3 February 199
Dublin, Ireland

My dear Friends of Jesus Christ,

The two readings from Scripture to which we have just listened would not be your choice for an occasion such as this, when we are gratefully celebrating the Centenary of the Vincentian presence here in All Hallows College. In the first reading the fortunes of David have sunk to their lowest point. He is in flight from his own son. Only a handful of trusted servants remain with him. The news is broken to him that "the hearts of the men of Israel are now with Absalom." (2 Sm 15:13). The narrative continues: "David then made his way up the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went and his feet bare.... (Ibid., v. 30). As David was reaching Bahurim, out came a man of the same clan as Saul's...and as he came he uttered curse after curse and threw stones at David and at all King David's officers." (2 Sm 16:5). This is a sad story of a loss of loyalty with the inevitable divisions that such a loss always entails and is certainly not a festive reading.

What of the passage from St. Mark's Gospel? To begin with, it is one of the strangest of episodes recorded in St. Mark's Gospel. Were we at Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park in London, we would feel a trifle embarrassed if a fanatical ecologist in the audience challenged us to explain the rather arbitrary destruction of those two thousand pigs, even if pigs cannot be exactly described as an endangered species. Again, this is hardly an appropriate reading for an occasion when we are recalling that legion of priests to whose formation the Vincentian Community has been privileged to contribute for a hundred years.

The two particular readings, however, of this evening's Mass are what the Providence of God through His Church offers us as pabulum for our nourishment today, Monday of the fourth week of the year. Taking them as they are, we must consider them as an invitation to interpret events by the Word of God and not the Word of God by events. The events that are foremost in our minds this evening are the arrival of those three Vincentian priests, Father James Moore, Father Daniel Walsh and Father Joseph Geoghean to this College exactly one hundred years ago today. We gratefully recall their arrival and the unbroken presence of members of St. Vincent's Community in this missionary College, which lays claim on all the Saints of God as Patrons for the work that goes on within its walls.

I referred to the Providence of God. Four years after his death the first biography of Monsieur Vincent was published. Its author was a retired Bishop who had lived as a guest in St. Vincent's Community for some years. Observing Monsieur Vincent over a number of years, he remarked that he thought that devotion to the Providence of God was a distinctive characteristic of the personal spirituality of Monsieur Vincent. Even if the Bishop had written his work without having personally known St. Vincent, he would have come to that conclusion from a study of his correspondence and writings. Over and over again he counseled his priests to keep always one step behind, rather than one step ahead of Divine Providence. "We have as a maxim," he wrote to his priest agent in Rome, "never to establish ourselves in a place to which we have not been invited.... We must be convinced that God will be more honored by submission to His Divine Providence, waiting on Him and awaiting His orders, rather than by taking the initiative to anticipate them." (Coste V, Fr. ed., p. 164).

The point had been well taken by the Vincentian authorities here in Dublin and in Paris when, some years before 1892, the fortunes of All Hallows College, for a variety of reasons, were at a low ebb. A clash of temperaments and of viewpoints seems to have divided the staff with a consequent undesirable effect on the formation of the students. In October 1891 it was the Conference of Irish Bishops who recommended to the authorities in Rome that the direction of All Hallows be entrusted to the Vincentians. Less than four months later the Irish Provincial had chosen and appointed the first three priests to assume the direction of the College, already a half century old.

It is easy for us to imagine that a certain sense of trepidation must have existed initially between the group of priests already resident in All Hallows and the three newcomers. Neither group could foretell what the reaction of the student body might be. Both sides might have very well feared what is described in the opening sentence of this evening's first reading: " A messenger came to tell David that the hearts of the men of Israel are now with Absalom." (2 Sm 15:13). By all accounts, however, the transition of administration was harmonious and smooth. More than half the former staff remained, and relations between the new and old administration were cordial. The ideals of Father Hand, the Founder of the College, continued to be respected, but they were now shot through with the spirituality of a Saint who has been described by Daniel Rops as "a "Builder of the Modern Church." What both sides may have feared, happily did not come to pass. "So David and his men went on their way (Ibid., v. 14). The community of Vincentian priests, always with a representation of diocesan priests on the staff, have continued for one hundred years, and for that, "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

It is not for me to assess or evaluate the work of the Vincentian community here in All Hallows over the past century. I am strongly discouraged from doing so by St. Vincent himself, for in the final sentence of the Rule which he wrote for his Community two years before his death, he said: "We must get it firmly into our heads that when we have carried out all we have been asked to do, we should, following Christ's advice, say to ourselves that we are unprofitable servants and that we have done what we were supposed to do, and that, in fact, we could not have done anything without Him." (CR XII, 14).

If St. Vincent would have me be silent, perhaps with his profound respect for Bishops, he will listen humbly to a distinguished Archbishop whose text book of apologetics was once studied in all the secondary schools of Ireland. It was Archbishop Sheehan of Sydney who forged out the Latin inscription on the tombstone of the first Vincentian President of All Hallows, James Moore. Recalling the fact that James Moore was the sixth President of All Hallows, (and in the past one hundred years there have only been six others), he described him as a priest who was "outstanding in prudence, distinguished by kindness, and luminous in his integrity of life."

Prudence with its sister virtue of simplicity was placed first in the hierarchy of those virtues which Vincent de Paul wished to be a distinguishing characteristic of his priests. Humility and gentleness, which beget kindness, came next, while mortification and zeal lend a solid integrity to a priest's life. James Moore seemingly had learned well at the school of St. Vincent de Paul. With greater or lesser degree of success, the generations of Vincentians who have worked in the formation of priests in All Hallows have, by word and example, tried to share those values with the students whom Divine Providence entrusted to their care on the way to the sanctuary of ordination.

Most of the Vincentians who labored here for a number of years lie buried in the little cemetery a hundred yards or so from this chapel and equidistant from those wooden gates that have kept eye on the comings and goings of priests, students and laity over the past century. If there be an All Hallows Community Room in heaven, the topic of the growing number of laity passing through the All Hallows gates in recent years will have come up for discussion frequently enough. Should they seek the view of Monsieur Vincent--he lives in a nearby Mansion House known to them all--he would show enthusiasm for the new courses in laity and pastoral formation that are now a feature of the College's curriculum. He might gently remind his Confreres in the words of George Bernard Shaw that "all the professions are conspiracies against the laity," and that in his lifetime he had as many friends among the laity as among the clergy. On being interviewed, he would admit to having tried to form and mobilize the laity for the kingdom of God and for the service of the marginalized in the society of his day. Perhaps with one of those subtle twists of humor that characterized him, he might ask us who was the first missionary sent out by Our Lord according to the Gospel of St. Mark. He himself would have the answer: the man out of whom a legion of devils had been cast. "Go home to your people," Jesus said, "and tell them all that the Lord in His mercy has done for you. So the man went off and proceeded to spread throughout the Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him. And everyone was amazed." (Mk 5:19-20). The man in question was one of the laity.

The Vincentians who came here a hundred years ago would not claim to have been savants. They were humble, holy and experienced priests who had thrown their hearts away on Christ, the eternal High Priest. They and the Vincentians who have succeeded them have tried to live their lives under the gentle influence of St. Vincent de Paul. We Vincentians might appropriately seize the words of the poet, Patrick Kavanagh, to express what is in our hearts:

With that same poet, we Vincentians today sing: