It is we, who are priests, who have been the cause of this desolation in the Church.
by VP
Posted on Tuesday September 28, 2021 at 12:15PM in Sermons
Rue du Bac, Paris.©VP
Saint Vincent de Paul to the Congregation of the Mission, serving the clergy by means of spiritual exercises for those about to be ordained, and by the direction of seminaries:
" To be employed in training good priests and to contribute thereto, as a second efficient instrumental cause, is to perform the work of Jesus Christ, Who, during His mortal life, seems to have assumed the task of making twelve good priests, who were the apostles; have deigned to live with them for years in order to instruct and form them in the Divine Ministry.
What is there in the world so grand as the ecclesiastical state? Principalities and kingdoms bear no comparison to it. Kings cannot, like the priests, change bread into the body of our Lord, forgive sins, or do the other wonders whereby priests surpass all temporal greatness."
It such be the greatness of the priest, judge of his action whether beneficent or fatal according as he is faithful or otherwise to his vocation. "As is the pastor, so will be the people. To the officers of the army is attributed the good or evil success of war. In like manner we can say that if the ministers of the Church are good, if they perform their duty, all will be well; but if, on the contrary, they are unfaithful, they are the cause of all disorders... Yes, we are the cause of the desolation that at present ravages the Church, of the deplorable diminution it has suffered in so many places....(...)
Yes, O Lord, we, it is, who have provoked Thy wrath; our sins have drawn down these calamities. Yes, it is the clerics and those who aspire to the ecclesiastical state, it is the sub-deacons, the deacons, the priests, it is we, who are priests, who have been the cause of this desolation in the Church."
O, my God, what a power! Oh, what a dignity! Is there anything greater or more admirable? Oh, gentlemen, how great a thing is a good priest! What can a good ecclesiastic not do? What conversions can he not procure? Upon the priests depends the happiness of Christendom. This consideration, then, obliges us to serve the ecclesiastical state which is so holy and so elevated, and still more the need the Church has of good priests to remedy the immense ignorance and the innumerable vices with which the earth is covered, and for which pious souls ought to shed tears of blood.
There is question whether all the disorders we witness be not attributable to the priests. This may scandalize some, but the subject requires that by the magnitude of the evil the importance of the remedy be shown. For sometime back, this question has been the subject of several conferences, and it has been thoroughly treated, in order to discover the sources of so many evils; and the conclusion arrived at was that the Church had not greater enemies than bad priests. Heresies sprang form them. We have the instance of the last heresies in those two great heresiarchs, Luther and Calvin. They were priests. It is by priests that heresy has prevailed, vice has reigned, and ignorance established its throne among the poor people; and this, because of their own disorders and their neglect to oppose with all their strength, as was their bounden duty, these three torrents that inundated the earth. What sacrifice, then, gentlemen, will you not make to God, in order to labor for their reformation so that they may live conformably to the sanctity of their state, and that the Church may rise from out her shame and desolation?"
Source: Virtues and spiritual doctrine of St. Vincent de Paul, by a priest of the Congregation of the Mission 1877; (Internet Archive)
