24 April 1990
Northampton, PA

I do not know if Father Kehoe and the faculty of this seminary, when planning and selecting the date for this talk, were aware of the fact that the 24 April is the birthday of St. Vincent. Today the Saint is a healthy 409 years old, and I imagine that in our Father's house, where there are many mansions, he is receiving many callers from his numerous friends and admirers of many nations and tongues. What the heavenly birthday greeting is, I do not know. It cannot be Happy Birthday, for happiness in fullness is already possessed. As for Many happy returns of the day, an eternity of them is already assured. I doubt if Vincent de Paul celebrated his birthday in any marked way when he was on earth. He lived into his eightieth year, and four days before he died he celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. Father Jean Gicquel, a priest who kept an eye on St. Vincent's mortality, wrote a little diary of community events during the last few weeks of the Saint's life. He makes no allusion to the diamond jubilee of St. Vincent's ordination to the priesthood. We have no way of knowing what St. Vincent's personal sentiments were on the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination. 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 Bishop who ordained Vincent de Paul was aged. Very probably Vincent was the last priest he would ordain, for a few weeks later the Bishop would close his eyes on this earthly scene. His eyes were already weak. One can legitimately surmise that he would have had difficulty in reading the text of the Pontifical on the morning he ordained young Vincent de Paul. There was nothing wrong with the eyesight of the ordinand, but he suffered from a certain shortsightedness in his spiritual vision. He himself testifies to that in the confession which he made in the letter from which I have just quoted.

The cataracts, that blurred Vincent de Paul's spiritual vision of the priesthood on the day of his ordination, would be removed, not through any rapid surgery but rather through a therapy that would be prolonged and gradual. It would, however, be some years before the therapy would commence under the direction of the Divine Therapist.

Search as they may, biographers of St. Vincent are unable to glean any insights which Vincent de Paul may have had into his priesthood during those early years. If one of the salient points in the theology of the diocesan priesthood was that a benefice was attached to or was an accessory of the office of priesthood, it could be said that Vincent de Paul thought more about the beneficium than the officium. His various travels within and outside France, as well as the contacts he was making with influential people in the early years of his priesthood, bear out the point. It is little wonder that in that first decade of his priesthood, when the pursuit of a benefice had caught his imagination and was absorbing much of his energy, there should be no indication of a desire to offer a ministry to his fellow priests. Perhaps the first and certainly a very significant spiritual service which St. Vincent offered to a fellow priest was when he met a professional theologian in Paris, whose mind had begun to be tortured with scruples and doubts of the most excruciating kind. The priest sought counseling and direction from St. Vincent, who then experienced what a modern psychologist might call transference. An encircling gloom descended upon the mind of St. Vincent, and he was led out of the darkness only when he began to visit the sick in the charity hospital close to the place where he resided. In the words of St. Vincent's official biographer: "After three or four years of unspeakable mental anguish, he made a promise to God to consecrate the rest of his life to the service of the poor. The taking of this resolution immediately banished the temptation and banished it for life; never afterwards was he troubled in regard to the faith, the truths of which were in his mind as indisputable as the most evident facts, since they were based on the very words of God Himself." (Coste: The Life and Works of Saint Vincent de Paul, vol. I, p. 49).

The success which St. Vincent had in alleviating the mental distress of the Parisian theologian, who died with much peace and serenity of soul, did not lead St. Vincent to set up a counseling service for the clergy of Paris. He was then too intent on following the kindly light of God's Spirit directing his steps to the poor. It would be the poor themselves who would lead him back to priests whose difficulties were more spiritual than psychological. It would be the poor who would guide him along the path that led him to see the truth which more than three centuries later would find expression in the document of the Second Vatican Council, Optatam Totius: "The desired renewal of the whole Church depends in great part upon a priestly ministry animated by the Spirit of Christ." (Introduction).

The Spirit of Christ works gently in the Church. Three or four years of experience in preaching the Gospel to the poor would pass before Vincent and his first associates would be led to turn their attention to the clergy. As an old man he would look back and say to his Community: "In the beginning the Company concerned itself only with itself and the poor, but in the fullness of time God called us to contribute towards the formation of good priests, of giving good pastors to parishes and teaching them what they should know and practice....Who would have thought of the exercises for ordinands and of seminaries? This undertaking never occurred to our mind until God showed us that it was His pleasure to devote us to it." (Coste XII, Fr. ed., p. 84).

The fullness of time to which St. Vincent refers dawned in a rather undramatic way. The year was 1628 and the occasion was a coach journey Vincent was making with the Bishop of Beauvais on a July day. The two men were discussing what today we might term the ongoing formation of the clergy. The term, ongoing formation, however, would be rather a pretentious, if not an inaccurate, description of what the two men were thinking about, for regrettably in the case of many of the clergy of the time, no initial formation had been given. The Bishop of Comminges, for instance, quite a pious man himself, demanded of candidates that they should turn up at his residence the night before ordination and listen to a sermon, and that they should avoid gambling and all forms of debauchery for that one night in their lodgings. (cf. J. Duquesne, Les Prêtres, p. 184, Paris, 1965). As the coach in which the Bishop and M. Vincent were travelling jogged along, the Bishop closed his eyes. It seemed that he had nodded off to sleep, as Bishops sometimes do during clerical discussions. But no, he was thinking. Opening his eyes, he told M. Vincent that he had been reflecting on what would be the most effective and practical way of improving the formation of the clergy, a topic which had often been broached by M. Vincent. From the discussion was born the retreat for ordinands, a project which was launched shortly afterwards in the Diocese of Beauvais. (cf. Abelly, bk. I, pp. 117-118).

The retreat for ordinands could be described as a workshop or seminar of ten days to two weeks duration, consisting of some lectures on basic spirituality and on the administration of the Sacraments, particularly that of Penance. The format was simple and practical. It was soon adopted in other dioceses and became a requisite for ordination to the priesthood. St. Vincent himself planned and conducted a number of these retreats. Some thirty years later the ordinands of the diocese of Rome were required by Pope Alexander VII to go to the house of the Congregation of the Mission to follow there the retreat course which was given by the members of the Vincentian Community.

From the retreats for ordinands two other innovations issued from the mind and heart of St. Vincent, both of which orbited around the pastoral priesthood. Understandably some of the men, who had been enlightened by the experience of a retreat with M. Vincent and his priests before ordination, sought further enlightenment after ordination. So it was that a number of priests would gather on Tuesdays in M. Vincent's spacious community house to share their insights on the priesthood with him and with each other, while giving expression also to some of their needs as pastors. These in service training courses became known as the Tuesday Conferences and were attended by professors of theology at the Sorbonne, like M. Duval; by Founders of Congregations, like Father Olier; and by future bishops, like Bossuet. These Conferences in time came to have an influence on the French clergy, far greater than that on the small original group.

It would be years later in 1642 that M. Vincent would launch a more protracted course of pastoral and spiritual formation for candidates for the priesthood. It would be a residential course for men in the four years immediately preceding ordination. The emphasis would be on the practical, rather than on the speculative, in the formation of men who would, immediately after ordination, assume responsibilities for parishes. The seminaries of M. Vincent would be centers of spiritual and pastoral formation of future priests, rather than complete schools of philosophy and theology. In launching this project in 1642, St. Vincent was giving a firm and practical shape to the decrees of the Council of Trent on seminaries. His project must be considered as one of the antecedents of the major seminary as we know it today.

With the passing of the years, a conviction, which may seem to us somewhat exaggerated, crystallized in St. Vincent's mind. It was that the failure of priests to live up to the ideals of their vocation was the cause of all the evils in the Church. "So, then, it is we priests," he remarked at a conference, "yes, we priests, who are the cause of the desolation which ravages the Church, of the deplorable losses she has sustained in many places." (Coste XI, Fr. ed., p. 309).

Writing to a layman in 1659 he remarked that there were some men who had entered the priesthood by the window and not by what he called "the door of a legitimate vocation," that these men sought rest rather than work, and that to priests must be attributed the ignorance, sins and heresies which were desolating the Church. (cf. Coste VII, Fr. ed., p. 463). These convictions of St. Vincent about the damaging potential of the priesthood, when it is not being lived in accordance with the mind of Christ and His Church, surfaced in my thoughts when I read an observation of Cardinal Ratzinger, which he made recently in Philadelphia in the course of a talk on "Some Perspectives on Priestly Formation Today." The Cardinal observed: "It is probable that all the great crises in the Church were essentially connected with a decline in the clergy, for whom intercourse with the Holy had ceased any longer to be the fascinating and perilous mystery it is of coming close to the burning presence of the All-Holy One, and had become instead a comfortable craft by which to secure one's daily needs." (L'Osservatore Romano, Supplement, Eng. ed., 26 Feb. 1990).

All St. Vincent's work for the preliminary and ongoing formation of priests in the France of the seventeenth century may be said to have had as its practical aim the dislodging of the image of the priesthood as being, in Cardinal Ratzinger's phrase, "a comfortable craft." Although he was not alone in working to give new lustre to the priesthood in the France of the seventeenth century, the personality of M. Vincent, with his vision and conviction that the poor must be the first beneficiaries of the spiritual riches which a priest dispenses, made him stand out among his contemporaries. "History teaches," wrote Pope Pius XII, "that when a saintly and zealous priest has arisen, wherever he has lived, all things around him have been as if by magic renewed and quickened; just as when in the desert a joyous fountain unexpectedly bursts forth, at once freshness and verdure triumph over aridity and desolation, and the caravans come to rejoice and to rest and rebuild their strength amid the enchantment of the new oasis." (Pius XII, 22 March 1956).

The oases of new seminaries multiplied with the growth and expansion of the Congregation. In the lifetime of St. Vincent some twenty communities of the Congregation in France and three in Italy were engaged in the formation of candidates for the Priesthood. It has been estimated that in the lifetime of the Saint some thirteen or fourteen thousand Ordinandi made retreats in the Mission centers. In Madagascar Father Nacquart, a Priest of the Mission, in a very lengthy letter to St. Vincent, etched out in broad strokes a program of priestly formation for indigenous vocations in that country. (cf. Coste III, Eng. ed., p. 538).

How much the formation of the clergy engaged the thought and the energies of the members of the Communities in the decades following the death of St. Vincent is illustrated by the number of decrees on the topic that were promulgated by successive General Assemblies of the Congregation. In the period before the French Revolution there were some 160 seminaries in Europe directed by Vincentian communities, with one also in Goa, in Macao and in Peking. Among the letters of our Confrere martyr, Blessed John Gabriel Perboyre, there is one to his uncle in which he describes the work that was being done by the Portuguese Vincentians in the seminary of Macao.

The 150 years that followed the French Revolution saw a steadily increasing number of seminaries, minor and major, entrusted to the care of the Priests of the Mission in the Americas, in Africa and in Asia. Their very proliferation is a testimony to the success of the formula for formation which the Community over the years had elaborated and developed. Not that the formula was above criticism. Many of you will be familiar with the considered judgment of Msgr. John Tracy Ellis who, while appreciating the magnitude of the contribution made by the Vincentian Community to the formation of priests in your country, considered that the program of these seminaries laid too heavy an emphasis on the spiritual and pastoral elements and too little on the intellectual. (cf. Essays in Seminary Education, Notre Dame, 1967, p. 55). If the criticism be valid, then the lack of vision must be attributed, not to St. Vincent, who responded effectively to an immediate and urgent need of his time, but to successive authorities in the Congregation who clung too tenaciously to a life raft instead of boarding and manning a larger skiff. Be that as it may, a tree is known by its fruits, and the fruits of Vincentian seminary formation have been good and abundant, as the humble lives of hundreds of priests testify in countries as diverse as Poland and Paraguay, Ireland and Iran.

Now let me leave behind all our yesterdays and come into the land of today. Writing to the entire Congregation on 25 January 1979, Father James Richardson, Superior General, remarked that "our role in certain seminaries has ceased, and that for various reasons. Often dioceses and their seminaries have sufficient learned and holy priests, capable of assuring their priestly candidates a suitable formation. If they tell us they no longer need us, let us humbly recognize this." (Vincentiana 1979, pp. 85-86). The past thirty years have undoubtedly seen Vincentians, as a Congregation, take their departure from many seminaries, minor and major. Our presence in centers where candidates for the priesthood are formed has assumed new forms with an obviously smaller concentration of numbers and bearing less administrative burdens. On 1 January 1988 some 404 Confreres of the Congregation in the world were working in seminaries for the formation of diocesan priests or of candidates for our own Congregation. The demands for Vincentians to engage in the seminary apostolate come principally from the African continent. Regretfully we have had to decline many invitations. It is encouraging, however, to know that in one of the largest seminaries in Africa--or for that matter, in the world today--we have an African Confrere acting as one of the spiritual directors of the seminarians.

Our ministry to priests has found expression in the preaching of retreats to the clergy and acting as confessors and spiritual directors to them. The history of this work--much of it hidden--has not been chronicled as has the history of the work in seminaries. The Recording Angel, I am sure, has filled many pages of the Book of Life with the names of Vincentian priests of different nations who have been to their fellow priests what the old Irish monks liked to call a soul friend.

At this point I would like to make two rather personal observations about our Vincentian charism of forming seminarians and of our ministry to priests.

There can be no doubt that, in the optic of St. Vincent, the foreground was occupied by the poor. It was the poor who, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, had led him to labor for the priesthood and for its greater efficacy in the Church. It was to the poor that he sent the priests of his own Congregation to proclaim the good news of Christ. For Vincent de Paul, a priest of his Community was a man who, through his constant efforts to chisel into his character the humility and charity of Christ, is humble about himself and his abilities, has a deep respect for the dignity of others, and makes it his principal mission to manifest genuine love, especially to those who for any reason have lost the sense of their own dignity and worth in the sight of God. The world of the poor was, in St. Vincent's vision, to be penetrated by priests, messengers of God, who in turn were to be penetrated by a love of the poor. For St. Vincent the great world of the poor and the smaller world of ordained priests were like two concentric circles. The living person of Jesus Christ was "the still point of the turning world." During the last thirty years of his life St. Vincent moved easily in these two worlds, introducing one to the other. Two years before he died, he wrote in his Rule for missioners:

"Though our preference is for missions, giving them should not mean omitting our work for the clergy, whenever we are asked to do this by Bishops or Superiors. The reason is that by the nature of our Congregation, we are bound almost equally to both." (CR, XI, 12).

"Almost equally to both..." In the General Assembly of the Congregation in 1968-69 and in the successive Assemblies of 1974 and 1980, the Congregation expressed its mind that the end of the Congregation is the evangelization of the poor. Official approbation of this statement was given by the Holy See through its approval of the Constitutions in 1984. As one of the criteria for evaluating our works, evangelization of the poor has been consistently invoked by Provinces throughout the world. Personally I have frequently thought that in recent years the Congregation has allowed its apostolate to the clergy to be eclipsed by its concern--albeit a just and a valid one--to evangelize the poor.

It is evident that the scenario of priestly formation has greatly changed over the last three decades. During this period academic standards in the seminaries of your country have risen notably. The obtaining of accreditation has demanded greater professionalization and has resulted in the development of high quality programs. The locus of theological studies, too, has changed. There has been an unprecedented growth of theological activity outside the traditional seminary (cf. Rev. Robert Wister, "The Teaching of Theology 1950-1990: The American Catholic Experience." AMERICA Feb. 3, 1990). Apart from the academic study of theology, the concept of personal formation and development has acquired new depths. Spiritual direction itself has become more complex. All these developments are formidable, demanding a high degree of specialization and of broad collaboration with agencies outside a particular Congregation. Facing such a changed scenario, has our Congregation quietly retreated before these demands, insisting that its end is the evangelization of the poor? However understandable such a retreat may be, and indeed to some degree inevitable, it is to be regretted that in a period in the history of the Church, when the priesthood is being challenged to make adjustments in the manner in which it exercises and expresses itself in the post-Vatican II Church, ur Congregation should not be more prominent in its ministry to priests.

The spiritual needs of priests have been well articulated in recent years. There comes to my mind the address which Father McNulty made to the Holy Father on the occasion of the Pope's meeting with priests in Miami in September 1987. Like a refrain running through Father McNulty's address were the words: "If priests could open up their hearts and tell you of their priesthood, they would speak of..." and Father McNulty listed a number of priestly hopes and concerns. Our Vincentian ministry to priests will address itself to such hopes and concerns. Supreme among a priest's hopes and concerns today, and in any era of history, must be holiness of life. Do we priests talk less nowadays about the primacy of personal holiness in the priest's life and much more about self-fulfillment--an expression, incidentally, that is not to be found in the pages of the New Testament? Valuable as the sciences of psychology and sociology are to a priest today, they are not a substitute for holiness. "No, Monsieur," St. Vincent advised the young Superior of the Seminary of Agde, "neither theology nor philosophy nor discourses can act upon souls. It is necessary for Christ to intervene with us or we with Him: that we act in Him and He in us, that we speak as He does and in His Spirit." (Coste XI, Fr. ed., p. 343).

Collected Poems: "Having Confessed".