by CCW | 3 August 2026 08:00
Fr. David Curry preached this homily to the St. John Vianney branch of the Societas Sanctae Crucis (SSC, Society of the Holy Cross) on 30 July, Feast of St John Vianney transferred.
We commemorate St. John Maria Vianney, patron saint of parish priests, of all priests, of all confessors, and of every healing ministry, and of our branch of the SSC. Born in 1786, he survived the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Ordained in 1815, he served as a curate for three years and then for forty-one years as the Parish Priest in Ars, celebrated as the Curé d’Ars. A most pious, devout, and faithful priest, he was not particularly distinguished by any intellectual gifts, had very little formal learning, and struggled with Latin, yet, as Simone Weil observes, his attention to the struggle to learn translated into his remarkable gifts of insight into the human heart and to the holiness of his witness in the rather spiritually barren climate of mid-nineteenth century France. An example for all priests, to be sure, but not in terms of things of outward show and spectacle but rather to the inward conversion of the soul united to God in love; he had a deep devotion to Mary and to Christ and his cross.
The Gospel reading from Luke highlights the theme of our watching and waiting upon the coming of the master, a fitting image for St. John Vianney seeking Christ in people’s souls, at once serving Christ and being served by him, and so entering into his blessedness, the blessedness to which our humanity is called. The glory of God, as Irenaeus puts it, is man alive, a living human being grounded in the vision of God. But what is that living human life? It is primarily ethical and spiritual but which always runs the risk of being reduced to the material and practical, and thus betraying or compromising the more radical nature of human redemption; namely its transformative qualities of being made more lovely in God’s eyes and thus becoming not less nor more than human or other than human but more Christ-like in our attention to Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” as Paul puts it. This signals the true purpose and dignity of our humanity; not its being denatured or dehumanized but its perfection.
In the Evening Offices, we have been reading from Luke. Earlier this week we had a reading from Luke 10. 25-42. A remarkable passage, it illustrates profoundly the essential ethical teaching of the Christian Faith expressed in two interconnected stories, the parable of the Good Samaritan and the scene of Martha and Mary with Jesus in Bethany. That story, it seems to me, bookends the radical beginning of the parable of the Good Samaritan captured in Jesus’ questions in response to the certain lawyer’s question which is intended to be subversive and sophistical. “Master, What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” he asks, but with the intent to trip him up. What Jesus does is wonderfully Socratic, for his questions in return actually draw out of the certain lawyer ethical truth in spite of himself. “What is written in the Law? Jesus asks him, and then adds, “How readest thou?” The lawyer is moved rightly despite his intention to quote Deuteronomy and Leviticus on the inseparable nature of the love of God and the love of neighbour, the Jewish Shema and the Christian Summary of the Law.
Jesus commends him: “Thou hast answered right; this do, and thou shalt live,” underscoring, it seems to me, the connection between reading or thinking and doing. “But he,” as Luke puts it, “willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” The question is dismissive and cynical, undermining the ethical principle which he had just recognised. But the question launches the parable of the so-called good Samaritan, which articulates beautifully and compellingly the essential ethical teaching of the Christian Church and Faith.
In the commentary tradition (largely following Augustine), the certain Samaritan is an image of Christ. The whole parable is an image of the human condition, the story of the Fall of Adam and of our redemption in Christ. We are that “certain man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” symbolic of the heavenly and the earthly cities respectively, “who fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him left half-dead.” Such are the effects of sin and evil. Priest and Levite see him but pass by on the other side. Law and Prophecy, and for that matter, all and every social and cultural human effort are not enough to restore and heal our wounded and broken humanity. Something more is required, namely the fulfilling of the Law in love; in short, in the unity of the divine and human in Christ. “A certain Samaritan came where he was; and when he saw him,” as Luke tellingly notes, “had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast,” symbolically his own body, the body of Christ, and brought him to an inn, symbolically the Church, and took care of him and provides for his further care, taking out two pence, symbolic of the twin sacraments of baptism and communion.
An illustration of the radical meaning of divine compassion, it recalls the priestly and pastoral work of the cure of souls through the sacramental life of the Church. Compassion is a particularly significant word in Luke’s Gospel shown here as the deeper meaning of the love of neighbour. The parable ends with Jesus asking his third and final question to the lawyer: “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” How you read is first about how you think. The lawyer for the second time in the story is moved or compelled by the truth itself to acknowledge, “He that showed mercy on him,” to which Jesus simply says unto him, “Go and do thou likewise.” How you read or think is secondly about how you act.
What is striking is the intimate connection and interplay between reading or thinking and doing or acting which is further emphasized in the passage which immediately follows the parable, the story of Martha and Mary. They are the classical Christian icons of the active and the contemplative life respectively and, as in the parable and its setting, these are complementary and mutually interdependent.
Martha, Luke tells us, was distracted with much serving, and complains to Jesus that her sister Mary has left her alone to serve. She asks him to tell her to help her. Martha’s distraction is about being drawn this way and that, a lack of focus and attention. Mary, on the other hand, is described as sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to his word; attentive. Jesus replies, “Martha, Martha”, repeating her name, “thou are anxious and troubled about a multitude of things; one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” The Vulgate gives us optima partem, hence the idea of the ‘better part’, but as Augustine remarks, it is not that Martha “was playing a bad part, but that there was ‘the best part’ which shall not be taken away”(De Trin. I, x, 20). The problem is more about her state of mind. Her busyness and distraction marks a failure to attend to what matters most. It is too easy to get lost in the busyness and the confusion and complexity of our lives.
Both are essential aspects of human activity but one thing is necessary. As Aelred of Rievaulx puts it, “As long as we need to eat and drink, we shall need to tame our flesh with watching, fasting, and work. This is Martha’s role.” But to what end? For “in our souls there ought also to be Mary, that is, spiritual activity,” sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to his word. “You should in no wise neglect Mary for Martha; or again, Martha for Mary. For, if you neglect Martha, who will feed Jesus? If you neglect Mary, what use is it for Jesus to come to your house, when you taste nothing of his sweetness?” At issue are two different activities of the soul, two different ways of thinking, both of which have their role and place but in a certain order.
Both these stories turn upon the primacy of thought informing action. Jesus’ interrogation of the certain lawyer seeks to draw out what belongs to the truth of his being, in spite of himself. So too, Jesus is reminding Martha, and the tendencies towards a kind of ‘Martha-ism’ in all of us, about the greater necessity of attending to his word in which we discover the truth of ourselves. Surely that too is the witness of St. John Maria Vianney as a confessor of souls par excellence, in his paying attention to Christ in each penitent, letting Christ serve to draw all of us into his greater mercy and truth.
I have been thinking about these passages along with Pope Leo XIVs encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. As a treatise on social justice it is pretty much basic boilerplate teaching but endeavors to place the latest new thing, ‘artificial intelligence,’ within an ethical framework about human dignity and flourishing. He looks back to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) but without, it seems, any awareness of the problematic of the times that remains with us in the fragmentation of the forms of thinking into separate and competing domains that undermine and confound the dialectical complementarity of contemplation and action. That 1891 encyclical might be described as ‘Thomas Aquinas bashing modernity’ and gave rise to the Thomistic Wars of the Twentieth Century. Those debates concerned the relation between philosophy and theology; philosophy here referring to the various human sciences. Were Thomas and Dante primarily philosophers, as Etienne Gilson maintained, or theologians as Pierre Mandonnet upheld?
This is about a confusion between distinct but interrelated forms of thinking that contributes to the contemporary malaise which collapses contemplation into action resulting in a betrayal of both. George Corbett, in 2022, has exposed the confusion and resolved the tension by noting that Thomas and Dante are thinking philosophically at certain times, arguing from creation to its principle, God, and thinking theologically at other times, arguing from God revealed in the Scriptures to the realms of creation and human endeavour but without confounding them or collapsing one into the other.
That is the confusion in the Encyclical. Social justice is not the same things as the justitia dei and while Pope Leo XIV endeavours to reclaim the dignity of the human person as imago dei and rightly names the real problem with AI in terms of the “technocratic paradigm,” which is really all about what you can do and get away with, power in other words, the weight of the argument is towards the practical and the political. Rightly critical about the corporate and private interests that drive AI, it is quite uncritical about other aspects of the global world of the elites such as the UN or the International Courts or, for that matter, the world of Trump and Carney. It is hard to see where subsidiarity has any place in those worlds any more than in the new feudal order of the billionaire elites.
The familiar tropes of human suffering in terms of the poor, the marginalized, and the migrant run the risk of being co-opted to the ideologies of the victim culture in the endless parade of the various neologisms of identitarian politics, all late 19th and 20th century. These subjective categories of radical indeterminacy belong to the reification of concepts into things, into separate and competing domains, and to the reification of behaviours into things, identities that are solipsistic, undermining the primacy of human dignity and agency as grounded in our being imago dei. One might note, too, how compassion has been co-opted by the therapeutic culture in the same way. The concept of solidarity risks being reduced to a competition for whose suffering is more privileged for attention than others. Intelligence, which is a mistaken term in the AI debate, is pitted against the emotional, a false dichotomy that does little justice to the interrelation of thought and feeling in the traditions of theological anthropology.
Fr. A.H Baverstock, Master SSC, for instance, called attention to the Veni Creator’s seven gifts of the Spirit as the “supernatural habits of the soul” that unite “mind, will, and the affections.” “Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, and Knowledge are intellectual,” “Spiritual Strength or Fortitude reinforces the energies of the will”; and “Piety and Holy Fear act upon the affections” (‘The Theology of Priesthood’ in Readings for the Liturgy of the Hours).
What is missing (in the Encyclical) is a sense of the primacy of the contemplative, of a form of unitive thought that corrects, directs and redeems the practical; in other words, to a sense of the ethical shown in these stories through the power of questions that open us out to the truth of our lives as found in Christ and his sacrifice.
Allow me to conclude with John Donne’s sonnet, “What if this present were the world’s last night?”, which illustrates these thoughts. The Octet begins with that question and the next seven lines answer by way of a double-barrelled question.
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether His countenance can thee affright.
He is calling to mind an image of the crucifixion and interrogating that image, asking us to think about its meaning; in short, to contemplate its truth. He has in mind, I think, at least as the imagery suggests, the later medieval images of Christ crucified that emphasize the suffering humanity of Christ, such as, perhaps, Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece which depicts Christ as twisted and distorted on the Cross bearing the marks of the plaque. The first question is about what we ‘see’ in calling to mind Christ crucified and how it applies to us. Does it frighten us? The description is arresting and graphic. “Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light;/Blood fills his frowns, which from His pierced head fell.”
The imagery then shifts from the visible to the audible, to what is heard, as it were, from Christ on the Cross, namely an explicit reference to the first word from the Cross in Luke’s account and in the tradition of the Seven Last Words. “And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,/Which pray’d forgiveness for His foes’ fierce spite?”
The octet raises the rhetorical questions about what we see and hear. Does what we see frighten us? Does what we hear condemn us?
The sestet answers most emphatically. “No, no;” No to both and proceeds to explain. “But as in my idolatry/I said to all my profane mistresses,” alluding to what we put in the place of God; our idols are here expressed as profane mistresses, not necessarily in a literal sense. Profane means what is outside the temple and which stands in place of the sacred; in short, all that we attach ourselves to in place of the truth and beauty of God.
What does he say to those idols of our hearts and minds? “Beauty of pity, foulness only is/ A sign of rigour.” It is an ellipse, a concentration of ideas, the meaning of which has to be unpacked. Basically, the conceit here is that beauty is a sign of pity, of mercy, as in the beloved showing mercy towards the lover, while foulness, meaning the decay and dissolution of the body, is a sign of rigour, as in rigor mortis, death. “And so I say to thee,” to his soul, “To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign’d;” If horrified or frightened, it is about my sinfulness but the sonnet concludes with what surely belongs to the confessional ministry: “This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.”
The image of Christ crucified is transformed from what is hideous into what is beauteous and transforms the penitent sinner, the one who knows himself to be in need of pity and mercy. Only by contemplating Christ crucified can we feel and know his compassion and be moved, transformed like the lawyer, to “go and do thou likewise.” All because of what and how we read.
Fr. David Curry, SSC
St. John Vianney (transf.)
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
July 30th, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/08/03/sermon-for-ssc-service-st-john-maria-vianney-branch/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.