(C.D. Stampley Enterprises, Charlotte, NC 2001). Used with permission.

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For parish priests

St. John Mary Vianney (1786-1859)

Feast day: August 4

St. John Mary Vianney, the patron of parish priests, labored for 41 years to bring about the total conversion of his tiny parish.

St. John Mary Vianney is popularly known as the Curé of Ars. In France a curé is a pastor of a parish, the man who cares for souls. In fact the French word curé comes from the same root as the English word cure, and certainly there was a great deal in Vianney’s time which needed to be made right.

He was three years old when the French Revolution broke out, sweeping away almost all of the old order—the good as well as the bad. The principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity still sound thrilling, but sad truth is the leaders of the Revolution betrayed their ideals almost from the beginning. The Church was targeted because the revolutionaries regarded it (not entirely unfairly) as a prop of the monarchy and the aristocracy. Contempt for God, hatred of the holy, worship of self and of material goods, the insignificance of the individual in the eyes of the state—this became part of the legacy Robespierre and his followers bequeathed to the world. In the confused and angry decades that followed the Curé of Ars tried to draw people out of their selfishness, out of their hate-filled philosophies, and back to God.

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John Mary Vianney was born into a family of peasants in the village of Dardilly not far from Lyons on May 8, 1786. Throughout his childhood his family practiced the Catholic faith in secret. Among the other outrages the Revolution inflicted on the Church—from guillotining Carmelite nuns to setting up a prostitute costumed as the “Goddess of Reason” on the High Altar of Notre Dame in Paris—was an attempt to impose upon the Catholic faithful “constitutional” clergy, priests who had renounced their loyalty to the {ln:Pope} and given their allegiance entirely to the state. One such priest was sent to staff the parish of Dardilly, but the Vianney family and most of their neighbors would not attend a church run by a schismatic priest who preached revolution instead of the gospel from the pulpit. On Sundays and holy days they slipped off to barns or farmhouses to hear Mass offered by outlaw priests who had remained loyal to the faith. It was dangerous to defy the Revolution. In nearby Lyon, Joseph Fouché, once an Oratorian priest, sent 130 Catholic priests to the guillotine.

Vianney was 18 when he knew for a certainty he wanted to be a priest. This was going to be hard thing to accomplish since he had not had more than a few months of formal education. At age 20 he parents gave him permission to leave home for the preparatory seminary Father Charles Balley operated in his rectory in the nearby village of Ecully. After so many years without any schooling at all study came hard to Vianney. Latin proved especially difficult to master, so much so that he made a pilgrimage on foot to the tomb of St. John Regis sixty miles away. He returned from the shrine with more confidence, although his seminary studies would always be difficult for him.

In 1809 Vianney received a draft notice for the military. As an ecclesiastical student he should have been exempted, but somehow his name had been omitted from the list. He reported for duty but became desperately ill. After eight weeks in a military hospital he was ready for duty but on the day his regiment was set out Vianney missed roll call. He tried to catch up but the troops were far ahead of him. As he was resting beside the road a man came along, picked up Vianney’s knapsack, and urged him to follow him. he led Vianney to a hut in the forest where the man introduced himself as “a fellow deserter.” Poor Vianney didn’t think of himself as a deserter, just a little slow. He called on Paul Fayot, the mayor of the village of Les Noes, to ask his help in rejoining the regiment, but the mayor pointed out that by being so late Vianney would already be listed as a runaway. Then he offered Vianney refuge in the home of a widowed cousin.

Vianney remained at the home of the mayor’s cousin for fourteen months, helping to work the farm and giving lessons to the children. The villagers must have grown fond of their refugee because when Napoleon issued an amnesty to all deserters and Vianney prepared to go home they had the village tailor make him a soutane.

On his return home Father Balley sent Vianney to the minor seminary where he had an especially difficult time with philosophy and with his old nemesis, Latin. During the summer break Father Balley gave him crash courses in both subjects, but at the end of the school term Vianney’s grades were wretched. Near despair he went to his mother’s grave in the churchyard and wept, begging her to pray for him so he could become a priest.

Before he could be ordained to minor orders Vianney had to pass an oral examination, but when he sat before the panel he panicked and his mind went blank. Once again Father Balley came to the rescue: he convinced the chief examiner to test Vianney in the rectory of Ecully, where he felt at home, and in French. Under these circumstances Vianney did very well. He received the minor orders of Acolyte, lector, porter, and subdeacon in the Cathedral of Lyon. For the next year he studied with Father Balley in preparation for ordination to the priesthood which he received at last on August 12, 1815. He was named assistant to Father Balley since no other pastor would take him.

Vianney and Balley had two happy, austere, religiously intense years together before Father Balley died. Since the new pastor did not want Father Vianney as his assistant, the bishop assigned him to the remote parish of Ars, a place with 260 inhabitants, 40 houses, and four taverns. It was the Siberia of the diocese.

The Revolution had been hard on religious life in Ars: two curés had left the priesthood; the local freethinkers took over the parish church and turned it into a temple for the worship of the goddess Reason. For years the village had been without the Mass, the sacraments, or catechisis. On Sundays the villagers met in the square for dances that always ended in a drunken riot. From the day he was installed as curé in 1818 Vianney set about recalling the lapsed to the faith, filling the lukewarm with fervor, and bringing sinners to full recognition of the horror of their sins and what they risked if they persisted. He set as his goal the total conversion of the villagers of Ars to a devout life.

He launched a campaign against drunkenness and the madness of poor people who squandered what little money they had in taverns. He preached against obscene language, and to make certain his congregation didn’t miss his meaning he repeated the offensive words in the pulpit. It took eight years for Vianney to bring Ars to strict observance of Sunday as a day of rest with Mass in the morning, Vespers in the afternoon, and no unnecessary physical labor all day. A harder fight, and one contemporary Christians find hard to understand, was Vianney’s war against dancing. He considered village dances lewd, riotous, and occasions of sin—and he wasn’t alone in this opinion. Throughout the 19th century both Catholic and Protestant clergy in Europe and the United States preached against dancing. To underscore his point, in the Ars church Vianney hung a sign over the statue of St. John the Baptist that read, “His head was the price of a dance!”

He set a personal example of holiness by living in a very austere style. His diet rarely extended beyond potatoes and milk. His furniture in the rectory was the plainest sort. Parishioners who came to church at dawn for the early Mass often found him on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament, arms stretched out like a cross, praying for his parish. His most frequent prayers were “My God, my all. You see how I love you and I do not love you enough” and “My God, here is all—take all: but convert my parish.”

The conversion of Ars was not smooth sailing; not everyone wanted to be converted. For 18 months the anti-Vianney party in the parish harassed their priest by vandalizing the rectory, throwing manure at the door, and sending complaints to the bishop that Vianney had fathered a child on a village girl. Even some of Vianney’s fellow priests joined in the calumny. At a retreat of the diocesan clergy one priest described Vianney as a madman. The bishop said, “Gentlemen, I wish all my clergy had a small grain of the same madness.”

At the command of his bishop Vianney traveled to neighboring towns to give parish missions. This is how he developed a reputation as an insightful, compassionate, but compelling confessor. At the town of Montmerle so many people came to confess to the Curé that he barely left the church for six days. Soon Vianney would be spending up to ten hours in the Ars confessional during winter, sixteen hours in summer. In the final years of his life 80,000 penitents a year, from all over Europe and from as far away as the United States, came to Ars to make their confession to Vianney. Father George Rutler, who has written a biography of the Curé of Ars, wonders “what the equivalent would be today, when travel is so much easier.”

His sermons also drew crowds. At Limas he walked into the church on the first night of his mission to find the sanctuary crowded with clergy and the pews crammed with laypeople. The size of the congregation unnerved him at first, but he climbed into the pulpit and preached on the love of God. Later he reported, “everything went well; everybody wept.”

And then the miracles started. In Ars Vianney had opened a school for destitute girls. One day the supply of wheat was down to nothing and there was no money to buy more. The Curé swept the remaining grain into a small pile and placed in it a statuette of St. John Regis, the saint who had helped him in his studies for the priesthood. Then he gathered the schoolgirls and they all prayed together. Later in the day he sent one of the teachers up to the loft; when she opened the door grain cascaded down the stairs. “The good God is very good,” the Curé said. “He takes care of his poor.”

If Vianney had experience of God, he also had experience of the devil. For thirty years he endured such phenomena as thunderous noises in the attic of the rectory, violent physical attacks on himself, and the sound of voices that came from nowhere. He gave the devil the contemptuous name of the grappin, French for a small rake. Over time Vianney noticed a pattern: the devil was especially active the night before a great sinner came to the Curé’s confessional. “The grappin is very stupid,” the Curé used to say. “He himself tells me of the arrival of big sinners.”

After 41 years of pastoral activity Vianney was physically exhausted. Sometimes he passed out in the confessional. He stopped reading the Divine Office on his knees, and even permitted himself an afternoon nap. When Corpus Christi came on June 23, 1859 -- the Curé’s favorite feast day—he was too weak to carry the monstrance. His curates placed it in his hands and helped support it at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

On July 30 Vianney did not leave the rectory to hear confessions. He told his housekeeper, “It is my poor end,” and asked her to send for the curé from a neighboring parish.

As word spread that Vianney was dying, clergy and dignitaries hurried to the rectory of Ars while crowds of laypeople packed the village streets. Ars was in the middle of blistering heat wave and the Curé’s room was stifling from the press of visitors to the deathbed. The teenagers of Ars tried to make their pastor more comfortable by stretching wet canvas over the rectory roof. Meanwhile dignitaries admitted to the room asked Vianney to hear their confessions, while from outside baskets of medals were sent up for Vianney to bless.

When it was time for John Mary Vianney to receive the last rites, a procession of twenty priests escorted the Blessed Sacrament from the church to the Curé’s room. “How kind the good God is,” Vianney said. “When we are no longer able to go to him, he comes himself to us.” The priests knelt around the bed as Vianney took the Host on his tongue. Then he whispered, “How sad to receive Holy Communion for the last time.” On August 4, as a violent thunderstorm broke over the village, John Mary Vianney passed peacefully to eternity.

The body was dressed in a cassock, surplice and stole and laid out in the parlor of the rectory. For two days an endless stream of mourners passed the remains of the Curé of Ars. Then a procession of 300 priests and religious and 6000 laity escorted the body to the village church for the Requiem Mass.

{ln:Pope} Pius XI canonized John Mary Vianney in 1925, and named him patron of parish priests in 1929. In recent years some priests have complained that Vianney is an unsuitable patron: they deride him as fanatical in his piety and inflexible in his teaching. {ln:Pope} John Paul II answered these criticisms on October 6, 1986, when he personally conducted a retreat for priests, deacons, and seminarians at Ars in honor of St. John Mary Vianney.

{tab=About Book}

Prayer to the saints is a powerful thing.

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“An excellent resource for home and classroom use.” – Publisher’s Weekly {/tabs}