gets plopped down into that kind of a situation. Now what does he do? First thing is to rebuild the church.
This edifice, this building that we're trying to turn into a community hall, I don't mean a heart church here but in various parts of the country not a million miles away. We're turning the church into a community hall no statues, no windows, nothing to make it religious. We're getting rid of the pews. We want to be informal. Because you know to be informal brings you close to God, we all know that.
Come in your bathing suits. So that's the first thing he did, rebuild the church and he wasn't afraid to go out and do it with his own hands. He was a man of the earth. And the second thing he did was to visit all the families. And the third thing he did was to I hate to use this word, makes me blush.
He catechized his parishioners. And he did it from the pulpit with his surplus on every day. They were the first day that that was his program of action. Then, as you know, he became famous not for that, but because of his work in the confessional. He became nationally famous for that, as a confessor.
And then incidentally, he also founded in this little parish of 250 people, he founded a refuge, a home for wayward girls. And so finally, the church declared him a saint. Now, I've left out one very important point. I didn't leave it out because I'm bringing it in. And that was from earliest years he was a very religious man.
And that I'm by that I mean, he didn't go out into the slums. He didn't talk a lot about social justice, all he did was to have a terrific consciousness of God Almighty in his life. And that I think we're missing so much today. As I said, the probably the worst enemy of religion of true honest to God religion in God is religion. Anyway, he had this terrific awareness of consciousness of God and his self as God's creature.
Even even in all these years when he was struggling to be a priest, trying to stay alive, literally. He was a man of great ascetical practices, of prayer, of penitential practices, and very severe ones. And he did it all his life. No one knows how he really lived as well as he did. And let me tell you this, all this business about his being dumb, when he died they found some pretty good textbooks on moral theology in his little library, written in Latin.
He wasn't so dumb, you know. He just didn't know Latin. So anyway, the church finally got around to declaring him a full fledged saint. That is, a person who has formerly been declared living with God Almighty face to face, as we say. And here's a very curious little incident that will tell you a lot about the Catholic church, and that we're talking about the Southern part of France now, but boy we sure can say it's the same thing about The United States.
When it was learned that our holy father was going to visit our ours in the fall of this year, what happens? A group of priests send a petition that he shouldn't come because that would be giving recognition to a priest that today is considered obsolete. Anarch, He's gone. He's he's with a dodo bird. That tells you something about the priest who signed the petition.
Because when the chips are down, you can't escape this very naked truth. What matters is God, my relationship to God, and what I do about that relationship in this life. You can't escape it, and you can't escape these simple things. There's got to be a certain amount of penance, there's got to be prayer, there's got to be awareness, and we've got to be doing our job, whatever that be. We're not all called upon to be couriers of ours.
It's a little town and it couldn't accommodate us. But the thing is we're all called upon to do our job for the simple fact, if we don't do it, it'll be left undone. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.