Homily
for the Memorial of
St.
Vincent de Paul
Collect
Sept.
27, 2021
Provincial
House, New Rochelle, N.Y.
As you know, the
Roman collects have a 2-fold structure:
acknowledgment of God’s deeds or attributes, followed by petition.
Today we acknowledge what God has done thru St. Vincent de Paul, great saint of the Catholic reform in France, preacher of parish missions, founder of the Congregation of the Mission and the Sisters of Charity, young friend and admirer of Francis de Sales. Thru Vincent God brought relief to the poor and formed good priests.
The responsorial
psalm told us, “The Lord will build up Zion again, and appear in all his
glory.” God used Francis de Sales, Vincent
de Paul, Louise de Marillac, John Eudes, Pierre Berulle, Jean-Jacques Olier, and
others to rebuild the Church in France after the devastation of the Protestant
Reformation and the wars of religion.
The glory of the Lord appeared in the holiness of their lives, their
zeal for souls, their charity for the poor.
Don Bosco was a
devotee of Vincent. He received some of
his priestly formation, thru retreats, from the Vincentians, helped found the
“conferences” of St. Vincent de Paul in Turin, encouraged the youths of the
Oratory to participate in projects on behalf of the poor, and published a book
in honor of St. Vincent as model of Christian virtue and courtesy in 1848,
reprinted in 1876. One edition of that
book was published in England in 1933, and one by us in Paterson in
1956, The Christian Trained in Conduct and Courtesy According to the Spirit
of Saint Vincent de Paul.
Don Bosco’s
imitation of St. Vincent went beyond relief of the poor to include education so
that they might leave poverty behind and become solid contributors to
society. His imitation also included
priestly formation, so important to Don Bosco that he identified it as one of
the purposes of our Congregation. From
1848, when Abp. Fransoni felt obliged to close Turin’s seminary because of the
seminarians’ revolutionary inclinations, until roughly the arrival of Abp. Gastaldi
in the 1880s, the Oratory was effectively Turin’s seminary, and Don Bosco
formed young men for other dioceses as well.
A worthy successor of St. Vincent de Paul, indeed. In fact, our founder was known, at least in
France, as a new St. Vincent.
In the Collect, we
prayed God to fire us with the same spirit, to make us love what Vincent loved,
and to practice what he taught. We pray
for that every day—not in Vincent’s name, to be sure—in our prayer of
recommitment to our Salesian vocation.
When Pascual Chavez finished the extraordinary visitation of our
province when he was regional councilor, he urged us all to “be fire,” to burn
for the renewal of our vocation and of the province, for the service of those
young people whom Jesus placed in the midst of his apostles (Luke 9:47-48), those
young people for whom Don Bosco sacrificed everything—even his life, we can
say, for he’d burned himself out by the time he was 72 years, 5½ months old,
younger than I am right now and not much older than many of you.
Age, of course,
isn’t the measure of our zeal or our holiness.
The Book of Wisdom asserts, “Old age is not honored for length of time,
nor measured by number of years; but understanding is gray hair for men, and a
blameless life is ripe old age” (4:8-9).
Our Salesian understanding is expressed in our faithfulness to our
vocation and our service to the young and the poor; our blamelessness is a
grace from God who gives us this vocation and enables us to walk in the steps
of Vincent de Paul and Don Bosco.
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