2 September 1985
To Each Confrere

My dear Confreres,

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

I write to greet you for the feast of St. Vincent, which this year should have a special significance for us, for it is now just one hundred years ago since Pope Leo XIII declared St. Vincent to be "the special Patron before God of all associations of charity." The Pope who gave the Church the first of the great encyclicals on social justice in modern times, was also a profound admirer of St. Vincent, who animated with charity all his projects so that justice and peace might embrace each other in the interests of the poor. So, may your celebration of St. Vincent's feast day this year bring you a new measure of that joy which is the fruit of charity.

Four days before he died, St. Vincent celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. Father Jean Gicquel, who chronicled some of the words and decisions that St. Vincent took during the final weeks of his life, makes no allusion to the Diamond Jubilee. We have no way of knowing what St. Vincent's personal sentiments were on this sixtieth anniversary. 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).

The years had quite clearly given St. Vincent a vision of the greatness of the priesthood that he did not have when he knelt before the aged Bishop of Périgueux on the 23 September 1600. 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 ministerial 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 priest and pastor there on that August Sunday in 1617.

St. Vincent's participation in the ministerial 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 that 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."  "To imitate what he handled...." The phrase is an echo of that used in the ordination rite which St. Vincent himself would have heard the ordaining Bishop pronounce.

The apostolic vitality of the Congregation will, I feel, 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. It is sometimes said that our era is the era of the layman. New horizons in theology and in the apostolates of the laity have been opening up for us. Within our Congregation some of our Brothers have been assuming new responsibilities that correspond with a new vision of the layman's vocation. However, if the layman is to be fully a layman, the priest must be fully a priest. The layman will only live his vocation fully if we priests are living fully the mystery of our participation in the ministerial priesthood of Jesus Christ.

To live intensely the mystery of the ministerial priesthood of Jesus Christ was for St. Vincent "to exercise the two great virtues of Jesus Christ, namely, religion towards His Father and charity towards men." (Coste VI, Fr. ed., p. 393). In St. Vincent's vision of the priesthood, an equilibrium must be achieved between religion towards the Father and charity towards men. In our day preaching the Gospel has been emphasized as the primary task of the priest, and for us in St. Vincent's Community it is to the poor that we must go. That emphasis, however, should not deflect us from our work of participating with Christ in His mediation with the Father. Neither time nor circumstances can change this eternal truth that a priest is "a man chosen from among men and is appointed on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins." (Heb 5:1).

We rejoice that in our day the Church has in so many fine documents called us to be active in the pursuit of justice and charity for the poor. It is the same Church that asks us priests, not only to celebrate the Eucharist but also to pray day in and day out the prayer of the Divine Office which is the prayer of Jesus Christ Himself. As priests it would help us to reflect often on the words of St. Augustine: "Jesus Christ prays for us as our priest. He prays in us as our head. He is prayed to by us as our God. So we must recognize our voices in Him and His voice in us." (St. Augustine, Divine Office, Lent, Week 5, Wednesday).

The Bishop who ordained St. Vincent was almost blind. If we are to believe St. Vincent, he himself was suffering at that time also from a certain blindness of the spiritual order, a failure to see the greatness of a vocation to be a priest. Time was to cure St. Vincent of this ailment. May St. Vincent on his feast day enlighten the eyes of our minds to see and to live "the two great virtues of Jesus Christ, namely, religion towards the Father and charity towards men." (Coste VI, Fr. ed., p. 393).