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St John Vianney, August 4th

 

St John Vianney is the patron saint of parish priests. He was born into a farming family on May 8th 1786 in Dardilly, near Lyons, France, and he struggled to become a priest amid the turmoil of the French Revolution and later the academic demands of the seminary. But he went on to serve in the tiny parish of Ars for 41 years until his death in 1859. During that time Ars not only witnessed a radical conversion but was also transformed into a centre of pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of people who sought healing and conversion through the ministry of the holy man who would come to be known as the Curé of Ars.

The saint spent most of his childhood and adolescence working in the fields and tending to flocks and by the time he had turned 17 he was still illiterate. But he had nevertheless shown a strong religious inclination throughout his young life. Even at the age of four years, his mother one day found him in a barn praying before a small statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and he would retain a life-long devotion to Our Lady.

He was instructed in the faith by two nuns, who were forbidden to wear religious dress at that time, and made his First Holy Communion at home in secret while local farmers watched out for Revolutionary Guards.

In 1802, Napoleon signed a concordat with Pope Pius VII that restored some of the freedoms of the Church. John-Marie Vianney was 16 years old at the time. A year later, he spoke of his desire to become a priest, telling his mother that he wanted to “win souls for God”. His father needed him to work on the farm, however, and he delayed his departure until he was aged 19.

The next obstacle facing the young saint was learning Latin: he simply wasn’t very good at it but he persevered nonetheless.

I809, St John was called up to serve in Napoleon’s army against the Spanish. He fell ill and missed his departure and was unable to locate his regiment when he tried to find it. He was technically a deserter and spent two years in hiding, emerging in 1811 only when Napoleon granted a general amnesty to those who refused to fight. His mother died just weeks before he returned home, and the tragedy was made worse by the death of the saint’s brother, Francis, on the battlefield in Spain.

St John resumed his studies at the age of 25 but was asked to leave the seminary in Lyons within months because he was deemed “too inadequate”. Following protests by his parish priest he was re-examined in French and was able to answer well enough to pass and on August 13th 1815 he was ordained priest. Three years later he was sent to Ars to serve at a chapel of ease in an irreligious village of about 200 people.

There are many anecdotes about the man who would become the Curé of Ars but one told most often recalls the encounter between the priest and a shepherd boy who directed him to the village. “My young friend, you have shown me the way to Ars,” he told him. “I shall show you the way to Heaven.”

The people of Ars were poorly educated farmers but St John Vianney wanted to show them the way to Heaven. Like our own time, many were ignorant of the faith or were generally indifferent to it. St John’s first act was to go to his chapel and pray for the “conversion of my parish”.

The next morning he rang the Angelus bells and celebrated Mass, attracting just a few curious parishioners, but soon the villagers had grown impressed by his humility and particularly the time he spent in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. “There is no need to say much to pray well,” he once explained. “You know God is there. Open your heart to Him, take pleasure in His holy presence. That is the best prayer.”

Indeed, his existence, according to Pope Benedict XVI, and his example as a faithful priest, was a “living catechesis that acquired a very special effectiveness when people saw him celebrating Mass, pausing before the tabernacle in adoration or spending hour after hour in the confessional”.

He was the image of the Good Shepherd, noted Benedict in a General Audience of 2009, an alter Christus who lays down his life for his sheep and the centre of his entire life was the Eucharist, which he celebrated and adored with devotion and respect. He would point all those who came to see him to the Altar and Tabernacle, saying: “He is here, He is here, the One who loves us so much, He is here!”

Benedict tells us that “another fundamental characteristic of this extraordinary priestly figure was his diligent ministry of confession”, with the saint beginning his day promptly at 1am each morning and spending up to 16 hours hearing Confessions. Historians have suggested that the number of confessions he heard in his lifetime was equivalent to a fifth of the then population of France.

“What made the Curé of Ars holy was his humble faithfulness to the mission to which God had called him,” Benedict said. “It was his constant abandonment, full of trust, to the hands of divine Providence. It was not by virtue of his own human gifts that he succeeded in moving peoples’ hearts nor even by relying on a praiseworthy commitment of his will; he won over even the most refractory souls by communicating to them what he himself lived deeply, namely, his friendship with Christ.”

“How beautiful, how great, to know, to love, to serve God,” St John would say. “We have nothing but that to do in this world. Anything we do apart from that is a waste of time.”

It was precisely because he loved God that St John Vianney answered his vocation to be a priest, to be a man for others. He was conscious of the greatness of this calling. “Without the Sacrament of Holy Orders, we would not have the Lord,” he once told to parishioners. “Who put him in the tabernacle? The priest. Who welcomed your soul at the beginning of your life? The priest/the deacon. Who feeds your soul and gives it strength for life’s journey? The priest. Who will prepare you to appear before God, bathing your soul one last time in the Blood of Jesus Christ? The priest.

“The priest, always the priest,” he continued. “And if this soul should die (as a result of sin) who will raise it up, who will restore its calm and peace. Again the priest …”

In the early part of his ministry St John identified three evils which he sought to combat: religious ignorance, disordered pleasure-seeking and Sunday work which prevented families from going to Mass together. So he opened schools for both girls and boys, he taught youngsters the catechism, how to pray the rosary, and taught them about the lives of the saints. “We must teach children about the saints for they are close to Christ,” he said. “When a saint passes, God comes with them.”

His dislike of dancing is well known, though it must be noted that his interventions against it were invited by the parents of youths concerned about the consequences of drinking and revelry. It is accepted within the Church that his pastoral methods in this respect are unlikely to suit the social and cultural conditions of the present day.

Even at the time they made him enemies, and some of them made counter-accusations of debauchery against the saint, while one young parish priest wrote to him to tell him he was incapable of his office. “My dear and most venerable confrere,” the Curé of Ars replied. “What good reason I have for loving you! You are the only person who really knows me.” It took the saint 10 years to bring about change in his parish.

For 34 of his 41 years in the parish, St John was also visited by the Devil in various forms, sometimes voices and occasionally more sinister manifestations. The saint’s nickname for the Devil was the “Grappin”, the “grabber”, and he described him as “cunning, but not strong”. St John noticed that the more frightening the manifestations appeared to be, the more urgent was his forthcoming task, and that these often involved the conversions of notorious sinners.

Such people came from miles around, from all over France. From 1830 to 1859 about 400 strangers arrived in Ars every day, mostly for confession. In the last seven months of his life, 100,000 pilgrims turned up in Ars.

He was a weak man by then and could speak only with difficulty. On July 30, he announced: “It is my poor end,” and asked for a priest. When he received the Last Rites he was heard to whisper how sad it was to be receiving Communion for the final time. The saint died at 2am on August 4.

In his General Audience, Pope Benedict warned the faithful against reducing the figure of St John Vianney to a man of his time, saying one should “understand the prophetic power that marked his human and priestly personality that is extremely timely”.

St John grew up in a post-revolutionary France marked by a “dictatorship of rationalism” that aimed at obliterating from society the very existence of priests and of the Church, and that he later showed that such rationalism could not satisfy authentic human needs, he said. We meet a similar challenge in the dictatorship of relativism, the practical relativism described by Pope Francis as one of sources of so many evils in the world today.

The example of St John Vianney may continue to serve as a great inspiration to the Church today.