Retreat director to fellow priests: Pursue holiness, avoid busyness
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People were heaping accolades on Father John Vianney for the miraculous healings God was working through him.
The unassuming pastor finally had enough.
“He blamed the miracles on St. Philomena, a saint he had great devotion to,” recounted Father Brett Brannen, a longtime admirer of St. John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests.
“He went so far as to say, ‘I told her she’s not allowed to do any more physical miracles here. She can do spiritual miracles, but no more physical miracles,’” said Fr. Brannen.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Fr. Vianney turned the responsibility back on his parishioners: “If a person has purity of heart, God will do many miracles through them.”
Fr. Brannen heard that story while leading a pilgrimage retreat for a group of priests from this diocese and Bishop W. Shawn McKnight in the village of Ars-sur-Formans, France.
Fr. Brannen said he’s certain that Fr. Vianney wasn’t referring to himself when speaking of purity of heart and miracles, “but it’s exactly what he did, and it’s exactly what happened.”
Ars-sur-Formans is where Fr. Vianney, known as the “Curé d’Ars” carried out his priestly ministry from 1818 until his death in 1859, offering daily Mass and hearing Confessions for up to 16 hours a day.
Possessing neither blinding charisma nor stellar intellect, he let God use him to transform a backwater of spiritual indifference into an epicenter of encounter and revival.
Fr. Vianney helped draw thousands back to the faith, mostly by living what he preached and dispensing God’s mercy in the confessional.
His witness became clearer and more focused as the years passed.
“A saint can say more in five words than I can say in 500 pages!” marveled Fr. Brannen, a priest of the Diocese of Savannah, Georgia, who for the past three years was director of spiritual formation at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio.
“My observation from reading lives of the saints,” said Fr. Brannen, “is that the closer the saints get to heaven, the simpler and the more silent they become.
“They realize that God is everything — that he’s so big and we’re so little,” Fr. Brannen stated. “That’s what makes them so simple.”
He believes that same simplicity should be the goal for every priest.
“The littler we get, the smaller in humility, the bigger God gets in us; the bigger Jesus gets in us,” said Fr. Brannen.
“So, the people don’t see us, they see Christ. That’s our goal: our union with God,” he said.
“The best news”
Fr. Brannen started giving priest retreats around 2008, when he was vice rector of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmetsburg, Maryland.
“It’s become sort of a vocation within my vocation, and I love doing it,” he said. “I love being with my brother priests. Any way I can help them, that’s what I want to do.”
Having previously served for 10 years as his diocese’s vocation director, he is returning to parish work following his three years at the Josephinum.
He said he could tell that the priests from the Jefferson City diocese want to be God’s good and holy servants.
“My message to the people of God in your diocese is that you have wonderful priests,” he said. “You’re very blessed.”
“They’re good men,” he continued. “Please pray for them and support them. Because we are Catholics, and Catholics need priests. We wouldn’t have the Eucharist without them.”
Fr. Brannen had previously been a pilgrim to Ars with a group of seminarians, but this was his first time there with fellow priests.
“What resonated with me most about our time together was that we can become the saints God created us to be, wherever we’re sent,” he said.
“We have to become a saint in our own skins, with our own identities and our own vulnerabilities and our own wounds,” he said.
“We make ourselves radically available, and God does the work of making us whole again.”
He pointed to a lyric from “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers: “Every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser.”
“In the providence of God, every person has the grace and the ability to become a saint if they wish to,” Fr. Brannen stated. “No matter who we are or where we’re from, no matter how much money, whatever our wounds, whatever.”
He extended the poker metaphor to something he once heard from the late Father Ronald Gillis, who taught at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary.
“He’d say Christianity is like sitting at a poker table with Jesus, and Jesus has all these chips and pushes them all into the middle of table and says, ‘I’m all-in for you,’” said Fr. Brannen.
“And I’ve got one chip in front of me and I kind of push it forward and pull it back,” the priest mused. “All the while, Jesus just looks at each of us and invites us to be all-in for him.”
The priest repeated St. Teresa of Avila’s dictum that “the only mistake we ever make is taking our eyes off of Jesus.”
“Ultimately, if we can keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, then it doesn’t really matter what happens, because his resurrection is the best news in the entire universe, and it supersedes all the bad news combined,” he stated.
“We win”
Recalling the example of the Curé d’Ars, Fr. Brannen pointed out that people don’t need their priests to be super-smart or the greatest administrators.
“They just need us to know Jesus and to bring Jesus to them,” he said.
He told the priests that what God is doing IN each of them is more important than what he is doing THROUGH them.
“And we can’t deny that the things he’s doing THROUGH you as priests are amazing — the transubstantiation, the forgiving of sins, the preaching of the Word — these are things that have ultimate consequences every day.
“But the work that God does IN us, in our personal call to holiness, is even more important, and that is the greatest work in the Church,” he stated.
“Because that’s the primary call of every person: to be like Jesus.”
Fr. Brannen warned the priests against the scourge of becoming habitually busy, which he said is an abbreviation for “Bound Under Satan’s Yoke.”
“Busy is a four-letter word that every priest should expunge from our vocabulary,” he said.
He noted that most people don’t call a priest when everything is going great; they often call him in times of difficulty or sadness.
“Our job is taking care of God’s people,” he said, “and I think the greatest work of a priest is walking with them to Calvary and reminding them that Christ is risen and that this, too, will pass.
“We need to be good-news junkies,” he asserted. “Because Christ is risen, and therefore, we win.
“Now, we just have to be faithful and then live with him forever in heaven.”
