26 June 1987
Chicago, Illinois

A few years ago, when I was flying to Australia in a plane belonging to Qantas Airlines, I had much time to study a map of the world with which the company had provided their passengers. For one who had often heard English and Irish people refer to Australia as 'down under,' it struck me forcefully that on the map the Australian continent was placed firmly in the center of the world's land masses. To the left were Asia and Europe and to the right were the Americas. I said to myself, "I have never seen the world like that before." As a European my eye had been trained to see Europe at the center of the world with the Americas to the left, Asia to the right and Australia down under. After a time on the plane journey to Australia, I realized that the airline Qantas was an Australian company and that naturally Australians would put their continent on center stage. Were I to fly with an American company, I would find the Americas in the center of the map with Europe and Asia in the wings. It is perfectly understandable and to a point very reasonable. One starts a journey from where one is, though I did hear of a farmer in my own country who, being asked by a traveler for some road directions, began by saying: "Well, if I were going to where you are going, I would not start from here...."

We must, however, start from where we are and move forward. That is what you have been doing here during this week. You have been looking at yourselves and where you are, and you have been planning, or at least trying to see the way ahead into America's heartland. Today you invite me to speak to you and, to quote from a letter that Paul Golden wrote to me, he interprets your wishes as follows: "We felt it important to end our week together by offering the Confreres a global perspective rather than focusing solely on our little provincial world."

Now, I feel that the Confreres of your province, who have participated in the last General Assembly, have already, by their contributions to this morning's program, lifted your sights above your provincial world. One of the great values of a General Assembly is to do just that. If the delegates bring to a General Assembly an open and receptive mind, it can be an immensely educative experience for them. One's land masses are moved around. One's province ceases to be the center of the Congregation. At a General Assembly we are forcefully reminded that St. Vincent and his Congregation are for all seasons and for all continents. The spirit of St. Vincent cannot be encapsulated in any one culture. It is true that we must try to give expression to St. Vincent's charism in the context of the culture in which we live, but we do well to reflect from time to time on the fact that our Congregation girdles the globe. I choose the verb carefully, for it suggests those spiritual links that bind together Confreres from north and south and east and west, welding them into one body, one spirit in Christ.

You have asked me for some reflections on, to quote Paul Golden, "trends in the Congregation" and "challenges we face." Looking at the Congregation in the world, it can be said that it has achieved "a greater closeness to the world of the poor, that is, to the people themselves and to the environment they live in." There can be noted, too, "a sharper sensitivity to the unjust situations existing in a large part of the world." There has sprung up, "a more intense desire to concretize St. Vincent's work and his thoughts about the contents and methods of evangelization." On the other hand, it must be recorded that in the Congregation "there is considerable indifference in regard to our Vincentian lay movements and that there has been little interest in creating new forms of service to the clergy. There has been lacking a serious analysis of the causes of poverty, injustice and violence as well as consciousness of the need to commit ourselves to work against those evils." Among Confreres one can detect "a searching for new ways of living the Gospels and preaching the good news together, as well as a desire to strengthen our communion by founding it upon common agreement concerning the content and methods of evangelizing the poor today." However, we must admit that in the Congregation there are many Confreres now "who live together without knowing each other well enough, who have not time to listen to one another, and who look outside the Community for the dialogue and support which they do not find within it or to which they themselves fail to contribute."

How have you been reacting to what I have just said? Perhaps you are thinking that my evaluation is a highly personalized one, or perhaps somewhat familiar to you. If you think it is a too personalized view, you are, if I may respectfully suggest, mistaken and a little out of touch. If, on the other hand, you think what I have said is somewhat familiar to you, you are on the right track. For what I have offered you is not my evaluation of the Congregation, but the Congregation's evaluation of itself in the Church, an evaluation which was made by the participants of the General Assembly a year ago. What I have offered you are but a few of what I might call straight-from-the-shoulder statements that you will find in the Lines of Action (LA).

I could continue to highlight some of the practical challenges that the last Assembly's document contains, but let what I have taken from it serve as an aperitif which will, I hope, stimulate an appetite for those courses that the provinces, through their approval of the document, have pledged to provide, in accordance with their means and in the course of the years immediately ahead.

Besides inviting me to offer some reflections on the Lines of Action, Paul Golden, as your program indicates, asked me to speak, too, on the challenges facing the Congregation. In a sense there are no challenges facing the Congregation today. There are only challenges facing you and me as individuals in the Congregation. More than once in these last few years I have found myself thinking of St. Pius X who, on one occasion, speaking of his program for renewal in the Church, broke off quite suddenly when he was sharing his vision of what should be done by the Church, and said: "Well, I suppose it all begins with me." It is so easy for us all to project onto the Congregation or onto the province the challenges which, as individuals, we have been slow to face. Some personal challenges, of which we become aware, can be costly. We find ourselves reluctant to try them in the laboratory of personal experience, and so we pass them on as suggestions to a provincial council or a provincial commission. The challenges that face each of us as individuals in the Congregation, are many. Let me just list some of the more urgent and fundamental ones as I see them. I have already touched on some of them when I gave to the General Assembly a reflection on the state of the Congregation last year, as I saw it at the end of six years as Superior General.

I see a particular challenge facing us in the vow of obedience. If the Congregation is to adapt itself to the demands of its mission in the modern world, it needs a certain mobility. But how can a province be mobile, if the men themselves are not mobile, and I am not referring to means of transport! Consultation is a very necessary and useful process for discerning God's Will. Used, however, without sensitivity it can become a weapon for defending one's personal and at times selfish preferences. And so the faculty of mobility, that is intended to result from obedience, becomes atrophied. We take up entrenched positions and the advance of the province into new territory, new apostolates, is retarded or impeded.

There is a challenge, too, that comes from our vow of poverty. I doubt if there has been any period in the history of the Congregation when the word 'poor' has been so much on the lips of Confreres. The poor have certainly impinged much on our thinking and on the drawing boards of provincial projects. We go to the poor because Christ sends us to them, but it is a poor Christ who gives us that mission. There is a perennial challenge for us to close the gap between talking about the poor, even evangelizing the poor, and manifesting in our personal lives that spirit of detachment and poverty with which Jesus Christ lived His. We have spoken much in these last few years of the importance of simple life-style. It is an issue, but it is not the most profound one. The deeper one is to acquire personally the mind of Christ Jesus Who willingly became poor in His personal life that we might become rich.

Next, there is the challenge facing the Congregation of being able to speak to the poor and to all whose lives we touch, with firsthand knowledge of God. Such firsthand knowledge can only be received in deep and personal prayer. Many young people have frequently known difficulty in getting teachers or clergy to discuss, let alone answer, their most important and ultimate questions. Put more bluntly, the idea can be expressed in the words of a member of a Protestant committee that was selecting a candidate to be their minister: "What this parish needs," one member said, "is a minister who knows his God more than by hearsay." There is the challenge, too, to promote vocations. It is not the challenge of vocation propaganda that I have in mind. Rather the challenge of letting young people see in our lives, in our houses, that we are men who, not only have a concern for the poor but who can pray together, recreate together, and submerge personal differences in the interests of the apostolate, thus presenting to the world of today, not only the image but the reality of being one body, one spirit in Christ.

The litany of challenges is unending. There remains, however, the challenge of faith, of hope and of charity. The challenge of faith which is, to quote Solzhenitsyn in his letter to the Patriarch of Moscow: "Our readiness to be mocked publicly by ignoramuses." The challenge of hope is no shallow invitation to be optimistic. Optimism does not go beyond the horizons of this life, while hope springs eternal. There is the challenge of not limiting our vision to the city of man, but of stretching it to that everlasting city to which we and our people are journeying. The greatest of all challenges is charity or agape. In an epoch that has seen so much discussion on celibacy, there is the daily challenge for us, both within and outside the Community, to make of our celibacy, to quote a conciliar phrase, "a sign and a stimulus to charity."

You will notice that the second part of the input I have been asked to present to you this morning, is entitled, "Significant Trends in the Works of the Mission." As I remarked last year to the Assembly: "Throughout the Congregation there are notable signs of a desire to draw closer to the poor, so that as a Community we could break the bread of God's Word for them....Some provinces have shown new awareness of the injustices suffered by the poor and have in a variety of ways been seeking practical and peaceful means of dismantling the structures of injustice in society." (Reflection on the State of the Congregation 1986).

However, it is true to say that, while Confreres have been greatly moved by the injustices suffered by the poor, many are perplexed as to how they can move from compassion to effective action in securing greater justice for the poor. One can notice in the Congregation, too, a new consciousness of the important place popular missions should hold in the apostolates of a province. There is, too, a very significant trend in some provinces to find new ways of expressing its charism of preaching the Gospel to the poor.

Let me at this point focus on an apostolate which I would like to see holding a place of greater significance in the Congregation's works. In the course of this week we have rejoiced with Confreres who have celebrated twenty-five and fifty years in the priesthood. Four days before he died, St. Vincent celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood. We have no way of knowing what St. Vincent's personal sentiments were on the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. It is likely that they would not have been very much different from those he expressed earlier in one of his letters to a priest:

"For me, if I had known what the priesthood was when I had the temerity to enter into it, as I know it now, I would have preferred to work on the farm than give myself to such a tremendous state in life. I have said this a thousand times to the poor people of the countryside...and indeed the older I get, the more I am confirmed in this opinion because I discover every day how far I am from the perfection which I ought to have as a priest." (Coste V, Fr. ed., p. 568).

However unworthy of the priesthood St. Vincent may have felt himself to be, he could not have denied that it was his participation in the pastoral priesthood of Christ that had largely enabled him to do so much for the poor. His sermon at Folleville would never have been preached had he not been a priest, nor would the charity at Châtillon-les-Dombes have been established if he had not been a priest and pastor there that August Sunday in 1617.

St. Vincent's participation in the pastoral priesthood of Christ was a constant reference point for him in the direction he gave to the dazzling panorama of his projects of charity and mercy. The Church herself makes the point clear for us in the prayer she asks us to pray over the gifts on his feast day: "God, You gave to St. Vincent as he celebrated the Sacred Mysteries the gift of imitating what he handled; grant by the power of this sacrifice that we also may be transformed into an offering pleasing to You."

The apostolic vitality of the Congregation will depend in large measure on the depth of appreciation which all of us in the Congregation have for the priesthood and on the intensity with which it is lived by us priests. In making that assertion I am not devaluing in any way the vocation of our Brothers in the Congregation who, because they are members of St. Vincent's Community, pursue with the priests the same end which the Spirit of God has given to the Congregation. What I do wish to say is that the lay person cannot and will not realize the full potential of his or her vocation as a lay person, if the priest is not realizing the specific potential of his.

In our Lines of Action we read: "The Provinces will make creative efforts over the next six years to find those contemporary means by which our ministry on behalf of the clergy, which St. Vincent considered almost equal to that of the missions, might be revitalized." (LA 11.2).

There is a profound challenge in those two words, creative and revitalize. The fact that in many provinces we have yielded up administrative and teaching positions to the diocesan clergy does not mean that our ministry to the clergy is at an end. Rather must it be interpreted as an invitation on the part of Divine Providence to revitalize those ministries which we still hold and create and innovate new ones. The task is all the more urgent in the light of the difficulties and doubts which are the experience of quite a number of priests today. A year ago I read an article by one of your own Bishops and it was entitled: "Is there a NASA syndrome among today's priests?" Archbishop Hurley of Anchorage, writing to his priests, remarked:

"From outside the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) there is much criticism; from within much introspection, soul-searching and calls for redesigns. Questions swirl around everyone: Are there basic flaws in the system? Have NASA personnel lost their common vision, their spirit of mutual support, their team work?....Much will depend on people within NASA itself, how true they will be personally to their high calling. So with the Catholic priesthood. At times its luster is tarnished or, because it is a countersign to the world, it is not attractive. That does not diminish its greatness. We know it is the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Its heroes and holy men, both of the past and present, remain heroes and holy men." ("Origins" 1986, vol. 16, no. 5).

The Congregation has an inbuilt power to counter the NASA syndrome among priests. It has had a long tradition of forming heroes and holy men for the diocesan priesthood. Most importantly, the Congregation itself must not succumb to the NASA syndrome. It must be alert to and receptive of the new ministries which the Spirit of God may be revealing among the priestly people. It must foster, encourage and develop in the laity those gifts which the Spirit of God has given to the baptized and confirmed for the building up of the body of Christ which is the Church.

The Congregation will respond to this challenge all the more effectively if it is convinced that, and I quote from the Council document, Optatam Totius: "The wish for renewal of the whole Church in great part depends on the priestly ministry, animated by the Spirit of Christ." (Introduction).

It was part of the creative genius of St. Vincent that he could link the movement towards the evangelization of the poor with that of the formation of the clergy. Has the Congregation in the centuries since his death tended to separate these two movements, setting them, as it were, on parallel lines--the seminary-college Confreres versus the rest? As a Congregation we should, by virtue of our charism and through reflection on the genius of our Founder, be able to fuse more effectively these two traditions for the advantage of forming laity for fuller participation in the life of the Church to which the Spirit of God is calling them today. Did such an idea, which I have just outlined, lie beneath this sentence in the letter which Pope John Paul II addressed to us in 1981, on the occasion of the fourth centenary of the birth of St. Vincent: "Does not St. Vincent today call all priests to live their priesthood in fraternal teams, indissolubly united in prayer and the apostolate, at the same time very open to collaboration with the laity and penetrated with the meaning of their ministerial priesthood which comes from Christ for the service of the Christian community?" (Pope John Paul II, Letter to the Superior General, 12 May 1981).

Even when the forthcoming Synod on the Laity will have provided us with fresh insights on the vocation of the baptized and its relationship to the vocation of the pastoral priesthood, there will remain for us these two questions:

"Second, is the Congregation in its Vincentian movements advancing towards or retreating from the world of youth today?" (Reflection on the State of the Congregation, General Assembly 1986).

There is one final significant trend in the Congregation which I hope will receive a special impulse from the last General Assembly, and that is unity. Recently the General Council sent to the Provinces a document on the unity of the Congregation. It is the fruit of a prolonged reflection of the General Council on that topic. I hope the document will be read, reflected upon and discussed. The experience of the past week has certainly been an exercise in building unity within the Province. So let me at this point congratulate Father Hugh O'Donnell and his Council who fathered the idea of holding this Convocation. Let me also congratulate the commission who over a protracted period of time have organized it. I am quite sure, too, that the new Visitor has put some last minute touches to the program, and I thank him, as I thank you all, for the welcome you have given me.

Speaking of new Visitors, I recall an occasion in my own Province when a new Visitor was being installed. The patent of office was read and afterwards, at a lunch in the presence of the Provincial Council and some former Visitors, one speaker remarked that, not only had we here present today the present Visitor, but we had also in the persons of his predecessors, the past, the perfect and the pluperfect Visitors among us! I am happy to greet Father Hugh O'Donnell as the past Visitor, Father Cecil Parres as the perfect Visitor and Father Jim Fischer as the pluperfect Visitor. How can I not tell you also about my happiness in meeting Father Jim Richardson to whom the Curia in Rome, and the entire Congregation and the Daughters of Charity throughout the world, owe so much for what he did for us during the twelve years that he held the office of Superior General.

With the unity of your Province now deepened through the experience of this week, you will move with a more confident step into the many apostolates of your Province, which are all subsumed under that mission which the Congregation has by the Spirit of God received from the Church. That one mission is being lived out on all five continents of the world. We do well from time to time to reflect humbly and gratefully on the fact that the sun never sets on the Congregation. At any hour of the day there are Confreres rising to go forth openly or secretly, as in some Communist countries, to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, to celebrate the Eucharist and to help spiritually and corporally the poor to whom we have all been sent.

At the end of this week let us leave the last word to St. Vincent, as recorded in the celebrated conference of the 6 December 1658: