14/02/2025
The Help of the Lady
The faculty of the seminary could have been the travelers on the road to Emmaus, discussing between themselves the meaning of recent events; meanwhile, Vianney was breaking bread at the inn. But he did quietly; a former classmate said, "There was nothing extraordinary about Jean-Marie; he was just perfectly simple." After six months, the faculty dismissed the future patron of the world's parish priests with the lowest mark they could give it; it would have been lower, but there was no lower grade, so they drew a line through it.
He prayed to his mother: sober and businesslike requests for help in getting through the seminary. Retrograde psychosis should be less pragmatic. Of course he was not backward at all; he was not trying to go back to the womb. It is quite clear that he was asking for a rejuvenation, beyond the obtuseness of a Nicodemus, and the myopia of a Freud. He knew where babies come from because he knew where babies are going. He understood nature, and he saw a labyrinth in nature that can only be explored to its end maternally.
The priest must be in some measure a solitary man, and like Christ, Vianney struggled for solitude as the one clear cure for loneliness. He turned to maternal memory as a point of departure into the supernatural solitude of Christ's own Mother. For the Mother of God is nothing as a mother substitute; she is everything as the Mother. And one who turns tj her becomes a child substitute. Saint John was the first. " Woman , behold thy son. "
