General Audience: St John Vianney

Blog-by-the-Sea has put me on to the General Audience address that Pope Benedict gave yesterday. He devoted his address to St John Vianney, whose feast day we celebrated on Tuesday.

The full Italian text can be found here, at the Vatican website. This article at Catholic News Agency gives an account of Pope Benedict's catechesis, including the comparison of the "dictatorship of rationalism" that St John Vianney experienced to the "dictatorship of relativism" that we experience today. This presents a fascinating insight, rooted in, of course, one of Pope Benedict's constant themes, that of the appropriate relationship of reason and faith.

I offer here the original Italian text of these two paragraphs, from the text at the Vatican website:

Lungi allora dal ridurre la figura di san Giovanni Maria Vianney a un esempio, sia pure ammirevole, della spiritualità devozionale ottocentesca, è necessario al contrario cogliere la forza profetica che contrassegna la sua personalità umana e sacerdotale di altissima attualità. Nella Francia post-rivoluzionaria che sperimentava una sorta di “dittatura del razionalismo” volta a cancellare la presenza stessa dei sacerdoti e della Chiesa nella società, egli visse, prima - negli anni della giovinezza - un’eroica clandestinità percorrendo chilometri nella notte per partecipare alla Santa Messa. Poi - da sacerdote – si contraddistinse per una singolare e feconda creatività pastorale, atta a mostrare che il razionalismo, allora imperante, era in realtà distante dal soddisfare gli autentici bisogni dell’uomo e quindi, in definitiva, non vivibile.

Cari fratelli e sorelle, a 150 anni dalla morte del Santo Curato d’Ars, le sfide della società odierna non sono meno impegnative, anzi forse, si sono fatte più complesse. Se allora c’era la “dittatura del razionalismo”, all’epoca attuale si registra in molti ambienti una sorta di “dittatura del relativismo”. Entrambe appaiono risposte inadeguate alla giusta domanda dell’uomo di usare a pieno della propria ragione come elemento distintivo e costitutivo della propria identità. Il razionalismo fu inadeguato perché non tenne conto dei limiti umani e pretese di elevare la sola ragione a misura di tutte le cose, trasformandola in una dea; il relativismo contemporaneo mortifica la ragione, perché di fatto arriva ad affermare che l’essere umano non può conoscere nulla con certezza al di là del campo scientifico positivo. Oggi però, come allora, l’uomo “mendicante di significato e compimento” va alla continua ricerca di risposte esaustive alle domande di fondo che non cessa di porsi.

And my own English translation, with assistance from the Catholic News Agency article, which translates some but not all of the paragraphs:

Far from reducing the figure of St John Mary Vianney to an example, to be just admired, of 18th century devotional spirituality, it is on the contrary necessary to grasp the prophetic force that gives his human and priestly personality a great topicality. In a post-revolutionary France that was experiencing a kind of “dictatorship of rationalism” bent on erasing the very presence of priests and the Church in society, he lived, first - in the years of his youth - a herioc secrecy travelling many kilometres during the night to participate at Holy Mass. Then - as a priest - he stood out for his unique and fruitful pastoral creativity in showing that the rationalism that prevailed at the time was in reality far from meeting the authentic needs of man and therefore, ultimately, was not worth living.

Dear brothers and sisters, 150 years after the death of the Holy Cure of Ars, the pressures of today's society are no less demanding, though perhaps they are more complex. If then there was a "dictatorship of rationalism", today there is noticeable in many situations a type of "dictatorship of relativism". Both of them represent inadequate responses to the just demand for man to make full use of his reason as an element that is distinctive and constitutive of his proper identity. Rationalism was inadequate because it did not take account of human limits and raised reason alone as the measure of all things, transforming it into a goddess; contemporary relativism mortifies reason, because in reality it concludes by affirming that the human being cannot know with certainty anything outside the field of the positive sciences. But today, as before, man "beggar for meaning and fulfilment" searches continually for the exhaustive answers to the fundamental questions that do not cease to challenge him.

Pope Benedict points out in his address that there are some aspects of the life of St John Mary Vianney that constitute his own individual charism, and that we might not expect them to be reproduced in the lives of priests today. On the other hand, there are aspects that are of permanent value for the priestly life today: the living of an intimate friendship with Christ, which spills over into pastoral efficacy in the community served by the priest; devotion to the celebration of Mass and adoration of the Eucharist; faithfulness to the Sacrament of Penance.

Whilst the priest of today might look with awe at the life of St John Mary Vianney - and, rightly, judge that it would not be appropriate today for them to live a life of such severity - nevertheless, they should look to his life to discover the essentials of priestly life and ministry that might renew their lives and ministry today. "I hope nobody is expecting me to do that" is a response that has only some justification; most priests can do some of it, to the growth of their priestly lives and ministry.