Audio only:
Joe takes this opportunity to highlight just how great Pope John Paul I was, and how unfortunate it is that he gets overlooked due to his very short papacy.
Transcript:
JOE:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to talk about a pope that doesn’t get a lot of love, doesn’t get a lot of attention. Pope John Paul, the first many of us are maybe dimly aware that he even exists. And if we know anything about him, it’s probably a handful of relatively superficial facts. Like for instance, he liked to smile sometimes
CLIP:
The
Smiling Pope albino, Ani Pope John Paul, the first joy is the legacy left behind by John Paul, the first known as the smiling pope. Though he only served as Pope for 33 days, his characteristic smile and down to earth personality was able to reach people from all walks of life.
JOE:
And that’s great. I mean it’s wonderful. The Pope liked to smile, but surely there’s more to Pope John Paul the first and the fact that he smiled. It’s understandable of course, that we don’t know a ton about him because he was only Pope for 33 days. And just to put that in context, as of today, Pope Leo the 14th has been Pope for 274 days. And I think for most of us, we still think of him as very much a new pope. It hasn’t even been a full year yet. And if you think about all the popes in the last century, there’s only been nine of them and that includes John Paul the first. But just to put this in perspective, Pope Francis was Pope for more than 4,400 days. John Paul II was Pope for more than 2,800 days. Saint John Paul II nearly hit 10,000 days. He’s one of the longest reigning popes in history.
And then right before you’ve got John Paul, the first who’s at 33 days, not 3,333 days, going back before that St. Paul, the 6 5500 days, John the 23rd, who also has a pretty famously short pontificate. It’s still 1,679 days long. Pius the 12th over 7,000 days, Pius the 11th, nearly 9,000 days. Now as you might imagine, those popes had a much bigger impact on the day-to-day life of the church. Their appointments, they’re homilies. And so for many of us, the one thing we know about John Paul, the first other than the fact that he smiled, is that he died and he died soon. And he died in a way that many people speculated, might’ve been murder, might’ve been poisoning. Father was John Paul one murdered? I think he was murdered, yes, I think he was murdered.
CLIP:
I believe that the Pope was poisoned. He was taking only one medication at that time for low blood pressure. And I believe that medicine was Tam with.
I says, you got to kill a pope. He says, yeah. I said, you’re crazy. He says, you know how many years we’ve been killing Popes in the Vatican? How many centuries we’ve been doing it for centuries? If they didn’t like the guy that was in, they got rid of him and put their own guy in.
I think almost the entire world has made the assumption that he was poisoned. It’s a totally unwarranted legend.
JOE:
But what I want to ask is what if there is more to John Paul the first beyond the fact that he smiled and died because I think there’s actually a lot we can learn from him, both from his month as Pope and also from some of the writings that he wrote before he became the Pope. And I thought a good way to go about kind of exploring his thought would be to look at three saints that he points us to. These are three saints that he had a connection to in some way, and I’m going to arrange them from most personal to him and then to most applicable to us. I think that ordering will make sense as we go because the first of these is Pope St. Gregory the Great, and he was very clear that this is, he was modeling his own papacy off of.
Now he takes the name John Paul in honor of both John the 23rd and Paul the sixth. But in terms of how to govern as Pope, he talks about the pastoral rule of St. Gregory. And he talked about, this is one of his personal saints that he devoted to. He mentions that up in Venito there is a saying every good thief has his devotion. And the pope too has a number of devotions including to St. Gregory the great. So that’s what he tells us on September 3rd, 1978. He then mentions specifically that among the books of St. Gregory, the great is the Pastoral Rule, which he calls a beautiful book that teaches bishops their trade. And he points out that at the end of the book, after having laid out how a bishop ought to live, Gregory acknowledges that he falls short of the standard that he’s just laid out for a good shepherd and he asks for prayers.
And so he doesn’t want to be shipwrecked himself. And John Paul, the first echoes that he says, I say the same yet it is not just the pope in his prayers but the world. And then he quotes a Spanish writer who I’m pretty sure is a wand Deso Cortez who wrote, the World is going wrong because there are more battles than prayers. Let us try to see that there may be more prayers and fewer battles. And I think even in this kind of pithy line, you get a sense of what his pontificate was oriented to, even in its brief time of let’s suppose all of the chaos going on in the world and create structure and order and prayer and push for peace. And you also get a glimpse in here that he is very well read. Now, that’s going to be a theme that we return to over and over again because when you encounter the writing in the thought of John Paul, the first you start to notice this is someone who clearly has read quite a few books.
But before we get to those other books, let’s continue to focus on the pastoral rule of St. Gregory the Great, because as I said, that was September 3rd, 20 days later. So now we’re from the beginning of his pontificate to near the end of it, he said, at Rome, I shall put myself in the school of St. Gregory the great. And then he quotes him on the way A pastor should with compassion be close to each one who is subject to him forgetful of his rank. He should consider himself on a level with the good subjects, but he should not fear to exercise the rights of his authority against the wicked. Now that’s what he quotes from in his homily at the mass where he takes possession of the chair of Peter to basically say like, yes, I intend to be down to earth in the spirit of St.
Gregory, but I’m also not afraid to use the weight of this authority. I’ve been entrusted against those practicing wickedness. Remember? And he’s quoting here, Gregory, while every subject lifts up to heaven, that which she has done well, no one dares to censure that which she has done badly. When he puts down vices, he does not cease with humility to recognize himself as on the level of the brother whom he has corrected. And he considers that he is all the more a debtor before God and as much as his actions remain unpunished before men, in other words, a good bishop, a good leader, a good pope should in the exercise of enforcing discipline, start to realize like, yes, but I deserve to be disciplined as well. I think there’s kind of an analogy within family life. If you tell your kids, Hey, don’t eat that, that’s junk food or Don’t stay up that late or don’t watch that much tv, then you can start to notice your own life and say, someone needs to be saying that to me as well.
And so these moments of correction should also be a moment of reflection. And this is what he’s taking from Gregory and he’s kind of inviting us in. So as I say, this is the first of the three Saints, and we can see a very clear personal influence Gregory is having on how it’s forming his idea of his own pontificate. Alas, this would be not as he seemed to think the beginning of it, but close to the end. But there’s a second saint who was massively influential, who I believe Vatican News mentioned was his favorite saint and who we find him writing about over and over again. We find him referencing him as Pope, but also well before. And that’s St. Francis DeSales, who full disclosure is one of my favorite saints as well. For instance, in a general audience of September 27th, 1978, which would prove to be his last general audience, John Paul first describes how to love God as therefore a journeying with one’s heart to God, a wonderful journey.
Then he says, when I was a boy, I was thrilled by the journeys described by Jules Verne, 20,000 leagues under the sea from the earth to the moon around the world, 80 days, et cetera. So again, well read, but then he says, but the journeys of love for God are far more interesting. You read them in the lives of the saints. And then he describes briefly St. Vincent de Paul and St. Peter Claver. But then he says, the journey also brings sacrifices, but these must not stop us. And then he references. He doesn’t quote ’em directly, but he’s clearly taking this from St. Francis to sales. He says, Jesus is on the cross. You want to kiss him. You cannot help bending over the cross and letting yourself be pricked by a few thorns of the crown on the Lord’s head. It’s a beautiful image that yes, this is a journey and it’s exciting to say like, yeah, we’re on a journey for God but have no illusions.
This journey is going to be one that is a journey where we encounter the crucified Lord and get a little bloodied ourselves. And so he tells us, you cannot cut the figure of good. St. Peter had no difficulty in shouting the long lived Jesus on Mount Tabor where there was joy, but didn’t even let himself be seen beside Jesus on Mount Calvary where there was risk and suffering. Now again, it’s a beautiful image and one that he’s clearly taking from Francis de Sales, and the official transcript includes those kinds of references. But if you want to see more obvious evidence of the influence in Francis DEA plays on the spirituality of John Paul, the first and some of the things that might mean for us, I would suggest his book imi, which to the illustrious ones is a very fascinating series of letters because he was asked by a Catholic newspaper to do one monthly letter to some figure either from the past or sometimes even just fictional characters.
And so this is kind of the genre that he’s writing in. So for instance, he writes to Mark Twain, which again, it’s just fascinating. Here he is this Italian from Venice who he’s not an American, he is not a native English speaker. It’s actually kind of fascinating. I heard him speak English for the first time in preparing this talk, but just hearing his kind of range of influences and encountering that has been really fascinating. So anyway, he writes to Mark Twain and he’s semi apologetic because Twain was pretty cynical about religion. And he says, perhaps I ought to explain that bishops vary just as much as books. Some are like eagles soaring high above us, burying important messages. Others are Nightingales who sing God’s praises in a marvelous way, and others are poor RINs who simply squawk on the lowest branch of the ecclesiastical tree trying to express the odd thought on some great subject.
Dear Twain, I’m one of this latter kind. That’s his view. He has a real humility about him. He’s patriarch of Venice when he’s writing this and he views himself and seemingly authentically views himself as just a squawking bird on the lowest branch. That’s the role that he finds himself called to play by God. Now, he’s obviously going to be very surprised when God raises him up to become Pope in just a few short years, but that’s a story for another day. I want to focus particularly on what he has to say about Francis de Sales. In this letter to Mark Twain. He describes him as a bishop like me and a humorist like you, which I think is actually a very delightful description of Francis to sales. And he quotes him, we blame our neighbor for small faults and forgive ourselves for big ones. We try to sell things at a high price, yet wish to buy them at a bargain.
We want justice for other people, but mercy for ourselves. We want what we say to be taken generously, yet we’re stuffy over what others say. If one of our inferiors is rude to us, we dislike whatever he does. Whereas if we like someone, we forgive him anything. Whatever he does, we demand our rights strictly. We don’t want others to be moderate and claiming theirs. What we do for others seems a great deal to us. What others do for us seems nothing at all. Now, I think this is just good wisdom. I mean, who doesn’t relate to this description? Who doesn’t look at that and say guilty? There have certainly been times when I’m much more generous to myself than I am to other people, or I’m much more generous to somebody I happen to than somebody I don’t like when they do the exact same thing, that we’re not just even while we want justice or perhaps we want justice for other people and something better than justice for ourselves.
So it’s a good kind of call out. And you can understand in the course of the letter why he’s mentioning this, but it’s also just good spiritual food for thought, like where have I been guilty of this? And again, we have this indication, Francis sales plays this big role on the thought of JP one. Then next letter I want to raise here from this same work is to Penelope from the purely fictional character here and he’s talking about marriage and all the ways marriage falls apart and adultery. And he says, in the context of adultery, are there any remedies against this kind of danger? Yes, the sense of our dependence on God, prayer which obtains what our weakness lacks in the art of renewing our love. And then the Pope future Pope gives his own solid advice. The husband should always continue to court his wife a little.
The wife should always seek to praise her husband and be kind and attentive. And then he quotes Francis de Sales love and fidelity joined together always generate intimacy and trust. For this reason, married saints expressed many caresses within their marriage. Now, I just want to point out this is somewhat unusual. I mean maybe in the period after John Paul ii who has all these lengthy Wednesday audiences on theology of the Body, and we’re just used to hearing popes talk about things like marital intimacy. But it’s actually quite surprising in this period to find this bishop and even more surprising several centuries earlier to find that Bishop Francis DeSales talking about the need to just have positive physical touch and frequent caresses within marriage. And this is not a euphemism for just the sexual act, it just means in general that there should be a healthy sense of caress within a marriage.
And Francis Decile gives the example of Isaac and Rebecca, the chaste Dismart couple in ancient times as he describes them, how they’re seen through the window caressing each other in a way that there’s nothing indecent about, but it clearly marks them off as obviously husband and wife. And you see this in the Book of Genesis, but the point there is they’re not being exhibitionists, they’re not doing anything overtly sexual, but there is something nevertheless deeply marital about their exchange with one another and that that should be the hallmark of what a married couple looks like. You should have that kind of intimacy with your spouse. And then Francis sales mentions the great King St. Louis was almost reproach for going too far and the small attentions needed for the preservation of conjugal love. I mean shocking, right? A French politician accused of being too handsy.
But in this case, it’s actually because he’s saintly. No offense to French politicians or maybe watching. But speaking of the French St. Francis de sales, he’s also the recipient of one of the letters of John Paul the first. So if you want to understand the influence of Francis DeSales on JP one and what Francis DeSales might have to say to us as presented to us by JP one, this is a great place to look. And it starts off in a really fascinating way because Luciani the future, John Paul first begins by saying, I have reread a book about you, St. Francis de sales in our heart of flesh. And again, I just love how much he clearly reads. And I also love particularly this emphasis on the heart of St. Francis de Sales because I think that is one of the most obvious details about him. He has called the gentleman Saint for a reason.
He’s just this incredible, very admirable, very relatable. There’s something just deeply attractive about him as a saint. And he is combines all of these tremendous features of being a brilliant mystic and theologian and apologist, but also just this person who just radiates sanctity and is clear that this is something that really drew John Paul the first to him as well. This heart of flesh. And that’s a term that Francis actually uses for himself. He admits he has a heart of flesh, a tender understanding heart that borne mine, the fact that men were not pure spirits but sensitive beings. And so if you want to understand the spirituality of both Francis DeSales and JP one, you need to start from this point that it begins with a recognition that we’re not angels, we are fallen creatures who even as we’re seeking after God, even after we’re desiring God, are still weak in many ways.
And so he says with this human heart of yours, you loved literature in the arts. Again, the parallel there seems obvious wrote with the most delicate sensibility and even encouraged your bishop, your friend Bishop Kmud, to write novels. You bent down over everyone and gave each person something. So what you see him drawn to in Francis DeSales, I think this is also in many ways what people are drawn to in him. The reason people they describe him, and this a smiling pope is because there appears to be in this man, this heart of flesh, and there’s something winsome and attractive about that. He goes on. When you were a university student in Padua, you made a rule that you would never run away or cut short a conversation with anyone. However, dislikeable and boring, that you’d be modest without insense, easy going without austerity, gentle without affectation and yielding without opposition.
Now I want to point out two things. Number one, that is a very difficult rule to impose upon yourself that even while Francis is very generous with other people and very generous with their own weaknesses and faults, he takes a much stricter line with himself. And if you remember earlier, one of the things that he pointed out that we’re prone to is to do the opposite. We have a lower bar for ourselves and a higher bar for everyone else. We’re much more merciful with ourselves than we are with other people, but he holds himself to a higher standard which allows himself to be more generous and to lower himself to other people. He can kind of stoop down to their level. He doesn’t run away, doesn’t cut the conversation short. The second thing to point out here is he seems to have lived up to this and Luciani says of this, many would call this the summit of achievement, but you thought achievement was elsewhere.
And he quotes Francis himself, man is the perfection of the universe. The spirit is a perfection of man. Love is a perfection of the spirit. The love of God is a perfection of love. So the summit of achievement, the perfection and excellence of the universe is the love of God. Luciani then says, you therefore believed in the primacy of God’s love. In fact, Francis writes an entire treatise on the love of God. Was it a matter of making people good? Let these people begin by loving God. Once this love was lit in their hearts and established there, the rest would follow of its own. Now, this is an important point that I think we can kind of overlook that Christianity is not first a moral code. And when this is pointed out, this sometimes gets pushback. This is something Pope Francis was fond of pointing out, but it’s simply true that Christianity and this Benedict to 16th also makes this point that Christianity at his heart is a relationship with Christ and everything else flows from that.
That doesn’t mean there’s not a moral dimension to it, but it means you have to start with the love that then makes you want to live by the rules. The reason people don’t commit adultery is not primarily because of rules, it’s primarily because they love their spouse enough and want to respect and honor them. So you have to order these relationships in the right way. Now it’s true your actions can block you from the love of God. You can be living in such a way that it’s incompatible with loving God. And so there are times where someone has to say, you need to get out of this lifestyle so you can be open to the love of God. But frequently, and this is I think what Francis DEA and what John Paul the first recognized and point to what needs to happen is that people need to fall more deeply in love with God and then the morality, the change of behavior, all of that can come next because now they have someone to strive for.
Think about even in human relationships, how often people will clean up their act for a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, when they wouldn’t do those things simply for themselves. Well, same too. We often can and should do things out of love of God where it changes our whole way of being. So once this love is lit in our hearts and established there, the rest can kind of follow. Alright? But that might sound a little kumbaya ish. And so Luciani is very clear. What kind of love of God is Francis talking about here? One kind consists of size and pious groans and eyes turn sweetly to heaven. Another is masculine and frank and like the love that possessed Christ when he said in the garden, not my will but thine be done. This is the only kind of love of God you recommended. In other words, a sweet kind of emotional but fluffy and meaningless love is not what we mean here.
We mean the kind of love that sweats blood in the garden. That’s the love of God we need to be striving for and that if we have that kind of love of God, everything else follows. Now here it is worth probably just hearing it from Francis himself. I don’t know if this is a passage that he has in mind, but this was a passage that I was immediately reminded of in reading these words, summarizing Francis’ thought. This is from introduction to the devout life. He writes, I would say then that devotion does not consist in conscious sweetness and tender constellations which move one to size and tears and bring about a kind of agreeable, acceptable sense of self-satisfaction. Now he’s calling out this thing we can easily fall into where we imagine we’re very pious because like, oh, I went to this amazing worship experience, or I had this great time in prayer or whatever, I just came out with this amazing spiritual high and maybe you wept.
Maybe you just had this huge emotional search and that Francis DeSales would say, could be fine, could be good, but that’s not actually the thing we’re looking for. Now, some of you might be surprised. What is it? How could that not be what we’re chasing? Well, here’s what he’s going to say. He says, no, my child, this is not one. And the same as devotion for you’ll find many persons who do experience those kind of constellations but who are nevertheless evil minded and thus they’re devoid of the true love of God. Still more they’re devoid of any true devotion. And he gives a great example. If you know the story of Saul chasing King David, if you watch the recent animated film, there’s this moment where David finds Saul relieving himself in the cave or sleeping in the cave and he’s able to kill him, but he doesn’t.
And this is a sort of wake up call literally to Saul. And Saul then gives this amazing kind of eloquent rhetoric about how his heart has been softened. He calls David his son, he exalts his generosity, he lifts up his own voice, he weeps, he foretells David future greatness. And then he asks him to deal kindly with Saul himself. They Saul seed after him. So treat Jonathan and whatever Jonathan’s sons, they treat them all well and that all sounds beautiful. But then you keep reading and you realize that on the one hand, what more could Saul have done? But he didn’t actually change his mind. He didn’t actually change his behavior. He continued to persecute and pursue David just as bitterly afterwards, as before. So we would look at that and say, that looked beautiful, great cinematic moment but kind of meaningless. And Francis de Sales is going to say, yeah, the same thing is true of us when we’re contemplating the goodness of God or the passion of Christ and we feel an emotion which leads us to size and tears and prayers and thanksgiving.
So we might suppose that our hearts are being kindled by a true devotion, but once we’re put to the test, we fall apart. And it proves that all of this seeming devotion was as the passing showers of a hot summer which splash down en large drops, but don’t penetrate the soil or bring forth anything from the soil better than mushrooms. That’s what he says. That’s what happens in like manner. These tears and emotions don’t really touch an evil heart. They’re altogether fruitless. And as much as in spite of them, all those poor people would not renounce one far the ill-gotten gain or one unholy affection, they would not suffer the slightest worldly inconvenience for the sake of the savior over whom they wept. You can have the big feelings about, oh, that’s just tragic what happened to Jesus on the cross, but if it doesn’t lead you to actually make any changes to your life, this is not what we mean by the love of God.
This is not what we mean by devotion. So he compares it to spiritual fungi. This is just the cheap mushrooms that are being brought forth by the reign of your tears. And he says that this doesn’t just fall short of real devotion, but often this becomes a snare of the devil because he beguiles souls with these trivial constellations to make us stop short and just feel satisfied with ourselves instead of continuing on and seeking after true solid devotion, which as Francis says, consists in a firm resolute, ready, active will prepared to do whatsoever is acceptable to God. He gives one final example here I think is really beautiful and kind of bracing. He says a little child who sees the surgeon bleed his mother. I mean remember the time he’s writing medicine isn’t quite what it is today, will cry when he sees Lance touch her, but let that mother for whom he weeps ask for his apple or a sugar plum, which he has in his hand and he will on no account part with it and too much of our seeming devotion of this kind.
So you can imagine if your wife or your mom or whoever is in pain, her children might be really upset to see that they might cry. But if you say, okay, what would make her feel a lot better? Can she have one of your toys? Can she have one of your candies? They’d be like, no, I can’t part with that. I feel really terrible at what’s happening to you, but I’m not going to give you the one thing you’re asking for. And we would look at that as a very immature sort of affection, understandable and a little kid, but hopefully something that they grow out of. But Francis sales warns, we are like this. We weep feelingly at the spear piercing the crucified savior side. We do well. So he is not saying emotions are bad, he’s just saying they’re good, but they’re not the end of things and they can become a trap if we settle for them.
So we weep feelingly at des spear piercing at the savior side and we do well, but why can we not give him the apple we hold for which he asks heartily, I mean our heart, the only love apple, which that dear Savior craves of us, why cannot we resign the numer, numberless, trifling attachments, indulgences and self complacencies of which he feign would deprive us only We would not let him do so because they are the sugar plumps sweeter to our taste than his heavenly grace. It’s a pretty convicting image I think. And he warned, surely this is but is the fondness of children demonstrative but weak, capricious unpractical. Devotion does not consist in such exterior displays of a tenderness which may be purely the result of a naturally impressionable plastic character or which may be the seductive action of the enemy or an excitable imagination stirred up by him.
In other words, if you think about this kind of devotion where it’s the big emotion devotion, some people are just prone to bigger emotions and it’s easy to mistake that for sanctity, but they might feel those same big emotions at any number of other stories. They just have big feelings. There’s no moral value of itself and just having big feelings. And in fact, that can become a trap of the enemy where you start focusing on your feelings rather than on devotion or on our Lord. So that is the contrast. The jump ball of the first is making between this childish devotion, which is false and true devotion when she describes as masculine the devotion of Christ in the garden. And so returning now to luciani then luciani in his own words, he then pivots to another subject which is about what this devotion should look like sort of qualitatively and quantitatively.
And he says it’s the quality of our actions we should consider rather than their size and number. And he gives the example, I believe this is from a letter that nuns wrote to St. Francis to sales where they were fasting three days a week, one lt, and then they decided they were going to double it the next lent to six days a week and they wanted his advice on it and he warned them not to have too many pious devotions. And he made the point where you’re not going to be able to keep doubling it. What are you going to do next time? Have 12 days a week, have nine days a week? It doesn’t work like that. And the takeaway is JP one points out is don’t so much practice devotions as have devotion. The soul is not so much a cistern to be filled as a fountain that must be made to play.
In other words, if you imagine your soul as just like an empty well that you’re just pouring devotions into and that’s what spiritual life looks like, that’s wrong. Rather it’s like a fountain and the whole question becomes how do you get the fountain to turn on? So the point of a devotion is to allow the things already within the fountain to come forth, not to just dump more external stuff in, so dumping one pious devotion after another, after another, after another. That’s not of itself good. Some pious devotions are good and are necessary to kind of get the fountain going, but just saying like, oh, you better be doing these 20 optional devotions. And this is something I think we still need to be reminded of today because I know there are often people who are for instance, converts to Catholicism who have this guilt like, oh, I’m not doing enough.
I don’t know all these devotional prayers, I don’t know all these Novenas. I haven’t read all of these spiritual works. And it can become this real burden. And even though clearly Luciani has schooled himself in the School of the Saints, he clearly knows a lot of books and a lot of spiritual books. He’s also very clear that trying to measure devotion in that kind of quantitative way, like look at how many things I did for God is not where it’s at. And you can listen to our Lord, if you remember when the Pharisee and the tax collector go into the temple, the Pharisees boast is look at the number of things that I’m doing. The tax collector just says have mercy on me as sinner. The Pharisees point is quantitative. Look at the number of things I’m doing for God and on that score, he’s doing more things than the tax collector is.
But none of that matters because qualitatively the tax collector actually has a posture, a disposition of trusting in God and relying on God and looking to God and so he can just cry out, have mercy on me lord of sinner and that’s all. And yet that’s all he needs because the soul is not a cistern that needs to be filled with a gazillion different devotions. The fountain of his heart is bringing forth living water, whereas the Pharisee is just gunking it up with self-righteousness. And so adding more and more and more stuff isn’t helping him, it’s just making him more.
So that’s the difference. We want to consider the quality of our actions rather than the size and number. If you tell me you’re doing 20 different Novenas, I’m not impressed, I’m alarmed. And that’s the point that John Paul first makes and that’s the point that Francis de sales makes. And then he points out that this isn’t true just when you’re talking about nuns and their fasting, that rather these principles mean that sanctity is not just something that you have to be in a convent to do because if it’s just about the quantity, if it’s about the amount of time, then yeah, you pretty much have to be a nun or a monk to be able to do this. But if it’s about the qualitative, if it’s about having your heart in the right place before God, well now this in the power of any to do that.
And in fact, it’s not just in our power to do it. It is our duty to be contemplative. It is our duty to be saints. Now Warren, he says this doesn’t make it an easy task. It’s the way of the cross, but it does mean that it is an ordinary one. I love that sentence. It’s not an easy task, but it’s an ordinary task. It’s not an easy task, it’s a way of the cross, but it is nevertheless not an extraordinary one. So sometimes you’ll find people today who say like, oh, well, for Christians to live out sanctity in the modern world with all of the sexual immorality and everything else that would take extraordinary virtues and only the select few can do it. No, John Paul, the first is very clear. It’s not easy, but it is ordinary. Every single person is called to it.
Some people achieve it with heroic actions or vows. He compares them to eagles flying high the heavens. Many achieve it by following the common duties of every day, but in an uncommon way like doves flying from roof to roof close to the ground and that image of doing the ordinary things in an uncommon way. We’re going to return to that with the third saint. But before we do that, I want to show where he’s getting this from Francis, including even the bird imagery. This is all coming from introduction to the devout life and there this is in part one, I believe it’s chapter three, he makes a point that it’d be absurd for a bishop to try to lead the solitary life of a Carthusian monk and similarly that the father of a family shouldn’t try to live in radical poverty the same way as a capuchin would or if an artisan spent all day in church like religious or if the religious involved himself in all manner of his neighbor’s business the way that a bishop might be called to do. And he used these examples to say, well, wouldn’t that kind of devotion be ridiculous irregulated and intolerable?
There’s no indeed my child, the devotion, which is true and just nothing. But on the contrary, it perfects everything and that which runs counter to the rightful vocation of anyone is you may be sure a spurious devotion if your idea of how you are being called to be holy is contrary to the concrete circumstances in which God has put you, where you’re called to be, say a student, a child, a father, whatever it is, if your plan of action is radically contrary to those calls, then we know this is a spurious devotion. It’s not true devotion. I heard many years ago a story about a woman who had a disabled husband and the woman had this idea that she needed to spend all day in church in adoration. The priest had to tell her, no, it is not pleasing God for you to run from your difficult life as a wife of a disabled man and spend your days inside in the pew in silence before God.
That’s not actually pleasing him because you’re running it’s counter to your rightful vocation. That’s a spurious devotion. So that’s something we need to kind of watch out for, but this also means not to beat ourselves up if the way we are called to live out the devotional life as laity in the world doesn’t look as quantitatively rich as somebody who has eight hours a day to spend in the chapel. One takeaway additionally for this is that it should actually make you better at everything. So not only should it not take you away from all those things you’re already called to, it should make you better at them. There’s this delightful image that I find very memorable. He says, throw precious stones into honey and each will grow more brilliant according to its several colors and in like manner everybody fulfills a special calling better when subject to the influence of devotion.
Family duties are lighter, married, love, truer service to our king, more faithful, every kind of occupation, more acceptable and better performed where that is the guide. I was recently talking to someone who’d been a successful athlete and they were asking a very similar question like this is an area professional athletics. People can spend a lot of time and effort pursuing excellence, and it’s true that can get in the way and that can become an impediment to your calling as a husband and a father and as a son of God, as a disciple of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, there is a legitimate sense in which Christians should be striving to be the best they can be at whatever it is they’re called to be. Now, the way you balance those two is recognizing that your professional life, whether that’s a professional athlete or an architect or an accountant or if you’re working at Dairy Queen, whatever that is, that is one part of who you are.
It’s not the whole you. So the image I gave him is you don’t skip leg day. You don’t just work out one part of your body to the exclusion of the other. I don’t think the irony of me telling him not to skip leg day was lost on either of us, but the point there is your spiritual life should be like this. It should actually make everything you are doing better, not in an obsessive way where you just focus on one thing, but where your whole life gets better. This is what it means when John Paul first says devotion isn’t something you do, it’s something you have. So you approach everything with devotion. It’s not like you get your devotions done in the morning and then you go about your day. No, that’s absurd because now you have this little religious part of your day and then you have the rest of your day.
No, rather your whole day should be done with devotion. So the whole thing should be sanctified. Like Jim’s thrown into Honey, St. Francis de sales says it’s an error named more, a very heresy to seek to banish the devout life from the soldier’s guardroom the mechanics workshop, the prince’s court or the domestic hearth. And now he points out, well, obviously if your idea of what devotion is purely contemplative devotion of the kind that you’d see in monastic life, well yeah, sure, that can’t be practiced among the soldier, among the artisan, among the housewife, but there are other kinds of devotion well suited to lead those who’s calling his secular along the paths of perfection. In other words, if what we’ve just said here is all true, that different people are called to holiness in different ways, and that means that we need to think very seriously about the idea of what lay spirituality looks like because just as a bishop’s life of devotion isn’t going to be the same as a monks, a layman’s life of devotion isn’t going to be the same as either of those.
This is a beautiful insight and Pope St. Paul six pointed out that in this way you have really a foreshadowing of the emphasis of Vatican two on lay spirituality and holiness and daily life and the universal call to holiness. And so he says no. One of the recent doctrines of the church more than St. Francis de sales anticipated the deliberations and decisions of the Second Vatican Council was such a keen and progressive insight. He renders his contribution by the example of his life, by the wealth of his true and sound doctrine, by the fact that he has opened and strengthened the spiritual ways of Christian perfection for all states and conditions in life in the way that he relates to the laity and the way that he presents the truth of Catholic doctrine, but then especially in this way, that he emphasizes that lay spirituality is not optional, but also isn’t just going to be previously spirituality or monastic spirituality.
It’s going to be its own thing. But while Francis anticipates this while he starts to chart the course, arguably there’s another saint that maybe does this better, and this is strong as an affirmation coming from both me and JP one since both of us love Francis DeSales, but that third saint is St. Jose Maria Riva. Now remember Jose Maria Riva is alive during the life of then Cardinal Luciani. In fact, he’s going to outlive him. And yet about a month before becoming Pope Cardinal Luciani writes a letter in one of the Italian newspapers describing this new thing called Opus Day and how this is in a lot of ways a fulfillment of this spiritual path that Francis de Sayles had charted, but that Jose Maria is actually going further along it. So here’s what he says. The article is called Seeking God through Ordinary Work.
He says, Monsignor Riva with gospel and hand constantly taught, God does not want us simply to be good. He wants us to be saints through and through. However, he wants us to attain that sanctity not by doing extraordinary things, but rather through ordinary common activities. Remember, this is the example of the bird that flies close to the ground doing ordinary things in an uncommon way. It is the way they’re done, which must be uncommon. They’re in the middle of the street, in the office, in the factory. We can be holy provided we do our job competently for love of God and cheerfully so that everyday work becomes not a daily tragedy, but rather a daily smile. I would add here just that if you’re familiar with the spirituality of the little way of St. Therese, I think she also anticipates this very well of doing the small things with great love. That’s a very easy idea to apply to the life of a layman.
Then the contrast, a comparison and contrast with Francis sales and Jose Maria is one that he makes. And I found it fascinating because I thought before like, oh, these two guys seem very similar and I’d never seen anyone else point this out, but John Paul, the first does, he says More than 300 years earlier, St. Francis de sales taught something along the same lines. A preacher had publicly consigned the flames from his pulpit, a book in which St. Francis had said that in certain circumstances, dancing can be permissible. The book also contained a whole chapter on the worthiness of the marriage bed. Now it’s worth just pausing on this and recognizing that Francis just saying, yeah, there’s actually in some of the other letters and illustrating John Paul’s first points out some of these other examples that he was okay with girls wearing makeup. Sometimes he was okay with all of these things that were shocking to some of the more austere priests of his day.
And so one of them preaches against the filthiness of this book, introduction to the Devout Life, and then burns it in the church. That’s what he’s kind of up against of just imagining everyone has to live like a monk or a nun, and if it wouldn’t be appropriate for a nun to wear a bunch of makeup, then it wouldn’t be appropriate for a young woman who’s single and that misapplication that inability to distinguish between what a lay is called to particularly one pursuing marriage and what a celibate member of the clergy is called to. That’s the kind of thing that he’s trying to break through so it can sign to the flames that book. But then he says this, that Jose Maria Riva actually goes further than Francis sales in many respects. St. Francis proclaims sanctity for everyone, but seems to have only a spirituality for laypeople.
Whereas Monsignor Riva wants a lay spirituality. He might be saying, what’s the difference between those two things? Francis, in other words, nearly always suggests for the laity, the same practical means used by religious, both suitable modification. So he is starting from, okay, here’s what we would do as priests. Here’s what someone in a convent or a monastery would do. Obviously a lay person can’t do all of that. What could we modify here to make this practical? But Jose Maria is actually more radical because he doesn’t just recognize the life of the layman as something that could become an obstacle to the contemplative life, but as one of the real ways in which we find the material for the contemplative life, he goes as far as talking about materializing in a good sense, the quest for holiness. For him, it is the material work itself which must be turned into prayer and sanctity. That work isn’t just something that gets in the way of your prayer work can become one of the places that you pray and one of the ways that you pray.
Monsignor Riva also speaks about a good and necessary anti clericalism in the sense that the laypeople should not imitate the methods and roles of the priests and religions nor vice versa. Now, that’s the point by the way that Pope Francis made a few years ago, that we want to clerical the laity and lay size the clergy, and that’s not healthy. You actually want a clear distinction between the life of the laity and the life of the clergy, and this is something that we’re missing an idea that for instance, full and active participation is going to just mean get as many lay people on the altar as you can that misunderstands the difference in the roles or the idea like, Hey, we need to have women priests so that women can be contemplative and holy. And all of this is coming from this place of misunderstanding the way God is calling the individual layperson to holiness.
He ends with this example. He says, on one occasion in 1957 when an important person congratulated Monsignor Riva because a member of the association had been appointed a government minister in Spain, he received a rather curt reply, what does it matter to me whether he’s a minister of state or a street sweeper? What I’m interested in is that he sanctify himself in his work, and John Paul the first says in that reply, we have the whole of Riva and the spirit of Opus Day. Each person should sanctify himself in and through his work, including the government minister. If he’s been put in that position, what is truly important is that he should really see holiness. The rest matters little. So there you go. I think there’s a lot more to John Paul the first than the fact that he smiled and the fact that he died. I think those are interesting facts about him.
I’m happy people are talking about those things I guess, but I think he has such a wealth to offer, and even still, there’s much more that could be said. But I found his spiritual insights fascinating, and I think particularly his emphasis on what does it mean to be truly holy if you’re not called to be ordained, is something that is very resonant, obviously with me as a layman, but hopefully with you as well. And hopefully if nothing else you’ve taken from this at least, hey, it might be good to read a little JP one. Maybe it might be good to read a little. Gregory the Great for As to Sales, Jose Maria Riva, and I think you’ll find all three of those, but particularly the latter two are very readable, very accessible because especially in the sense of Jose Maria, he’s often writing for the Lady.
So these are these pithy little, almost aphorisms, these things that you can read and sort of chew on throughout the day where it’s just some food for thought. So if you don’t have eight hours a day to give to prayer or to spiritual reading, if you’re not as much of a book worm as John Paul, I first appears to have been, hopefully you can still find something in these works like the way the furrow and the forge that you can benefit from, and I always will recommend Introduction to the Devout Life as a fantastic work for spiritual growth. I’ll also recommend as an apologist his book, the Catholic Controversy, and so if any of those speak to you, if any of those interest you, I encourage you to check those out some more. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.