• Article Tools
• Print

by Paul Ciarcia

If you were to ask Father George Rutler, pastor of the Church of Our Saviour on Park Avenue in Manhattan, what his cosmopolitan parish has in common with the little country village of Ars where St. John Vianney served, he would tell you a great deal.

"The life of Vianney can be transferred to any parish in the world,” Father Rutler maintains. Each parish is a “microcosm of the Church” that must face many of the same spiritual problems and challenges, the same personalities, the same conflicts, however manifested in different ways. 

Father Rutler’s path to the Catholic Church was uniquely inspired by the Curé D’Ars.

During a retreat in a monastery in England during Father Rutler’s early days as an Anglican, a green book sitting on the shelf happened to catch his eye. That book turned out to be the "Life of the Curé D'Ars," by Alfred Monnin. Encountering the life of St. John Vianney for the first time was a watershed moment in Father Rutler’s spiritual journey to the Catholic Church.

“I was just hypnotized by the book and could not put it down,” Father Rutler said.

The example of St. John Vianney exerted a formative influence on Father Rutler: “This man is living the life of a Catholic priest and that is what I was striving for.” Inspired by his life and devotion, Father Rutler as an Anglican knew he faced a dilemma: “If Catholicism is wrong, how could it produce such saints?” Thus began his conversion to the Catholic faith.

It was as also as an Anglican that Father Rutler encountered another towering Catholic figure, Cardinal John Henry Newman, who also played an influential part in his own spiritual formation. While studying at Oxford, Father Rutler began to read the works of Newman and would pray before Newman’s pulpit.

Father Rutler recalls an Anglican professor advising him, “Don’t read the 'Apologia,'  it’s a dangerous book” – a kind of warning that only encourages curiosity.

“The more I read Newman, the more I wanted to follow his path,” Father Rutler said, undeterred by the professor’s warnings of the famous convert to Catholicism who once wrote that “to be deep in history is to cease being a Protestant.”

Ten years later Father Rutler would return to the same pulpit, this time as a Catholic priest.

I am absolutely convinced it was by (Newman’s) intercessions” that his own conversion to Catholicism was fulfilled, Father Rutler said.

Thus, the “Year for Priests” has been uniquely providential for Fr. Rutler. Two of the major influences of his priestly development, Newman and St. John Vianney, have both been given renewed prominence in recent months by Pope Benedict XVI.

St. John Vianney has been made the patron of the “Year for Priests” declared by the pope in June. In addition, on July 3 of this year, Pope Benedict officially recognized a miracle attributed to Cardinal John Henry Newman, thus allowing for his beatification and moving him closer to sainthood.

Recently, at the request of Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, Father Rutler began planning a pilgrimage for priests of the archdiocese to Ars in February.

It was over 30 years ago when I went to Ars as an Anglican; I never thought that someday I would return leading a pilgrimage of Catholic priests,” Father Rutler said.

In a journey to the Catholic faith informed by the works of Catholic thinkers and fueled by his own intellectual curiosity, it is no surprise that Father Rutler today is a prolific writer and author in his own right.

He is a regular contributor to the online Crisis Magazine, and his writings have appeared in National Review and First Things. He hosted the television program Christ in the City for EWTN, and for ten years he travelled extensively delivering speeches in his role as national chaplain of Legatus, an organization for Catholic businessmen.

Raised in New Jersey as an Anglican in the High Church tradition, Father Rutler finally entered the Catholic Church in 1979 and was ordained a Catholic priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1981. He holds degrees from the pontifical Gregorian and Angelicum universities in Rome, the Institut Catholique in Paris and the University of Oxford.

His writings include over 14 books that range from the purely historical work “Coincidentally” to a work on church hymns, as well as more weighty issues of theology. The "Curé D'Ars Today: St. John Vianney" is Father Rutler’s own treatment of St. John Vianney, written in 1988 while serving as a college chaplain for the Archdiocese of New York. His other major work, "A Crisis of Saints," is a study of sainthood and the need for faith to be renewed by heroic virtue -- an element of the Christian life that Father Rutler sees as lacking in modern times.

Father Rutler also shared some of his opinions on the state of vocations in light of the recent report from Georgetown that indicated, among other findings, that more traditional religious orders are attracting the largest share of vocations.

I just saw that and yawned,” Father Rutler quipped, noting the report confirmed what he and many others have observed for some time.

In Father Rutler’s view, today’s young crop of priests and seminarians are unspoiled by divisions that emerged after Vatican II and the disputes that ensued over the role of the laity, women and the Latin Mass. He believes such conflicts influenced last generation’s priests, but those battles are over now.

For young seminarians, he said, “the old traditions are new again, and fascinating.” Seminarians are seeking out the more traditional orders because they want something substantive, not “simply a rehash of the mainstream culture.”

"To be a Catholic,” Father Rutler said, “is to be counter-cultural.”

Next month will mark eight years since Father Rutler was assigned by Cardinal Edward Egan as the new pastor of the Church of Our Saviour on Park Avenue, but he will never forget his first week on the job, September 11, 2001.

That day, Father Rutler was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center, and he rushed to Ground Zero, where he spent the day offering absolution and last rites to firefighters and other victims of the terrorist attacks. He also tended to a fellow priest with whom he had been working side by side, Father Mychal Judge, who was mortally wounded in the day’s chaos. It was a day where that “heroic virtue” of which Father Rutler had written about years earlier was on full display.

For now, Father Rutler continues to write and devote himself to parish life, which he considers the heart of the Church. Recently, the second edition of “A Crisis of Saints” was released featuring an introduction from George Weigel. Father Rutler is currently working on a new book, “Cloud of Witnesses,” a collection of essays on some of the fascinating people Fr. Rutler has met throughout his life.