God’s Plan for a Broken World: Denver Priest Reflects on Fatherhood and the Curé of Ars
- Guest Contributor
- 4 minutes ago
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From a challenging homily to pilgrimage in France, one local priest reflects on the mission of spiritual fatherhood in an apostolic age.
By Father Trevor Lontine
A Priestly Challenge at the Start of My Priesthood
On May 15, 2022, Father Dan Barron, OMV, stood at the pulpit in St. Joseph Parish in Denver and asked a simple question. There are so many bad and abusive men in this world; why doesn’t God do something about it? Why doesn’t God seem to give an adequate response to the evil being performed?
Father Barron went on to give statistics about what happens when good men are lacking in children’s lives, and no one in that beautiful little church was immune to the corporate, societal pain being described for the next two minutes. Delinquency, alcoholism, depression and all the other bad news.
What a way to start the homily at the first public Mass of the newly ordained Father Trevor!
There are so many problems caused by bad men, and what is God’s response to them?
“Good men,” Father Barron answered, with a simplicity that seemed on an entirely different plane than the question proposed.
God does not annul the order he created in the beginning; he does not smite men from the earth. He does not take away their dignity, purpose, freedom or power. Rather, he raises up good men to be good fathers. And this is how Father Barron made the invitation to his spiritual son at the beginning of his priesthood: Will you be God’s response to a fatherless world?
Hearing this was not new, but it raised the stakes in a scary and confusing way. When the apostles heard Jesus say, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), they must have feared their inadequacy. Still, they dared to take a step out, and in the end, they shared in the Father’s fruitfulness. Embracing their own unprofitable service (cf. Luke 17:10) for the one cause that has been in the Father’s heart from the foundation of the world, they became incarnate responses to humanity’s ultimate grief and misery: separation from the Father.
Seeing Firsthand: A Priestly Pilgrimage
Every priest’s embrace of this poverty and dignity is gradual. And sometimes, it helps him not just to read more about the good men and good fathers that God has raised up, but to go to one and sit with him. To see the place where his hands got blistered, where his brow and back sweated. To see the tiny confessional where his stomach howled with hunger, where he saw his breath as absolution poured from his lips. To tromp through the same mud that the Curé of Ars tracked into his rectory. This is the stuff of pilgrimage. Sometimes, a priest needs to remember how the Father’s love can positively pour through such a small personage and parsonage.
Ars is humble; as such, it is suited for the little man whom the Father chose to represent him. It is where God answered Father Barron’s question: What is God doing about it?
In this sense, it is the center of the world. What begins as a miraculous desire in the heart of a man, to love the children of God as they need to be loved, is transformed into an epicenter of grace. Since St. John Vianney was named their patron, every parish priest in this world is drawn to Ars to see the heart that became the Father’s own.
An Apostle of God’s Heart
Two centuries earlier, 50 miles away from Ars in Paray-le-Monial, a young girl lost her father at the age of 8, and the tragedy of loss turned into the tragedy of betrayal as her uncle took control of her family’s estate and relegated the family to poverty. Nevertheless, her desire from childhood, not unlike that small parish priest who would later know her name, was to enter into the love of the Father, who desired to give his Son as her spouse. The Spousal Heart crafted so precisely that it could be placed within the God-Man and so reveal the Heart of the Father — this was the Heart that was shown to and shared with St. Margaret Mary, that abused orphan who became the spouse of Christ and the princess of the Father’s Kingdom.
She became the saint of the Sacred Heart. She “popularized” and proclaimed the insights and the vision of Christ’s burning love for his Church. Neither did she have to do this alone. Not only did he himself accompany her recovery from the traumas of her early life and the public doubts of her credibility in later life, but he gave her an earthly father and friend to assist in mediating the Father’s love. As a publicly mystic nun, St. Margaret’s experiences were entrusted by the Church to the priest, St. Claude de la Colombière, SJ, who believed her, reverenced her, respected her, gave her freedom and accompanied her to Heaven. So close was the friendship between Jesus, St. Claude and St. Margaret Mary that Jesus once showed her his Heart as a furnace into which were plunged her own heart and the priest’s, saying, “Thus, my pure love unites these three hearts.”
From Ars to Paray-le-Monial, God’s promise is constant: I will raise up good men in your midst, “shepherds after my own heart” (cf. Jeremiah 3:15), who are themselves my Son’s response to the griefs of his bride. This is the priesthood, worthily lived out, and placing itself at the service of the (no-longer orphaned) bride.
