26 November 2018
Memorial of Saint John Berchmans
Today, we celebrate the feast of the young Jesuit saint John Berchmans, a patron for altar servers and also a patron for Jesuit students (scholastics). John grew up in poverty; like the poor widow in Luke 21, John and his family “put in more than all the rest” in allowing John to pursue a pre-seminary education that they could not afford. John himself had to bear the humiliation of not supporting his family financially on account of his choice to study for the priesthood, a humiliation compounded by the fact that he had to work as a servant in order to pay for those same studies. Once he encountered the Jesuits, though, his choice was made: he entered the novitiate of the Order that bears Jesus’ name and there continued his life of holiness. John was a model of obedience and a brilliant student. He died at the age of 22, having given his all to life as a religious and a student. He was one of those luminous young saints of the Church about whom one may say, as in the first reading, “On [his] lips no deceit has been found; [he is] unblemished” (Rev 14:5).
In our own days, one can encounter the old and the old-at-heart in the Church who dismiss saints such as John Berchmans as being hopelessly naive and distant from the realities of our present day. But such holiness continues to manifest itself among the young, and especially among the poor. It is the mediocrity of a self-satisfied and self-justifying clerical class—whether they be clerics or not—that would disdain the holiness that God would wish to share through the young, the simple, the poor. When the first Jesuits made their vows at Montmartre in 1534, six out of seven of them were under thirty years of age, and the youngest was just nineteen. Their zeal was the zeal of the young on fire with the love of God! The final document of the recent 2018 Synod of bishops concludes with these lines: “Through the holiness of the young, the Church can renew her spiritual ardor and her apostolic vigor. The balm of holiness generated by the good life of many young people can heal the wounds of the Church and the world, bringing us back to that fullness of love to which we have always been called: the young saints urge us to return to our first love (Cf. Rev 2:4).” Through the intercession of Saint John Berchmans, may we, too, be moved by the holiness that the Lord wishes to offer through the young of our age, so that we might come to resemble more and more that God who comes among us as a child and gives his life while still young. “Unless you become like a child…” (Cf. Mt 18).