Bread for the Body, Christ for the Soul
MASS Justus ut palma florebit
LESSON 1 Corinthians 4:9-14
GOSPEL St Luke 10:1-9
PROPER LAST GOSPEL St Luke 16:1-9
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Saint Vincent de Paul gave bread to the poor because he knew that bread was not enough. He clothed the naked because he knew that the body was not the whole man. He rescued abandoned children because he knew that they had not been created merely to survive, but to know, love, and serve Almighty God. He relieved human suffering on an extraordinary scale, yet he never committed the modern cruelty of offering men everything except Jesus Christ.
“The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few.” These words disclose the whole mystery of Saint Vincent’s vocation. He was not merely a benefactor or social reformer. He was an apostolic labourer sent into the harvest of Christ. In every poor man he saw an immortal soul purchased by the Precious Blood; in every abandoned child, a creature called to the Beatific Vision; in every neglected parish, a field where souls were starving for doctrine, confession, and grace.
The Collect praises two works which the Church refuses to separate: preaching the Gospel to the poor and restoring the dignity of the clergy. The poor require both bread and absolution, both human tenderness and divine truth. When the priesthood declines, they suffer first.
Vincent was born in 1581 at Pouy in Gascony, the son of a poor farming family. As a boy he tended livestock; after studying at Toulouse, he was ordained priest in 1600. Grace gradually stripped away ambition and the desire for security until the clever young cleric became the father of the poor.
The decisive year was 1617. At Gannes, Vincent was summoned to the bedside of a dying peasant who made a general confession. Beneath the outward respectability of the countryside, Vincent discovered terrible spiritual abandonment. Men and women had lived for years without adequate instruction and without priests who would search out their souls.
On 25 January, the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, he preached at Folleville upon the necessity of a good general confession. The response was so great that other priests had to be called to hear the penitents. There Vincent discovered souls living without absolution or preparation for death.
Later that year, at Châtillon-les-Dombes, he was told of an entire family lying sick and destitute. He preached upon their condition, and the parishioners responded generously; but they all arrived at once, bringing such abundance that much might have been wasted while the family remained helpless on the following days. Vincent understood that compassion without order may be intense but transient. Charity required discipline, perseverance, and form.
From these two encounters arose the Vincentian vocation. Folleville revealed souls without confession; Châtillon revealed bodies without care. One led towards the Congregation of the Mission; the other towards the Confraternities of Charity and eventually the Daughters of Charity. Catholic charity must unite both: the truth that saves the soul and the mercy that bends over the wounded body.
In 1625 Saint Vincent founded the Congregation of the Mission, whose priests preached missions, instructed the ignorant, prepared souls for confession, and restored Christian life where it had withered. With Saint Louise de Marillac he founded the Daughters of Charity, whose cloister would be the streets of the city, whose cells would be the dwellings of the sick, and whose enclosure would be holy obedience.
His works multiplied because misery multiplied before him. He cared for prisoners and galley slaves, rescued foundlings, and sent relief into provinces devastated by war, famine, and disease.
Yet Saint Vincent knew that material misery was not the only evil. A man may possess food, comfort, education, and civil rights and still be perishing eternally. Those who carried bread must also carry Christian love; the sick must receive not only medicine but the Sacraments; the abandoned must be restored not merely to society but, wherever possible, to the friendship of God.
This distinction is desperately necessary today. Modern humanitarianism frequently borrows the language of Christian charity while rejecting its supernatural substance. It offers food without faith, affirmation without conversion, compassion without truth, and social inclusion without salvation.
To give a man everything except God is not mercy. To relieve his temporal suffering while confirming him in mortal sin is not love. The poor do not need a Church that imitates a secular welfare agency. They need the Church to be the Church. They need her doctrine, her moral law, her priesthood, and her altars, because man cannot live by bread alone.
For this reason Saint Vincent laboured tirelessly for the reform of the clergy. He established retreats for ordinands, encouraged seminaries, and gathered priests for conferences in which they could deepen their knowledge and pastoral zeal. He knew that a worldly priest might speak eloquently about poverty while failing to save a single poor man’s soul. A holy priest may possess little, yet he carries within his hands the Sacrifice of Calvary and upon his lips the words of absolution.
The dignity of the clergy is restored when a priest knows that he belongs entirely to Jesus Christ; when he offers the Holy Sacrifice with fear and love; when he teaches the Faith without alteration; when he hears confessions patiently; and when he accepts, as Saint Paul declares in the Epistle, that the apostolic man may become “a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men.”
The proper Last Gospel of the commemorated Sunday casts a searching light upon his life: “Give an account of thy stewardship.” Saint Vincent regarded every gift as something entrusted rather than possessed. Intelligence, priesthood, influence, money, friendships, time, health, and opportunity all belonged to the Master. He converted the wealth of the great into bread for the hungry, shelter for foundlings, missions for the countryside, seminaries for the clergy, and assistance for lands ravaged by war.
The children of this world labour with astonishing energy for what must perish. Yet the children of light can behave as though the salvation of souls required no urgency, the preservation of the Mass no sacrifice, and the transmission of the Faith no deliberate labour.
Saint Vincent rebukes such spiritual indolence. Charity must move beyond agreeable feelings into costly service. There may be an elderly person suffering in silence, a family burdened by hardship, a child deprived of Catholic instruction, a neighbour estranged from the Sacraments, or a soul who has forgotten how to make a good confession. We need not found a congregation before beginning to practise charity; but we must begin where Providence has placed us.
Yet Saint Vincent’s activity never replaced his interior life. He recognised Christ in the poor because he had first adored Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Without that hidden union with God, charity becomes restless activism, then self-importance, and finally bitterness.
Saint Vincent said that “love is inventive to infinity,” but he spoke those words above all of the Holy Eucharist. The supreme invention of divine charity is not one of Vincent’s institutions, but this Sacrament upon the altar. Our Lord determined not merely to assist us from afar, but to remain substantially present beneath the appearances of bread and wine. He made Himself our food so that the poor man—and before God every one of us is poor—might receive not merely a gift from Christ, but Christ Himself.
Here all the works of Saint Vincent find their source and completion. The bread given to the hungry points towards the Bread of Angels. The cleansing of wounds points towards the washing away of sin. The rescue of abandoned children points towards our adoption as sons of God. The shelter offered to the homeless points towards the everlasting dwellings promised in the Communion antiphon.
The deepest poverty is to be without God; the deepest hunger is to be without the Bread of Life; and the most terrible abandonment is to approach death without sanctifying grace. Saint Vincent served every lesser poverty because he understood this greatest poverty. He gave men bread, but he would not leave them with bread alone.
May he obtain for us a charity that is neither sentimental nor ideological, but supernatural; a charity that serves the poor without using them, honours the priesthood without flattering priests, relieves suffering without concealing sin, and speaks the truth because it longs for souls to be saved. Then, when the Master says, “Give an account of thy stewardship,” may those whom we have assisted by alms, prayer, instruction, sacrifice, correction, or forgiveness rise to bear witness that we did not pass them by.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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