Munificence in Ministry
by Fr. Roger Landry - April 9, 2010
On Monday of Holy Week, the Gospel at daily Mass focused of Mary of Bethany's anointing Jesus' feet with oil made from genuine aromatic nard. Judas Iscariot immediately objected to such a gesture, saying that the oil could have been sold for 300 days wages and the money given to the poor. He had already assessed Jesus' value at 30 pieces of silver and thought that Jesus was simply not worth such an expense of precious resources.
Objections to costly expressions of love for God did not die with Judas Iscariot. During my time studying in Rome, where I often gave tours to Americans of the holy sites, some used to be scandalized by the wealth that was expended to build St. Peter's Basilica. Why doesn't the Vatican — they asked with a sense of indignation — sell St. Peter's or the Sistine Chapel and give the money to the poor? I would generally reply that the Catholic Church is second to none in the services, money and other help given to the poor. But that seldom was enough to mollify their umbrage. Their issue was almost never fundamentally about the Church's charity to the poor, but about the Church's love for God. They thought that such munificence was a sin, not a virtue. God was not worth extravagant sacrifices, they believed, even if such spending did not lessen at all the Church's charitable work.
Like Mary of Bethany, St. John Vianney recognized that God deserves our very best. He saw that there's no inherent competition between the love of God and the love of neighbor, and always sought to do both. We've seen in previous columns the patron saint of priest's legendary charity to the poor, how he routinely exchanged shoes, clothes, and food with the indigent, emptied his cassock "shuttle pocket" each day, sold all his familial property to found an orphanage, and at the end of his life was sustaining over 30 family farms. This was all a simple consequence of his Christian faith and the Lord's call to love others according to his own standard of total self-giving.
Fr. Vianney, however, was just as concerned with concrete acts of material love for God.
When he arrived in Ars in 1818, the first thing he did was to visit the Church of St. Sixtus. On the one hand, he said he felt like he was returning to his paternal home; on the other hand, he felt that the familial home was in a pitifully deplorable state. It was tiny, ugly and totally uninspiring. The Church was 36 feet long by 16 feet wide. The walls had discolored white wooden paneling. The plain wooden altar was devoid of beauty. The ceiling was flat and full of cracks. The wooden steeple was about to collapse. The only art to speak of was a simple statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but it was in the midst of a worm-eaten shrine. Priests who had come to celebrate occasional Masses there prior to Fr. Vianney's arrival were roused to pity at how ugly it was, not even considering its deteriorated state. The Church was, in short, the visual manifestation of spiritual condition of the populace. "There's no love of God there," the vicar general told him upon giving him the assignment. "You must put some."
His discomfort at the state of the parish Church was only magnified when he compared it to the rectory. The local chatelaine had loaned the rectory all types of expensive and tasteful furniture: velvet chairs, tables, beds, cooking equipment and more. Like King David 3,800 years before him, Vianney couldn't fathom that he would be living in the lap of luxury when the Lord was abiding in a dilapidated house.
Since he couldn't improve the Church immediately, he thought that the quickest way to remedy the disproportion between the houses of Master and servant would be to reduce the priest's condition. He sent back to the chateau almost all the permanently loaned benefactions, keeping only the bare essentials of his deceased mentor's bed and books, a couple of straw chairs, two tables and the barest of cooking utensils.
He then got to work on the Church. He knew that it order to attract people back to God, they needed to get a glimpse of God's beauty. He began by spending his own money to have constructed a more beautiful altar and reredos. This was his priority because of its direct connection to Jesus in the Eucharist. He also bought some angels to place on both sides of the tabernacle. He then repainted the walls. Then he began to recruit artisans and carpenters and benefactors to expand and consolidate the work.
The Viscount of Ars, moved by the zeal of the new pastor and urged on by his sister, the chateleine, began to underwrite Fr. Vianney's pursuit of pastoral pulchritude. He sent from Paris some beautiful altar candlesticks, a gilded brass tabernacle, several reliquaries, a silver-gilt monstrance and throne for exposition, and a rich canopy and banners for Corpus Christi processions. He also gave Fr. Vianney money to go to the embroiderers in Lyons to purchase or have made some new vestments, since the chasubles and copes he had inherited were just as ugly and unworthy of the Lord as the Church itself. The tradesmen were shocked to meet a priest in a tattered cassock asking to see and buy the most beautiful fabrics they had. "In this district," several of them began to say, "there lives a little cure, lean, badly dressed, looking as if he had not a sou in his pocket, yet only the very best things are good enough for his church." He would on occasion frustrate them when he would say to them, after they had displayed specimens they thought would suffice, "Not good enough! I must have something better than that." When the tradesmen mentioned to him about the asymmetry between the liturgical vestments he desired and his personal attire, the priest responded humorously, "An old cassock goes very well with a beautiful chasuble!"
These improvements started to draw people to the Church, some attracted by the beauty, others simply by curiosity. A few, however, began to raise questions about the appropriateness of the expenses. "How could we fail to give to our Lord the richest and most precious things we have?," he asked in reply. "What ingratitude to be miserly toward a God who is so generous! Has he not given every drop of his Blood for us on the Cross?"
Rather than putting on the breaks, he stepped on the gas. With the help of the Mayor, he repaired the bell tower and added a second bell. He re-did the ceiling. He widened the entrance to the Church, fixed the staircase, and added an elegant balustrade. He cleaned and painted the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and expanded the shrine to her, adorning the niche with gildings and mouldings. He built other shrines to St. John the Baptist, St. Philomena, the Suffering Christ and the Holy Angels. He also adorned the white walls of the nave with statues and painted images of various saints. It wasn't just decorative eye candy. "Sometimes the mere sight of a picture is enough to move and convert us," he said. "At times pictures make almost as deep an impression as the objects they represent."
When people began with pride to marvel that their Church had metamorphosed from plain to exquisite over the span of just three years, he stoked their desire for something even better: "In Heaven everything will be even more beautiful!" Rather than depressing priest and people, the Church had become a source of inspiration, a type of sacrament of the beauty of God in the midst of their simple village.
The Church of Ars had become, in short, a modern Bethany, where Jesus was lavishly loved by a faithful parish priest and, eventually, his people.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
