4 August 1990
Confort, France

My dear Sisters,

I do not wish to leave you without expressing in the context of the Eucharist my thanks to you for the hospitality and kindness you have shown me during the past few days. More than once I said to myself during these days: the spirit of Sister Rosalie Rendu lives in this house. I give thanks to God for that and pray that His protection will surround you as the mountains surround your house.

In the course of our lives in the Community we make many retreats and, as time goes on, it is inevitable that we forget much that was said to us by those who preached to us during our annual retreats. That does not matter a great deal. What matters is that our retreats would change us and make us a little more like Jesus Christ in our thoughts, in our words and in our actions. Little phrases from various retreats we have made in our lives will lodge in our minds and remain there. I recall making one of my first Community retreats almost forty years ago and a saintly Confrere, perhaps a little dramatic in the way he put things, said: "Be a saint and the world will wear a path to your door."

This sentence always comes to my mind when we are celebrating the feast of St. John Mary Vianney or, as perhaps he is better known, the Curé of Ars. Before the end of his life, the world had begun to wear a path to the door of his rectory. The attraction, which this simple parish priest had was nothing other than great personal holiness.

The Curé of Ars has a great deal in common with St. Vincent. They both came from peasant families. They both were experienced parish priests and they are now both saints. St. John Mary Vianney is patron of all pastors and St. Vincent is patron of all works of charity.

The lives of both these priests and saints were marked by much mortification. The life of the Curé of Ars was marked by an extraordinary degree of self-denial and austerity. The grace to carry out the penances which he did is an extraordinary one and not given to everybody. While St. Vincent would probably protest if we said he assumed the sort of penances as the Curé of Ars, it is certainly true that in his writings and conferences, he places much stress on the need for mortification in our lives. He stressed the importance of mortification of our wills, judgments, and senses with as much emphasis as he urged us to serve the poor.

If we are to grow in the love of God and our neighbor, mortification must be a reality in our lives. It is not a question of imposing mortification on ourselves for its own sake. Being mortified means saying no to ourselves. We say no to ourselves so that we may say yes to God and His Will. For St. John Vianney, and for all the saints, it is doing the Will of God which lies at the heart of all holiness. Doing the Will of God means saying yes to Him. However, the reality of original sin in this world and my own personal sins have biased me towards putting my own will in the first place and God's in the second. For that reason, I must constantly cut back those little shoots of selfishness which prevent the tree of my life from bearing fruit. What particular acts of mortification should be in the lives of each of us will vary from person to person. This, however, is certain, that according to St. Vincent's teaching, my judgment, my will, my heart and my senses must feel the touch of the pruning knife, so that, to quote St. Paul, "the life of Jesus may be manifested in our bodies." (2 Cor 4:10).

Jesus Christ described Himself as "the light of the world." That light shines through the lives of His friends, in the way that the sun shines through the stained glass windows of a church. Hundreds of colors will make up one stained glass window and each will admit a special quality of the sun's light. So it is with the holiness of the saints. Each of them lets in a special quality of Him Who is the light of the world. The holiness of St. Vincent de Paul is different from the holiness of St. John Mary Vianney, but it is the light of Jesus Christ that penetrated brilliantly through both of them. That same light penetrates through us and illuminates Christ's Church in our time. Perhaps the difference between the great saints, like St. Vincent and the Curé of Ars, and myself is that I have allowed the dust and grime of sin and selfishness to settle on my window so that the light of Christ cannot reach into my Community as it should, or touch the poor as it might.