Allegory of Nobility and Virtue slaying Perfidy, Giambattista Tiepolo, 1774-1775, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice.
Some days ago, I came across this motto “Solo Virtus Vera Nobilitas” – only virtue is true nobility – that made my heart flow over.
The reason for this response is because I truly believe that nobility, true nobility, is the one thing that all of us Christians – and especially seminarians and priests – need to commit ourselves to. It is not only good to be noble, it is essential to Christian practice to be nobility.
Let me echo the words of Pope St. Leo the Great, which we encounter in the Office of Readings on Christmas Day: “O Christian, remember your nobility.” Of course, the true nobility we aspire to is the nobility of Christ, and as the motto so kindly reminded me, and now us, it is the practice of the virtues that allows us to approximate the nobility of Christ. This aspiration for nobility is particularly important because contemporary culture actively discourages us from the pursuit of nobility, encouraging us instead to cultivate mediocrity.
The Saint whose memorial we mark today, St. Damien of Moloka’i, is a great example of a nobility that emerges from the pursuit of the virtues.
When Damien de Veuster, of the Fathers of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, came to the leper settlement on the Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i in 1873, the situation was so horrific that he spent his first night sleeping under a tree. Separated from their family members and ostracized from society, the men, women, and children in the settlement struggled with despair. As is often the case of people who despair, they lived in filth. The dead went unburied. Over the period of his mission in Moloka’i Damien organized every aspect of their society, building homes, schools, and hospitals, raising crops, and protecting orphans. He even brought together a girls’ choir. After sixteen years working on Moloka‘i, Damien himself succumbed to leprosy.
In the life of Damien de Veuster, we can clearly see the practice of the virtues. We have the virtue of justice: it was unjust that these people, many of whom were Catholics, should live abandoned, out of communion as it were, and deprived of their natural and supernatural needs. When the vicar apostolic of the Honolulu diocese, asked for volunteers, Damien was reportedly the only to volunteer. He clearly saw the justice issues involved and he responded.
For him to live all those sixteen years, at the risk of contracting the disease, which ultimately took his life, and open to this risk required the practice of courage or fortitude.
But what of prudence? How was the desire to go to one’s possible death, and then embrace the lepers in such a way as to put oneself in the position of contracting the disease prudent in any way? This was the question I wrestled with as I drafted, and redrafted, this homily until just a few minutes before Mass this evening.
It finally dawned on me that I was having such a difficult time appreciating St. Damien’s actions as prudent because I was all wrapped up in a mundane understanding of the term. In the language of the virtues, prudence does not mean the most sensible thing to do, but the right thing to do at the right time. In this sense, Fr Damien was in fact prudent because he saw with clarity that serving these people, when no one else would do so was the right thing to do at the time. In so doing, he left us a lasting testament to what true nobility is.
But none of this would have been possible had he not petitioned, received, and then practiced the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. I firmly believe that too often much of our beige Catholicism is because we do not truly believe that there is a world to come. So caught up are we in this world, that we practically forget that there is a Christ who will judge us, and that we stand to lose heaven for the failure to measure up to the nobility of Christ.
If you will permit me, one final word. The Office of Readings from the Common of the Pastor contains some lovely words from the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Priestly Ministry and Life:
Priests…have a special obligation to acquire perfection [nobility] because they were consecrated afresh to God when they were ordained…. Each priest is enriched with a particular grace because in his own way he assumes the person of Christ himself. …He is thus made more capable of aspiring to the perfection [the nobility] of him whose place he takes…. Priests, consecrated by the anointing of the Holy Spirit and sent out by Christ, must practice mortification and give themselves entirely to the service of mankind. In this way, enriched by holiness in Christ, they can achieve perfect [noble] manhood.
It might appear that the Council had the exemplary life of St. Damien of Moloka’I in mind when they presented us with this mandate.
(This homily was preached to the community at the Pontifical Beda College, Rome, on May 10, 2024.)
