Preaching the Word out of Season

In his Second Epistle to Timothy, Chapter 4, St. Paul the Apostle gives this command to his younger disciple: “Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke, in all patience and doctrine.”

In A.D. 1209 St. Francis of Assisi (Feast-day, October 4th) began to preach the Christian Gospel to people of his home region of Umbria with such energy and freshness that it ignited a popular religious renewal to the rest of Europe and beyond. Francis, three years before, had dramatically renounced all his inheritance rights as the only son of a rich merchant in the presence of the Bishop of Assisi, going so far as to surrender even his clothes back to his father. Shortly after, he went to live among the lepers, who had been cast out into the forest for their frightful disease.

Coming out of his obscurity, Francis preached repentance from sin and peace and reconciliation among his neighbors. He preached with great power, however, and was not cowed by any human respect. As one of his early biographers, St. Bonaventure, describes it:

And because he had first impressed upon his own mind by his works what he endeavored to impress upon others by his words, fearing reproof from no man, he preached the truth with great confidence. He was not accustomed to handle the sins of man delicately, but pierced them with the sword of the Spirit, nor did he spare their sinful lives, but rebuked them sharply and boldly. He spoke to great and small with equal constancy of mind, and with a like joyfulness of spirit, whether to many or to few; people of every age and sex came forth to see this man, newly given to the world by God, to look upon him and listen to his words.

St. Francis of Assisi’s unction was of a high degree which no preacher should presume to imitate as a style. Nonetheless, it is much to be wondered at, with all of the market-style strategizing on how to “get people back to Church”, is there any thought given to the solemn charge: “be instant in season, out of season…”

(Fr. Higgins)

Pastor’s Note from the Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Bulletin for October 14, 2012

(Pastor’s Note from the Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Parish Bulletin for February 12, 2012)

Apparition at Massabielle — An illustration of the Apparition of Our Lady to St. Bernadette Soubirous within the grotto of the massive rock, known by the people of Lourdes as the “Massabielle”, along the bank of the River Gave. Bernadette’s first apparition was on February 11th, 1858. She was to receive 17 more . The last one occurred on July 16th, 1858. Although the picture shows Our Lady as if visible to all, Bernadette alone saw her. The onlookers saw only Bernadette in her ecstasy.

On February 11th we celebrate the patronal feast-day of our parish of Mary Immaculate of Lourdes. One hundred and fifty-four years ago a poor girl named Bernadette Soubirous from the town of Lourdes, France, claimed that she saw a mysterious young girl,
dressed in white, within the rocks of the Massabielle along the River Gave. The report caused a sensation and much controversy
among the Lourdais. In the course of successive apparitions, the mysterious visitor, seen only by Bernadette, revealed to the girl an underground spring by the rocks which began to flow copiously into the River Gave (the famous Lourdes spring). On March 25th, 1858, the visitor gave Bernadette her name: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” After careful investigation, the local Bishop eventually judged the testimony of Bernadette Soubirous as “worthy of belief”. The Church has incorporated a feast of the first apparition of Our Lady at Lourdes into her official liturgy.

One of the objections made to the first promoters of Lourdes was that these outside commentators were superimposing a
sentimentalized and idealized picture of life in the Pyrenees—as if Lourdes was a kind of idyllic, pristine mountain town, solid in its traditions and Christian values, uncontaminated by the currents of godless modernity. Such deliberately crafted sentimentalization, it is true, hardly does justice to the real-world suffering in which Bernadette and her impoverished family lived.

The region of the Upper Pyrenees was generally suffering from worsening economic and social conditions. In 1828, the French government tried to control access to the communal forestland, which covered a third of the mountains. Access to the communal forest, however, was crucial to the survival of the poor. Beginning in the early 1830s armed revolt spread throughout the countryside. It became known as the War of the Demoiselles. Pyrenean men dressed in white after the legendary fairy-spirits who were believed to inhabit the deep woods. They would carry out raids against the forest guards in an effort to recover their historic rights. This civil strife and the government’s attempts to suppress it lasted through the 1850s. By then the women and children carried on the fight by acts of civil disobedience, defiantly taking bundles of wood from the forests despite the penalties which included fines and imprisonment. This was the local world visited by Our Lady in 1858.

(Fr. Higgins)

Mary Immaculate Notes

Category Archives: Calendar of Saints

Preaching the Word out of Season

Lourdes, 1858