Homily for the Feast of Bl. Hyacinth Marie Cormier, O.P. (May 21) Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C., by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

People often speak about the tension between the contemplative life and the active life: How to live an active apostolate, while still remaining in the life of contemplation. Of course the Dominican Order has its own version of this quarrel, which frequently centers around the question of the so-called canonical life. What life should the observance of the monastic offices and customs play in the ordinary life of Dominican Friars? I once heard an English Dominican, commenting on this longstanding controversial question, describe the Dominican Order as “men divided by a common idea.” Yes, we each have our own idea of the solution and the Order sometimes seems like a conversation about magnificent but also partially mutually incompatible solutions. And there is good in that.

Blessed Hyacinth Marie Cormier helps us to think about the question. He was born Henry Cormier on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1832. The feast day of this institution [the Dominican House of Studies], we might note, but more about that later. He entered the diocesan priesthood for the diocese of Orleans, France and was ordained a priest in 1856--twenty four years old. Shortly thereafter he went to the little town of Flavigny to beg admission to the newly re-founded Dominican Order in France, in a meeting with Lacordaire, and Lacordaire admitted him, despite his ill health.

The first lesson his life teaches us concerns the surprises of divine providence. Cormier was for many years too sickly to make solemn vows. He coughed up blood. He had internal hemorrhages that were associated with tuberculosis. The Friars judged his health too unstable to permit him to make vows. So his superior, Vincent Jandel, the Master of the Order, brought him to Rome as his personal secretary, and asked the Pope, Pius IX, if he might make solemn vows by a special privilege. The Pope, prudent man, said he could if he could remain 30 days without suffering a bout of hemorrhaging of blood while living the common observances. He could not. He made it once to 29 days. Eventually, he fell into an especially profound illness and seemed destined to die. So they anointed him and allowed him to make solemn vows on his death bed. He then promptly recovered and served the order fervently for 50 years, first as the Provincial of the re-founding of the Toulouse Province in 1865, and then as the successor to Jandel as Master of the Order in 1904, until his death in 1916.

Perhaps the moral of the story is this: it is silly to judge the meaning of your life in religion based upon your natural gifts or deficits, whether physical or spiritual. What God will do with you depends upon God. Yes, the canon lawyers are to be respected (and the canonical norms governing the Order are important!), but if they are respected too much in preference to the manifest love of God, God might take a person to the door of death and back again to make that person his saint and to make the world recognize his work in that person. And so, the basis of our observances and laws and best laid plans and worst disappointments: all that is ultimately in the hands of divine providence, and it is when we believe and live by dependence upon divine providence that that we are really religious vowed to God.

Second, Cormier was a man of supreme prudence. At the time of his death he was the ordinary confessor of 8 large convents of nuns and sisters. He had written two books on heroic men of prudence: Raymond of Capua and Vincent Jandel. He’d overseen the renewal of the Order throughout much of Europe, as well as in the Americas, and he had maintained peace with the Holy See, through copious letter writing, especially in the important difficulties surround Pope Pius X and the seminal work of Marie Joseph Lagrange. Cormier defended the doctrine of the Church and the prerogatives of exegesis and theological investigation in a unity and mutual respect that was absolute. A book like the book on Jesus of Nazareth just authored by Pope Benedict XVI would make little sense in the Church today outside of the vision of the unity of dogmatic faith and historical reason upheld by Cormier in his work on behalf of the Holy See. What gives unity to our life of active pastoral apostolate and contemplative observances is prudence: the prudence to govern all things well in view of the common good. The common good who is God, the source of all good, the common good that is the Church that is mystical, and the common good of the Order and of our community. Blessed Cormier lived by the gift of counsel, the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes us docile to the higher prudence of divine wisdom, and that gift informed his life as a man of the Order and as a servant of his brethren.

Last, and most important for us: Fr. Cormier was a man of prayer. This is important because it lies behind the House in which we live and worship today. When he was elected Master in 1904, Cormier was ultimately in charge of implementing the recommendations of a recent visitation of the Province of St. Joseph. Among these was the idea that a house of formation might be built in Washington, D.C. that would contribute to the deepening of the common observances of the Order in our Province. There is a letter from Cormier written in 1905 at the time of the opening of the House that is still with us today. In it he underscores (in cursive French), that he desires that the House be a place of piety, study, common observance, and “adoration of the Most Holy Eucharist”. Even at his busiest, Cormier was known to spend hours each day in front of the Eucharist, praying and meditating. He wanted for us that we might accede to the presence of Christ as the life giving and life altering presence among us, here in this very building and in this very chapel.

There are not many people that can say that they live in a house of religion whose construction was mandated by a saint. We are privileged to be able to do so. But we must also try to be apt to receive that privilege and gift: to be persons who believe in dependence upon divine providence. To be persons who are committed to the common good, and live for the higher ideals of the Order, advocating and advancing these ideas with prudence and charity, and to be men of prayer, committed to the presence of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Blessed Hyacinth Marie Cormier: pray for us, that God may bring to perfection this good work that he has begun among us. Amen.