Ordo Praedicatorum

Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., professor of theology at St. John’s Seminary in the Archdiocese of Boston, preached a homily at the seminary in which he offered St. Therese, the Guardian Angels, and St. Francis of Assisi as guides for priestly formation.

27 Sunday in Ordinary Time, 4 October 2009, Saint John’s Seminary

Early October brings a suite of feast days that provide consolation for the Christian people. On the first day of the month, Therese of the Child Jesus ushers in October. She has left the Church a powerful, personal testimony to the truth that Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel: “Amen , I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it” (Mk 10:15). The Holy Guardian Angels follow the Little Flower. They teach us about the particularity of God’s Providence. His care for all that exists. In a world where unbridled autonomy draws more people away from God, I aver, than any other sin, the Guardian Angels remind us that God doesn’t let go of us even when we indulge the delusion of separating ourselves from him. If today, 4 October, were not a Sunday, we would celebrate the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. No matter. He is the one of those saints who makes himself better felt when he is passed over. Holy Father Francis teaches us the radicalness of Christian living. There are no half measures. No double standards or lives. No pretending. Everything lies exposed to the Eye of the One who sees all. The first week of October ends with the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Mary’s mysteries daily draw us close to Christ whose Eucharistic sacrifice stands at the center of this and each Sunday celebration.

When we look at these saints and the divine mysteries that they herald, we discover a threefold pattern for priestly formation. First, spiritual childhood. The Little Flower encourages the seminarian to develop the confidence of a child. This confidence, as she testifies in her autobiography, first develops in the relationship of the child with its father. The family provides the natural setting in which a young man learns the basic dispositions that enable him to live as a son of the Heavenly Father. Sons learn first of all what it means to belong a family, that is, they learn that they enjoy a secure place in a circumscribed set of relationships. They learn that they can remain secure within a concrete social setting and that they occupy a place in the world they can call home. In a word, that they are loved. For only love can create these permanent psychological bonds. (In today’s Gospel (Mk 10: 2-16), Christ himself teaches this truth when he forbids divorce.) The experience of paternity, of being loved by a father within a family, establishes the basis for the virtues that priests require in order to fulfill the priestly ministry. These are the virtues of the Pastor; they are the qualities of a spiritual Father. To name a few, reliability. The priest is a man of his word. Honesty. In the strong sense of the term. Honestas The priest flees the ephemeral, the covert, the dark side of life. Above all, the priest exhibits that indispensable quality of human life that we refer to as confidence. It belongs to the Pastor of souls, not to anyone else, to teach people to practice confidence. Confidence that they are loved. Confidence that they are forgiven. And confidence that God will provide what they need to persevere in whatever vocation God calls them to until death. For the seminarian himself, this means confidence that the grace of his vocation will beget its own perseverance in those who remain faithful to the graces they have received.

The Guardian Angels teach the priest to recognize the particular designs of divine providence. Commentators ignore for the most part one of the hidden casualties of the evolution of Catholic life that unfolded after the mid-1960s. We hear about changes in liturgy, decline in vocations to priesthood and religious life, much reduced Mass attendance, but little about the fewer number of persons, including Catholics who go to Mass, who believe in a divine providence that is particular and loving. The history of modern philosophy is packed full of reasons that can account for this forgetfulness of being at its deepest level. What is new in the last forty years, however, is that the preachers of the Church provide no effective antidote and so leave their people susceptible to a variety of mythologies. That is, absent the Guardian Angels, believers easily abandon Christian belief in a loving and particular providence in favor of deterministic explanations of all kind. Psychological determinism explains human behavior, even sin; sociological determinism, buttressed by polls and statistics, governs political activity; and mathematical determinism controls everything else. What oftentimes goes unnoticed is that even the garden varieties of determinism erode the Christian believer’s everyday contact with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. People begin to think of themselves as lost in a universe of potentially hostile influences. This evolution is widespread, as far as I can determine, not only in post-modern philosophers but also among the young who decorate themselves with tattooed symbols and adorn their bodies with amulets and piercings. These of course are the anthropological practices of people who have never heard of the Guardian Angels and the benevolent, caring, providential God who sends them from on high to watch over very step of his creatures. Our young people whose catechists would, in many cases, never have thought of mentioning angels except to dismiss them, are caught in world where the highest explanations of what goes on around them most likely remains at the level of the occult and hostile. To children such as these the priest must teach the real mystery of God’s paternal providence, his daily loving care, and his authority. In a word, the priest must exercise Headship. As I look back four decades, I recognize more and more that the great error of my generation was to replace Headship with an undifferentiated fraternity. In case you hadn’t noticed, it didn’t work. But the more the priest mingled with his people, the more they forgot that the Catholic priest represents a divine order that is served both by the ministry of angels and of priests. Today the Letter to the Hebrews 2: 9-11 places the angels within the outpouring of divine mediations in the world.

St Francis teaches the seminarian how to become a Bridegroom. We associate today the Bridegroom status of the priest with his promise of celibacy. The truth of the matter is that the spousal relationship of the priest to the Church runs much deeper than celibate loving alone. The priest is called a Bridegroom because he is asked to love the Church with everything that is in him. The priest holds nothing reasonable back. The three promises that priests make, of obedience to a Bishop, of chaste celibacy, and the supporting requirement of simplicity of life, make sense only in a man who has decided to live without compromise. This seems to me the best one-line description of St Francis. He stands out as a man who never imagined compromise. That the priest stands in the person of Christ, the chaste Bridegroom of the Church, explains why the Church, perhaps from the very beginning, according to the thesis that was developed during last week’s conference, required of higher clerics perfect continence. Even for clerics who may have been married. Perfect continence means no procured venereal pleasure, no satisfying the concupiscence of the eyes, no satisfying the concupiscence of the flesh, no indulgence in activities that may ignite such compromises. A contemporary saint captures the spirit of the Bridegroom: “To defend his purity, Saint Francis of Assisi rolled in the snow, Saint Benedict threw himself into a thorn bush, Saint Bernard plunged into an icy pond… You…, what have you done?”  (St. Josemaria Escriva, The Way, ch. 4, no. 143)  These practices should alert us to seriousness that preserving chaste celibacy requires. At the same time, when we place the struggle for chastity within the context of the October feasts, we find encouragement. Confident love. The Pastor. Mediated authority. The Head. An undivided heart. The Bridegroom. These graces come to the priest and to the seminarian mediated by the saints of October, each of whom moreover cherished a special love for priests. Therese who wanted to be one, but recognized that it was not in God’s wise and loving plan. Francis who could have been one, but who remained a deacon because of the overwhelming awe that he held the priesthood in. And the Guardian Angels who according to the tradition pay special attention to priests, especially when they are offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

We close by looking ahead. To Wednesday, October 7, the feast of the Holy Rosary. The day when in 1571 the combined forces of Catholic Europe defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire (numbered at 208) galleys and liberated the some 10,000 Christians enslaved to power them. The freed slaves returned to the Italian peninsula, and at Loretto, stopped to hail the Blessed Virgin as, “Help of Christians.” Each generation is required to face the cultural challenges of the moment. The Gospel never proceeds without those who preach it facing sometimes fierce opposition. It is one reason why the God sent his Son, and that the Catholic priest is a man. He may not shirk the arduous. The priest and seminarian find in the Blessed Virgin Mary a place of sure refuge and strength to sustain his vocation. And in the feast days that follow one after another during the first week of October, the seminarian and priest discover the mystery of complementarity in the Church that finds its original model in the creation of man and woman and reaches unexpected dimensions in the spiritual direction and support that priests receive from the Mother of God, a young French nineteenth-century French girl, who consecrated herself in Carmel, and in a deacon who gave everything for the Lord.

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