“Monsieur le Cure,” someone once asked the Cure of Ars, “why is it that you speak so softly when you pray and so loudly when you preach?” “Oh,” was his good-natured reply, “the reason is that when I preach I am speaking to people who are either deaf or asleep, but when I pray, I speak to the good God who is not deaf.”
“Truth!
It is inexhaustible!
Unfailing!
Charged with life
and more intense than a blazing fire!”

Saint Jean-Marie Vianney (1786-1859)
Priest

“Mr. Joseph has served many a Mass, but never a Mass like this one. Yet it is the same, the one sacrifice, eternally repeated and eternally valuable. But he who says it does not merely say it–though that would suffice–he lives it, he dies it. There is an endless silence. Father Vianney, bent over the sacred species, contemplates his incarnate God. His God at His birth, his God suffering, his God betrayed after a banquet where He gave His Body to men. Just as He will be forever betrayed, so will He be forever sacrificed. Forever agonizing, He will always give His Flesh to eat and His Blood to drink to His executioners. And His ministers, like Himself, will be betrayed and struck by their own. They will give them their flesh and blood; they will have nothing left but skin and bone… Such is Father Vianney. Such is the priest. “You want to become a priest, my boy?” When Father Vianney comes forward with the Sacred Host, it is as if he has just torn off some of his own sanctified flesh. Mr. Joseph, receiving the gift, perceives for the first time the grandeur, the sweetness and the rigor of the priesthood…”

Henri Ghéon (1875-1944)
Writer