Bishop Provost opens “Year for Priests”

Tuesday, 18 August 2009 07:14

LAKE CHARLES – On the feast day (August 4) of St. John Vianney, the Cure Ars, Bishop Glen John Provost presided over a Vespers Service at Our Lady Queen of Heaven Church officially beginning the Year for Priests in the Diocese of Lake Charles. Pope Benedict XVI called for a worldwide Year for Priests in June, naming the 18th Century priest, who had already been the patron of parish priests, as the patron of all priests. St. John Vianney was proclaimed Venerable on Oct. 3, 1874 by Pope Pius IX and enrolled among the Blessed on Jan. 8, 1905. Pope Pius X proposed him as a model to the parochial clergy and he was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1925. St. John Vianney lived a life of service, Bishop Provost noted in his homily and the Bishop recalled an image of service from his seminary days in Rome. “When I was a seminarian in Rome, there was an older gentleman in his 80s whose name was Umberto. He was frail, weak, and very slow moving. “Every morning he would dress up in a morning suit and position himself at the entrance of the college and there he would do only one thing, he would open the door and close the door for all the seminarians as they passed,” the Bishop continued. “This is what he would do, this is all he did. He wasn’t hired to do it but it was what he would do. He wasn’t asked to do it. He just did it, because he wanted to do it. Because, it was his only way of being of service.    “When he would open the door for the seminarians, he would always kiss your hand, which was for me always a very humbling experience.,” Bishop Provost said. “I felt I should be kissing his hand. He was a reminder of service.  A gentleman in retirement making an effort to do what little he could do, and doing it faithfully and well.  This is what I think St. John Vianney did.”    St. John Vianney’s life was a life of service, he served the needs of his parishioners, from morning to night, with what little sleep he had, waking early so that he could continue his service, according to Bishop Provost.   “Hearing confessions for a dozen or sixteen or 18 hours a day, one wonders when he had time  for anything else - his catechetical instructions, his visitations to the sick, his caring for those who are dying, the list goes on and on,” Bishop Provost noted.    His assignment at Ars, which to this day, according to the Bishop, is an out of the way place, changed the parish.    “He came to a parish whose religious practice was lukewarm at best, if not non-existent,” the Bishop said. “ By the time he died, the place was thriving with people who had flocked from all directions of France and from Europe too, to have their confessions heard by this priest to whom God had given the gift of reading hearts.    “There are many ways in which a priest might give his life in service – he could teach in a seminary, be a missionary in a foreign land, serve as a chaplain to a charitable institution, to a prison, or a school – but for St. John Vianney it was as a parish priest that he served, communicating Christ in his life and in the Sacraments.”    The Bishop noted that “like Umberto we are not quite sure of what we can do, but what we do we are going to do faithfully, we are going to persevere doing it and we are going to do it as well as we can.”    At the beginning of the Year for Priests, Bishop Provost asked that everyone “pray for priests daily, heeding the exhortation of Pope Benedict, who said he was calling the year for priests in order to have a spiritual renewal of priests. The spiritual renewal of priests is always necessary because without holy priests the faithful cannot be called to holiness.”    In closing his homily, the Bishop said, “So, we pray for our priests. And, at the end of this special vespers, which I think is such a marvelous occasion for us to be gathered around the Blessed Sacrament in adoration, we begin this year for priests seeking the intercession of St. John Vianney for our priests and for vocations to the priesthood as well. Let us pray that we might follow the example of  St. John Vianney, who  served faithfully, perseveringly and well and in so doing manifested a holiness to which he was called by God and an example he left for us to follow as well.”    St. John Vianney, pray for us and intercede for us, who strive to follow the example that you set that we might witness in our own lives to the sufferings of Christ and share the glory that He promised to those who do the Father's will."