Without humility we cannot evangelize

By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami

Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily during a Mass with archdiocesan seminarians gathered for their annual convocation at St. John Vianney Seminary in Miami. The Mass was celebrated Aug. 4, 2020, feast of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests.

St. John Vianney is not merely the patron saint of this seminary, he is the patron saint of diocesan priests, of parish priests. That he is patron and thus a role model for parish priests is why he is also the patron of this seminary.

Like Jesus in the Gospel reading today, he was filled with pity for the people. Like Ezekiel in the first reading, he felt keenly the burden of performing spiritual works of mercy, especially that work of mercy called: admonishing the sinner. For he saw that his own salvation was tied up with his efforts to save the sinner and to help the righteous to persevere.

Of course, he would not have been chosen by his peers or singled out by his bishop as the “one most likely to succeed.” But succeed he did — for he succeeded in helping replant the faith where it had been uprooted because of revolutionary violence; he succeeded in restoring hope to hearts that had become hardened because of cynicism and despair; he succeeded in reenkindling, in his rural parishioners and the thousands that sought him out for Confession, the fire of charity.

At any rate, St. John Vianney, discounted by some of his peers as being a bit dull and a lot ugly, shows us that Jesus does not call the qualified, but he does qualify the called. In today’s Gospel, Jesus' heart was moved with pity for the crowd — that pity for the crowd is the source of what is called pastoral charity that every priest should have.

As we see in the gospels, there is great diversity among the Twelve: Simon was a zealot but Matthew a collaborator; Peter, Andrew, James, and John were crude fishermen. Philip and Andrew have Greek names — suggesting perhaps their accommodation or assimilation into the Greek culture that surrounded them. In any case, there is no one mold that shaped these men into future Apostles and Evangelizers. Jesus wanted unity but not uniformity.

St. John Vianney ministered in post-revolutionary France — a difficult time; not less difficult than our own time. And nobody gave John Vianney a road map for his future ministry. In fact, on his way to Ars, he got lost and had to ask a young boy for directions.

We are at the change of an era — history sometimes writes of the pre-war era and the post-war era; history speaks of the Old World and the New World. Salvation history is divided between Old and New Testaments. We don’t know how this pandemic will play out but as I have said elsewhere, we face a triple crisis: a health crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis. These are intertwined one with the others. But it is clear that in years to come we will be using 2020 and this pandemic as a marker to divide what came before and what will come after.

We don’t know what will come after — and so, we don’t have a road map to follow. But hopefully these months have taught us to be humbler. Humility — a virtue that John Vianney had in a heroic degree — teaches us that we are not as self-sufficient as we sometimes think, we are not in charge of our lives as we sometimes pretend to be. Without humility we cannot evangelize; and without humility we certainly will not be evangelized.

So, let us look forward to the new year with hope but with humility. St. John Vianney, pray for us.