10 February 1987
To Each Confrere

My dear Confrere,

May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with us forever!

Perhaps you have already heard the news that the Holy Father has graciously accepted an invitation from us to celebrate a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica on Sunday, 27 September, to commemorate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Canonization of St. Vincent. It was on Trinity Sunday, 16 June 1737, that Pope Clement XII declared Vincent de Paul to be a Saint. If every canonization is, as Pope Paul VI remarked, a celebration of holiness, then our anniversary celebration of St. Vincent's canonization must be seen principally as the celebration of his personal holiness. The point cannot be too often made that, the forest of charitable works that grew up around St. Vincent in his lifetime and that still cluster around his name today, are there because of his personal holiness. In one of his conferences St. Vincent asked himself the question: "What is holiness?" He answered it himself, saying: "It is the cutting off and the withdrawing from earthly things and, at the same time, an affection for God and union with His Divine Will." (Coste XII, Fr. ed., p. 300). All of us have met living incarnations of that definition. Let me, however, pass on to you an observation of a modern Anglican poet who wrote: "I have met in my life two persons, one a man, the other a woman, who convinced me that they were persons of sanctity. Utterly different in character, upbringing and interests as they were, their effect upon me was the same. In their presence I felt myself to be ten times as nice, ten times as intelligent, ten times as good-looking as I really am." (D.W.H. Auden).

Would a meeting with St. Vincent in the final years of his life produce such an effect on us? I feel quite certain it would. To begin with, his personal holiness would make him accept us fully for what we are, and undoubtedly his own profound and living conviction about the importance of humility in his own life would cause him to look up to, rather than to look down on, us. It is so in the pages of the Gospel. The Samaritan woman, the woman taken in adultery, the good thief and so many others who, for a variety of reasons felt themselves to be at the bottom of life's ladder, could feel fully accepted and valued when they were in the presence of Jesus Christ, Who was humble of heart. It is this humility of heart that opens windows onto God's world and allows the light of His holiness and the warmth of His love, which is in our hearts through Baptism, to stream into the dark world of sin and infidelity.

It is holiness and humility that are at the heart of all evangelization. Evangelization is something greater than a transmission of the good news about the Kingdom of God. Evangelization is an event by which something of the holiness of Christ is appropriated by and passes through the one who evangelizes. We think of evangelization as being a work ad extra, directed to others. That is so. Let us, however, never forget that evangelization is also a work ad intra. While thinking about our "Lines of action" that will make our evangelization of the poor more effective, let us not neglect the acres of territory in our own hearts where the Gospel of Christ has yet to be preached, those desert areas of our hearts which have yet to be touched by the holiness of Christ.

Let me make one practical and simple suggestion to you this Lent and for this year when we are honoring in a special way the holiness of St. Vincent. Our Congregation could be said to have been founded on the experience of a simple confession in Folleville in 1617. The Sacrament of Penance has, since then, been a very marked feature of our preaching, particularly during our popular missions. On the landscape of our personal lives, is the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation a prominent and regular feature? Ask not what you are getting from the Sacrament of Penance; rather ask, what does Christ, the Holy One of God, wish to give you. There is a special efficacy and power in the word of Christ, spoken to us in the Sacrament of Penance, that helps us to shed our false illusions about ourselves and become more "alive with a life that looks towards God through Christ Jesus." (Rom 6:11). The truth is that Jesus Christ wishes to make us not only feel ten times holier than we are but really make us so.