Lenten Letter -- Mortification

10 February 1992
To Each Confrere

In St. Vincent's vision of us, he would see us as men who are busy dying, not once in a lifetime but many times a day. Being a man who is busy dying every day is a salient characteristic of a Vincentian priest, brother or seminarian, for mortification (how old-fashioned the word sounds!) is one of those five virtues or values which we, as members of the Congregation, pledge ourselves to cultivate and express in our manner and style of living. Our modern Constitutions remind us that "The Congregation tries to express its spirit in five virtues drawn from its own special way of looking at Christ." (C.7). We are reminded, too, that "our spirit and our ministries ought to nourish one another." (C.8).

Would it be true to say that in our day mortification has become the Cinderella of our five virtues? Somehow it is easier to talk of the importance of zeal for evangelization of the poor than of mortification, which seems to have a negative connotation. It is not that we deny a place to mortification in our lives, but over the years mortification tends to become diluted by the little compensations which we award to ourselves. St. Peter knew all about it. He left his boat and fishing nets to follow Our Lord. For him it must have been a costly sacrifice. It was his all and he left it. Time passed, and later he seems to have become more calculating: "We have left everything and followed You. What, then, shall we have?" (Mt 19:27). St. Peter's mind was running along the lines of compensation.

Into our lives, too, there slip imperceptively little self-gratifications which in an earlier period we may have outlawed. We tend to invoke the principle of occult compensation. We find pretexts for having this and enjoying that. We can even do so in the name of greater efficiency in carrying out our apostolates, but honesty and sincerity in prayer will alert us, at times, to the possibility that such concessions may be deflecting our hearts from Christ and insulating us against the cries and the pains of the poor. The truth is that we can drive out selfishness by the front door, but it has a way of sneaking silently in by the back door.

If mortification of our senses (and St. Vincent stresses the importance of both interior and exterior mortification) seems negative and repellent to us, it may very well be that our vision of mortification is too narrow. We may be giving emphasis to the principle of dying without looking further into the life that mortification can generate. The dying, which was the experience of Christ, led into His Resurrection, and the dying which He proposes to all His followers has no other purpose than that they may become more "alive for God in Christ Jesus." (Rom 6:11).

For St. Vincent, as for all other saints, holiness meant doing the Will of God as perfectly as one could at all times. The reality, however, of original sin in the world, along with my own personal sins, has biased me towards putting my own will in the first place and God's in the second. For that reason I must constantly cut back those little shoots of selfishness, sensuality and vanity that prevent or retard the tree of my life from bearing fruit. A man has to be busy dying. What particular forms of dying he should choose may vary somewhat from person to person. This, however, is certain, that according to St. Vincent's teaching our judgment, our wills, our hearts and our senses must feel the touch of the pruning knife so that, to quote St. Paul, "the life of Jesus may be manifested in our bodies." (2 Cor 4:10). Thus the daily Eucharistic Sacrifice will have depth and meaning for us.

Let no one, then, persuade us that the mortification of our senses, interior and exterior, is now outmoded. We have "passions and desires" that run contrary to the law of the life of Christ within us. It is humility to acknowledge them, and it is charity to crucify them. Only thus can we belong fully to Christ Jesus. Only thus can we proclaim with authenticity the good news of Christ to the poor. Only thus will our vows remain a living reality.

"To the modern science of psychology, " writes a present-day Catholic philosopher, "we owe the insight that the lack of courage to accept injury and the incapability of self-sacrifice belong to the deepest source of psychic illness. All neuroses seem to have as a common symptom an egocentric anxiety, a tense and self-centered concern for security, the inability to 'let go,' in short, that kind of love for one's own life that leads straight to the loss of life." (J. Pieper, Fortitude and Temperance, p. 40).