August 8th - St. Jean Marie Vianney

[Stone]

Blessed John Baptist Vianney

by Rev. Constantine Kempf, S.J., 1916

The Blessed John Baptist Vianney, parish priest of Ars, is certainly one of the noblest figures among the saints of the nineteenth century. If one would know holiness in all its charms, in its ineffable gentleness and amiability, let him read the life of this illustrious ornament of the French clergy. The supernatural power revealed in him is so grand and so clearly manifest that only the ill-disposed can deny it.

John Baptist Vianney, born May 8, 1786, in the village of Dardilly, near Lyons, was the son of simple peasants. Grace attracted him heavenward from the beginning. Reason had hardly dawned in him when it turned toward God. The boy of three or four years was often found praying in some secluded corner of the house. When, at the age of seven, he was sent to tend the cows, he was able to spend almost the entire day in the sweetness of prayer. Even then he gave promise of his future calling. He used to gather the shepherd boys of the neighborhood around him from time to time and give them a little exhortation on the duty of avoiding evil and of persevering in good. He had always before his eyes the best example in his parents, who were models of piety and were most careful to preserve their children from every taint of evil.

Then came the French Revolution, closing the churches and expelling the priests. Blessed John received his first Holy Communion in a barn during the darkness of night. Finally, in 1803 a priest, the zealous Charles Bailey, was appointed to Ecully, about three miles from Dardilly. His attention was soon attracted to the virtuous John Vianney. He offered to help John to become a priest. The young man gladly agreed, lodged with relations at Ecully and began to learn Latin. He was then seventeen years old, but had had scarcely any schooling. Study, therefore, proved very difficult for him, for his natural talent appeared to be rather poor. But his tutor, convinced that this upright and innocent youth would serve the Church well by his holiness, if not by his learning, did not lose patience. Vianney sought help from God and vowed a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. John Francis Regis at Lalouvesc. While he advanced steadily but slowly in his studies, it brought him many humiliations. In the little seminary of Verrieres he had to suffer much from his fellow-students and he failed in his examination for entrance into the great seminary of Lyons. It was only through the intercession of his tutor Bailey that he was granted a second examination and admission to the seminary. On August 9, 1815, the end was at last attained. Vianney was a priest. His former teacher, Father Bailey, asked to have him for an assistant. Ecully rejoiced, for it already knew the profound piety and modesty of the newly-ordained priest. Vianney's good sense in the direction of souls soon showed itself. His zeal was prodigious but not indiscreet or excessive, and he began at once to achieve noble triumphs.

At the beginning of February, 1818, Vianney was appointed parish priest of Ars. The vicar-general said to him: "My friend, you are pastor of Ars. It is a small parish where there is little love for God. Bring it to them." Ars was in bad repute and not without reason. Even among the good attendance at divine service and the reception of the sacraments were limited to what was just necessary. The rest sometimes attended, but only exteriorly. Dissolute pleasure seeking allowed religion only scant existence.

Still all admired the edifying example of the new pastor in the church and in his humble and modest manner of life. If the sheep did not come to the shepherd the shepherd sought out the sheep. Vianney went from house to house, showed interest in their welfare and their troubles and spoke kinds words of encouragement and consolation. In this way the ice was broken. Sunday after Sunday more came to church, They ventured even to approach the sacraments outside the great feasts. Those who had once experienced in confession what gentleness flowed from the heart of the priest and how refreshing were his words, soon came again. With his heart glowing with love and speaking as only saints can speak he preached on God, death, heaven, hell, and on the Blessed Sacrament so movingly that from eyes which on like occasions had never wept there welled up fountains of tears. In the whole village only one voice was heard: "Our pastor is a saint." In the course of time no one could escape the influence of his personality. It was indeed a long struggle and many years passed before all hearts were conquered, for the love of pleasure made a most stubborn resistance.

The news of this change in Ars and of the holiness of its pastor soon spread throughout the neighboring country round about, penetrating at length to the limits of France and thence abroad. Every day the roads that led to Ars brought greater pilgrimages. Monnin says of them: "These pilgrimages, which went on for more than thirty years with extraordinarily great crowds and under exceptional circumstances, will fill a large page in Christian annals. They give the monograph we now publish a color so living and original, a framing so splendid, that it seems to be poetry as well as history. We find here on a large scale all those wonders with which our ancient hagiographers loved to adorn their narratives. But we have no mythical antiquity before us and no one can find excuse for our belief that our history of this man who is still a contemporary will show any trace of fanciful or exaggerated elaboration.

It is a history of our own time which can bring forward witnesses to its truth by thousands and hundreds of thousands, yet we find in it all that we marvel at in the legends of the past--all that in our own day we may regard as extraordinary heroism, perfect mortification, wonderful self-denial, incomparable humility, boundless love of God and our neighbor, and a dominion over souls--a power to draw them from afar, to move them, to convert and to gain them for heaven; and further, as if in proof of this spiritual dominion, a miraculous power over nature, the power to change the ordinary course of things, to heal bodily diseases, to read the depths of conscience as an open book, to foretell the future--in a word, he possessed the miraculous gift of knowledge and of power. This does not constitute, it is true, what is most sublime in the lives of the saints, but it is most convincing with the people--one of them told us: 'Before I came to Ars and saw the good Father [so the pilgrims used to call our saint], I found it hard to believe all that is related in the lives of the saints. Much in them seemed to me impossible. But now I believe it all, for I have seen all those things with my own eyes and even more.'"

In fact, Ars proved to be a constant miracle. Men could not say precisely what it was that attracted these vast crowds from near and far. They saw only a poor little church and a poorly-clad priest. Yet they stood there close-thronged and waited patiently two or three days to confess to him and to listen to his simple catechism, which powerfully stirred their consciences. Many came out of mere curiosity, but on these, too, fell the rays of grace. They could not resist going in and confessing their sins to the holy priest. To these wonders of grace were added the most astonishing cures of the sick, which he effected through the intercession of St. Philomena, and his wise admonitions, which were certainly inspired by divine enlightenment.

These labors demanded of him the heaviest personal sacrifices. He could hardly allow himself one or two hours of rest at night. A little after midnight he hurried to the confessional, there to remain the whole day except during the times of Mass, of the brief instruction, and of his very scanty meal. One can not understand whence he derived the physical strength for such uninterrupted exertions. Still, not satisfied with all this, he afflicted his body with the severest penances, and it pleased God to send him the most grievous interior trials. His combats with the evil one, which are verified by the best authorities, remind us of what St. Athanasius relates of the hermit Anthony. All that is related of the gifts of grace and the fulness of virtue possessed by the holy Cure of Ars and of the wonderful cures and conversions wrought by him, is full of consolation. What faith teaches of the power, the beauty, and the grandeur of the soul of the just man was embodied in him. Vianney was to be set against the unbelieving spirit of the age as a visible proof of the truth of Christian teaching.

On July 29, 1859, the Cure, then seventy-three years of age, had been, as usual, for sixteen or seventeen hours in the confessional, and there his strength suddenly gave way. On the morning of the fourth of August his soul took its flight to heaven while Abbe Monnin was reciting the prayer of the dying: "Veniant illi obviam sancti angeli Dei et perducant eum in civitatem caelestem Jerusalem;" "May the holy angels of God meet him and guide him into the city of the heavenly Jerusalem." But his influence was not ended with his death. All Christendom rejoiced when Pius X, on January 8, 1905, numbered this ideal pastor of souls among the beatified.

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How the Cure of Ars became a Saint
by Abbe Alfred Monnin, 1865

The sufferings He Inflicted on Himself

It is from the period of the foundation of the Providence that M. Monnin dates the commencement of the heroic life of the Cur of Ars. "Those," says he, "who did not approach him till the later years of his life, when the habit of sanctity had become a second nature to him; when the practice of the most heroic virtues had become so familiar as no longer to cost him an effort; when, united with, and transformed into, Him, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, he had become one with Him, loving what He loves, hating what He hates, never changing tone or look, whatever might befall him; following every movement of that Divine Master, with Whose Heart and will his own were inseparably united; those who knew him in those days admired a work finished and perfected. But they would have much mistaken had they imagined that the Cure of Ars had become a saint without the toil and effort by which alone saints are made.

"'Who are these,' says one of the ancients in the Apocalypse, 'who are around the Throne before the face of the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and having palms in their hands? Who are they, and whence come they?' And he is answered, 'These are they who are come out of great tribulation.' This is the law of sanctity; and it was not given to our saint to escape it, or to unite himself by any other means to Him who is the Saint of saints.

"Through how many tribulations, conflicts, and trials did he pass before he reached the lofty summit on which we have seen him so tranquilly reposing! So true are the words of St. Catherine, that never from the beginning to the end of the world has our Lord willed, or shall He will, that anything great should be accomplished but through much suffering. "Sanctity is the fruit of sacrifice. It is a death, and a new birth; the death of the old man, the birth of the new. There is no death without its suffering, no childbirth without its pangs."

Of the sufferings of our holy cure, some were inflicted by himself, some by the devil, some by good and some by evil men; some, and those the most intense of all, by the hand of God Himself. And first of those which were self-imposed. There are few, even among the saints, whose lives bear the marks of a more systematic and unflinching crucifixion of the whole man, a more uniform practice both of exterior and interior mortification, than we find in the portrait traced of him by those familiar with the details of his daily life.

Claudine Renard, the pious widow who had the charge of washing his linen, and rendering him such other little services as he could not refuse to receive at her hands, could rarely obtain admittance into the presbytery. On the few occasions when she contrived to effect an entrance, after doing her best to put the poor furniture in order, she sometimes proceeded to make the good Cur's bed. She thus discovered that, one by one, he had cast aside all the bedding he had brought with him from Ecully, till nothing remained but the straw palliasse; and that finding even this too luxurious, he had put a board on the top of it.

"And besides," said Catherine, when relating these particulars, "there is hardly any straw left now in that poor bed. He takes it out by degrees, till at last there will be nothing left but the wood. Then he will be satisfied. We have tried sometimes secretly to put in a few handfuls, but it only made him take out more; for if he felt his bed a little less hard, he would pull out the straw, and throw it into the fire. We discovered this by finding the ashes in the fireplace."

It was accidentally found out afterwards, that, to satisfy his increasing thirst for suffering, M. Vianney was in the habit of discarding his bed altogether, and sleeping on the bare floor of the granary with a stone for his pillow.

His favorite food consisted of some pieces of the coarsest black bread bought out of the basket of some poor man. The Abbe Renard, in a memoir drawn up by him of the early days of the holy Cur's ministry, tell us that he had often witnessed the joy with which he ate this most distasteful food. If he perceived the disgust which his companion felt at the sight of it, he would laugh and invite him to share his dinner, saying, "It is a blessing, dear friend, to be permitted to eat the bread of the poor; they are the friends of Jesus Christ. I feel as if I were sitting at His table."

When these delicacies were not to be procured, his ordinary meal consisted of potatoes, which he boiled himself once a week. Sometimes, when his own stock of potatoes had come to an end, he has been seen, with his basket in his hand, begging his week's provision from door to door. He took our Lord at His word, and left the whole care of his life, and all that belonged to it, to the pledged care of His Providence. He never withheld an alms because it would leave him without provision for the morrow, or even for the day.

A neighbor one day brought him a loaf of fine flour, which she had made on purpose for him. She went back to fetch some milk; and believing that he had been long fasting, she wished him to eat the bread and milk in her presence. No persuasions could induce him to consent. At last an idea struck her, which would account for his pertinacious refusal.

"I see, M. le Cure," said she, "you have no bread left." True, indeed; a beggar had passed while she was gone, and the whole loaf of bread had been deposited in his wallet. M. Vianney seemed determined, in those days, to try how long human nature could be supported without food. He sometimes reduced himself to such a state of weakness, as to be obliged to lean against the forms or walls of the church for support. When, after long days of fasting, he could hold out no longer, he would take a handful of flour, and, moistening it with a little water, make a few matafaims (A thin cake so called in the Dombes), which served him for his single meal.

Catherine tells us that she had often heard him say: "Oh! how happy I was in those days! I had not the whole world on my hands; I was all alone. When I wanted my dinner, I did not lose much time over it. Three matefaims did the business. I ate the first while I was baking the second; and while I was eating the second, I baked the third. As I finished my dinner, I arranged my fire and my stove, drank a little water, and that was enough for two or three days."

It has, in fact, been ascertained that the Cure of Ars often passed several days together without taking any nourishment whatever, when he desired to obtain some special grace for himself or his parishioners, to make reparation for some scandal which had wrung his heart, or to do penance for some grievous sinner, whom he judged too weak in courage, or in contrition, to perform it for himself. When asked how a confessor was to act in order to exact due reparation for sin, and at the same time show necessary consideration for the weakness of sinners, he said, "I will tell you my recipe. I give them a light penance, and do the rest in their place."

He had great confidence in the efficacy of fasting as a means of appeasing Divine justice, and a weapon against the evil one.

''The devil," said he, "laughs at disciplines and other instruments of penance; or, at least, if he does not laugh at them, he cares little for them; but what puts him effectually to flight is the privation of food and sleep. There is nothing which the devil dreads so much, and nothing which is more pleasing to God. I experienced this during the five or six years when I was alone, and could follow my attrait without being remarked. Oh, what graces did the Lord vouchsafe to me at that time! I obtained everything. I wanted from Him." His assistant priest once said to him: "M. le Cur, it is said that at one time you could easily pass a whole week without eating."

"Oh, no, my friend," replied he; "that is an exaggeration. The utmost I ever did was to go through a week upon three meals."

He has acknowledged on other occasions having abstained from all nourishment for whole days together, and sometimes for forty-eight hours. The habitual rigid abstinence which he practiced appears from a remark which escaped him one day, when a batch of baking at the Providence had been very successful: "Well, for once I must be greedy, and eat as much as I want." It is positively affirmed by Catherine that he has passed a whole Lent without consuming two pounds of bread. He even tried to live without bread altogether. Claudine Renard caught him one day eating a handful of grass.

"What, M. le Cur," said she in amazement, "are you eating grass?"

"Yes, my good mother Renard," answered he with a smile; "it is an experiment which I am trying; but it does not answer."

"It is very plain," said he, long afterwards, in a moment of affectionate familiarity, to his assistant priest, "that we are differently formed from the beasts. I once tried to live like them, upon grass; but I lost all my strength. It seems that bread is necessary to man."

Bishop Devie once asked him: "Did you ever try to live upon roots and grass, like your predecessors, the fathers of the desert?"

"Monseigneur," replied he, "I did try it once for a week; but I could not go on. I am not a saint like them."

"One day," says Catherine, "I tried to persuade M. le Cure to take a little more nourishment. I said, 'You will never hold out, if you go on living in this way.' 'Oh, yes,' replied he gaily. 'What says our Lord? I have another food to eat; which is, to do the will of My Father, who hath sent Me.' Then he added, 'I have a good carcass. I am tough. As soon as I have eaten something, no matter what, or slept a couple of hours, I can begin again. When you have given something to a good horse, he sets off upon the trot again, as if nothing ailed him; and a horse hardly ever lies down.'"

The best horse, however, may be overridden, and M. Vianney was sometimes forced to acknowledge that he could do no more.

"There are days when I can really hardly speak; especially about seven in the morning, and seven in the evening; but I always find strength to speak of the good God."

At evening prayers his voice was sometimes scarcely audible. He was asked once, why he spoke so loud when he preached, and so low when he prayed.

"Because, when I am preaching," said he, "I have to deal with those who are deaf or sleeping; but when I pray, I have to deal with the good God, and He is not deaf."

In fact, he always went to the very limit of his powers. "My good cure," said M. d'Ars, "do take a little more care of yourself, if you would not give me continual distractions. When I hear you recite the Rosary in that feeble, worn-out tone, I find myself saying, instead of Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us,' 'My God, have pity on him, and give him grace to go on to the end.'"

Sometimes the good lady got fairly angry with him, and threatened to complain of him to the Archbishop; and, indeed, M. Courbon, the Vicar-General, who looked upon him as in some sort a child of his own, remonstrated with him, though without effect.

The only occasions on which M. Vianney relaxed, in any degree, the habitual austerity of his life, were when he was called upon to exercise hospitality to a brother priest. On these rare occasions, he would send to Mdlle. d'Ars; or, if there was not time to reach the castle, Mdlle. Pignaut, or Claudine Renard, would provide a dinner, simple indeed, but very different from his ordinary fare, which he would make a show of sharing with his guests, while, in the words of one who enjoyed his hospitality on one of these occasions, "he ceased not to discourse of heavenly things, like a man absorbed in God." It is an instance of what has been before observed, of the strength and tenderness of his home affections, that he showed the same consideration for any of his relatives who came to see him. When his nephew and niece from Dardilly paid him a visit, some little addition was always made. He sat down to dinner with them, whereas he always took his solitary meals standing; carved for them, and courteously did all the honors of the table, encouraging them to eat, and eating with them of whatever was before them. But as these good people said, "When we were at Ars, we felt neither hunger nor thirst; it was always like the day of our first Communion."

Then M. Vianney would ask kindly after all his old friends at Dardilly, and dwell upon his childish reminiscences, asking particularly after the old apple-tree, under the shadows of which the reapers had been accustomed to dine and sleep.

We are told of a very characteristic banquet, to which the good cure invited Mdlle. Pignaut and the widow Renard, who, to satisfy a little womanly curiosity, often teased him to give them an entertainment in return for the many repasts they had provided for his guests. He could do no less, they said, than invite them in return.

"One evening, then," says Catherine, "when M. le Cure had laid in a fresh stock of his favorite black bread, he went to visit his neighbor.

"'Claudine,' said he, in a livelier tone than usual, 'you are to come to my house at once, with your daughter and Mdlle. Pignaut. I want you all three.'

"Exceedingly pleased, and above all exceedingly curious to know what M. le Cure wanted with them, the three women arrived at the presbytery.

"'What do I want with you?' said he, as soon as they came in; 'I want you to sup with me. Are you not pleased? Take chairs, and sit down. What a feast we are going to have! We will eat the bread of the poor--the friends of Jesus Christ--and we will drink the good water of the good God. So much for the body. And then we will-read out of the lives of those holy Saints who were so penitent and so mortified. So much for the soul. And so now let us set to work.'"

The good Cure had arranged his table, and spread his feast: in the middle was a basket filled with the bread of the poor; on the right, a large folio volume of the Lives of the Saints; on the left, a pitcher of water, with a wooden cup.

At the sight of this grand preparation, Claudine Renard,who was in the secret, exchanged a look with M. le Cur, and smiled; the other two were a little disconcerted. Without seeming to notice their confusion, M. Vianney blessed the table, and offered a piece of bread to each.

"I dared not refuse," said Anne Renard, when she related the story. "I got to the end of my piece of bread, and so did my mother; but poor Mdlle. Pignaut, do what she would, could not manage to swallow hers. She was on thorns the whole time the visit lasted, having never been invited to such a feast before. She never tried to get another invitation."

M. Vianney would certainly have wanted the necessaries of life but for the watchful care of Divine Providence in commissioning one pious hand after another to supply his wants. On the death of the good widow Renard, her place was 'filled by a pious woman, who went by the name of Soeur Lacon. She carried on a perpetual warfare with the holy cure to induce him to mitigate in some degree the inflexible austerity of his life. She would slip unawares into the presbytery, and leave with-inside the provisions which M. Vianney had refused to receive from her. Great was her self-gratulation on such occasions, until, on the following morning, she would recognize her gift in the wallet of the first beggar who came to ask alms at her door.

Catherine's journal contains an amusing account of one of these skirmishes between Soeur Lacon and her incorrigible pastor:

"She had made a beautiful pie for M. le Cure, which, when baked to perfection, she took out of the oven, and hid in an old cupboard in the presbytery kitchen, thinking it would be sure to be safe in that deserted corner of the house. She impatiently awaited M. Vianney's return in the evening; and as soon as she heard him come in, she said to him, in the most insinuating tone in the world, 'M. le Cure, will you have a little piece of pie?'

"'Certainly,' replied he, immediately; 'I should like it very much!

"Delighted with so unusual an acquiescence, she flew to her hiding-place, when, alas, no pie was to be found! What could have become of it? Had M. le Cure found it out, and given it to some poor man? This was really too much. She went up stairs in great indignation.

"'M. le Cure, this is too bad. My pie was my own; I did not give it to you.'

"'Why did you put it in the presbytery, then?' replied he, very quietly. 'I conclude that what I find in my house is my own, and that I have a right to dispose of it.'"

Poor Mdlle. Lacon, as Catherine tells us, had taken a great deal of trouble to give M. Vianney this surprise; and was the more to be pitied, as she was upwards of seventy, had one leg shorter than the other, and had great difficulty in moving about, on account of her rheumatism.

"M. le Cure, however," adds she, "only did it to try her; for he knew that she was a good soul, and that the more sacrifices he led her to make, the more would she advance in the ways of God."

That she was a good soul, free from malice and guile, appears from her proposing, a few days afterwards, to M. Vianney to make him some matefaims. He consented with a readiness which might have led her to suspect mischief. But in the innocence of her heart she set to work to mix her flour; and, being doubtful of her own skill, called in Mdlle. Pignaut to counsel. M. Vianney watched all these preparations with a malicious eye. When they were finished, the dish was solemnly placed before him. He joined his hands, and raised his eyes to heaven, as if about to say the Benedicite; and then, while all around were devoutly making the sign of the Cross, he took up the dish, ran down stairs with it, and distributed the contents to the poor.

M. Vianney was often to be met hurrying along with something concealed under his cassock. He would go about, knocking at one door after another, till he found some one to receive his alms, which it was his great object to bestow with the greatest possible secrecy, and unknown, if possible, even to the objects of his bounty. An old blind woman, who lived near the church, was on this account a special favorite. He would enter her cottage softly, and deposit his gift in her apron without speaking a word. She would feel with her hand what he had given her, and, supposing she owed it to the kindness of some of her poor neighbors, would answer, " Many thanks, good woman; many thanks;" to the great delight of M. le Curl, who would go away laughing heartily.

M. Vianney, after some of his long fasts, often came home from the church so utterly exhausted, that he was unable to stand. On these occasions he would laugh merrily, and seem as much delighted with himself as a schoolboy who has succeeded in some mischievous frolic.

One day, as Catherine tells us, he felt so faint in the confessional, that he said to himself, "You had better come out while you can, or they will be obliged to carry you." So he dragged himself, as best he could, to the Providence, when he arrived panting for breath, and as pale as a corpse. He asked for a little eau de Cologne.

"Well, Monsieur," said Catherine, as she brought it to him, "you must be quite happy this time; you have carried things far enough to-day." And indeed, said she, "under his pale and sunken features we could perceive the radiance of an exceeding interior joy." It was the joy of victory over a vanquished enemy; and that enemy whom he thus triumphed over and laughed to scorn was himself. He would take nothing but a little eau de Cologne; and as soon as he could stand, hastened into the next room to catechize the children.

"When the catechizing is over," says Catherine, "he finds his little earthen pipkin by the fire containing some milk just colored with chocolate. He generally takes his meal, if meal it can be called, standing by the chimney corner, and often drinks his milk without putting any bread into it at all; the whole is concluded in the course of five minutes. When he is in a hurry, he returns to the presbytery with his pipkin in his hand; so that any one who met him going through the streets would take him for a beggar who had just received an alms. He is never better pleased, nor in a merrier mood, than on these occasions."

It was thus that he contrived to add humiliation to mortification. An ecclesiastic, who had come to Ars on purpose to see him, met him thus eating his dinner as he went along. "Are you the Cur of Ars, of whom every one speaks " said he, in great astonishment and disgust.

"Yes, my good friend; I am indeed the poor Cur of Ars."

"This is a little too much," said the priest; "I had expected to see something dignified and striking. This little Cure has no presence or dignity, and eats in the street like a beggar. It is a mystery altogether."

The words were repeated to M. Vianney, who delighted to tell the story. "The poor good gentleman," said he, "was fairly caught; he came to Ars to see something, and found nothing."

A second interview, however, brought this contemptuous visitor under the power of the singular fascination which the little Cure exercised over all who came within its sphere. He made a good retreat under his direction, and no longer wondered what men came out into the wilderness to see.

The dress of M. Vianney corresponded with his fare. Though a great lover of order and cleanliness, he never allowed himself more than one cassock at a time. It was washed and mended till it would no longer hold together, and not till then would he consent to replace it by a new one. It was the same with his hat, which was worn till it was perfectly shapeless; and with his shoes, which were never approached by brush or blacking. Thus arrayed, he would present himself at the ecclesiastical conferences or other meetings of the clergy, which he made a point of attending, meeting all the raillery of his brethren by the invariable reply, "It is quite good enough for the Cure of Ars. Who do you think would take scandal at it? When you have said, It is the Cure of Ars, you have said all there is to say."

"Thus was it," says M. Monnin, "that he became a Saint,--by sparing himself in nothing, little or great; by applying fire and steel to the most sensitive parts of his being. Such, at the period of his history at which we have arrived, was the Cure of Ars. Having overcome the slavery of self, he was free to follow every impulse of the Holy Ghost. He had removed all the hindrances, and broken all the bonds, which could attach his heart to anything below the Supreme Good. His will soared above this world, in union with the will of God. His views, his desires, his affections, were, so to speak, deified; his expanded heart included all creatures in its wide and fraternal embrace. He had but one wish,--that God's name should be hallowed : His kingdom come; His will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." With him, as with St. Paul, to live was Christ; and it was manifest to all who saw him, that Christ lived in him.

Prayer to Our Lady by St. John Mary Vianney

O thou most holy virgin Mary, who dost evermore stand before the most holy Trinity, and to whom it is granted at all times to pray for us to thy most beloved Son; pray for me in all my necessities; help me, combat for me, and obtain for me the pardon of all my sins. Help me especially at my last hour; and when I can no longer give any sign of the use of reason, then do thou encourage me, make the sign of the cross for me, and fight for me against the enemy. Make in my name a profession of faith; favor me with a testimony of my salvation, and never let me despair of the mercy of God. Help me to overthrow the wicked enemy. When I can no longer say:

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I place my soul in your hands," do thou say it for me; when I can no longer hear human words of consolation, do thou comfort me. Leave me not before I have been judged; and if I have to expiate my sins in purgatory, Oh! pray for me earnestly; and admonish my friends to procure for me a speedy enjoyment of the blessed sight of God. Lessen my sufferings, deliver me speedily, and lead my soul into heaven with thee: that, united with all the elect, I may there bless and praise my God and thee for all eternity. Amen.

Hymn: Iste Confessor

This the Confessor of the Lord, whose triumph

Now all the faithful celebrate, with gladness

Erst on this feast-day merited to enter

Into his glory.

Saintly and prudent, modest in behavior,

Peaceful and sober, chaste was he, and lowly,

While that life's vigor, coursing through his members,

Quickened his being.

Sick ones of old time, to his tomb resorting,

Sorely by ailments manifold afflicted,

Oft-times have welcomed health and strength returning,

At his petition.

Whence we in chorus gladly do him honor,

Chanting his praises with devout affection,

That in his merits we may have a portion,

Now and forever.

His be the glory, power and salvation,

Who over all things reigneth in the highest,

Earth's mighty fabric ruling and directing,

Onely and Trinal. Amen

A Prayer for Priests

Keep them, I pray Thee, dearest Lord,

Keep them, for they are Thine

Thy priests whose lives burn out before Thy consecrated shrine.

Keep them, and comfort them in hours of loneliness and pain,

When all their life of sacrifice for souls seems but in vain.

Keep them, and O remember, Lord, They have no one but Thee,

Yet they have only human hearts with human frailty.

Keep them as spotless as the host that daily, they caress.

Their ever thought and word and deed

Deign, dearest Lord, to bless.

August

[Stone]

August 8 – John Mary Vianney, Confessor

Taken from The Liturgical Year by Dom Prosper Guéranger  (1841-1875)

Ever since the Sun of righteousness vanished from men’s view, the heaven of holy Church has been illumined through the centuries by the shining light of countless Saints; and even as the brightness of the stars increases as the night advances, so, as we recede from the blessed days of His mortal life, Our Lord sends into the world Saint after Saint whose lives seem to shine with ever-increasing lustre.

Less than a century ago a tiny village of provincial France was for many years the hub of the religious life of the whole country. Between 1818 and 1859 its name was upon the lips of countless thousands and so great was the affluence of pilgrims that the railway company serving the district had to open a special booking office at Lyons to deal with the traffic between that great city and the little hamlet of Ars. The cause of all this stir was the lowly yet incomparable priest whose story is to be briefly told in these pages.

Like so many other Saints, Jean Baptiste Vianney enjoyed the priceless advantage of being born of truly Christian parents. His father was one of those sturdy farmer-owners who constitute the backbone of a nation. His mother was a native of the small village of Ecully, which, like Dardilly, the Saint’s birthplace, lies within a few miles of the ancient city of Lyons. It would be a huge mistake were we to look upon the Vianneys as rough and ignorant country yokels. No doubt both parents and children were compelled to spend laborious days in field and vineyard, but the consciousness that for several centuries the beloved homestead had belonged to other generations of Vianneys, inspired the family with legitimate pride and they enjoyed the esteem of all who knew them. Kindness to the poor and the needy was an outstanding virtue of the Vianneys. No beggar or tramp was ever driven from their doorstep. Thus it came about that they were privileged, one day, to give hospitality to St Benedict Labre when that patron Saint of tramps passed through Dardilly on one of his pilgrimages to Rome.

He whom the whole world was to know and revere under the touching appellation of “The Curé of Ars,” a title than which none could be dearer to himself, was born on May 8th, 1786, and baptized on the same day. Jean Marie Baptiste was the fourth of a family of six children. His pious mother refused to yield to another what is a mother’s highest duty and sweetest privilege, viz., that of teaching her children to know and love God. Without exception all responded to her loving solicitude, but the keenest of them all was little Jean Baptiste. As a matter of fact, though an elder sister taught him to read and write, even then his mind was particularly responsive to religious knowledge and his memory, always his weakest point, was more retentive of such teaching than of secular learning.

Almost as soon as he was able to walk, the child accompanied his parents into the fields where he tended the sheep and the cows. Great is the charm of that part of rural France. Years later, when he had become the prisoner of the confessional, the holy cure spoke with gentle wistfulness of the verdant valley of the Chante-Merle alive, as its delightful name suggests, with the music of the blackbirds and the murmur of the babbling brook meandering through the meadows, its banks fringed with wild rose bushes and overhung with the branches of ash and elder trees. Here the youthful shepherd would often seek the shelter of some fragrant thicket and, having placed a little statue of Our Lady, which never left him, in a hollow of a big tree, he would kneel on the greensward and pray his little heart out. At other times he would gather other little shepherds and teach them what he had himself learnt at his mother’s knee, thus anticipating the wonderful “catechism” which was to be one of the daily, as it was one of the most fruitful, features of his apostolate at Ars. Even at that early age he was wont to cross himself when the clock struck the hour.

This he did without first looking round to see whether or not he was observed. A neighbour of the Vianneys having caught him in the act laughingly remarked to his father: “That little fellow of yours evidently takes me for the devil: he crosses himself when he sees me!”

All this time dark clouds, big with havoc and disaster, had been gathering over the fair land of France. On November 26th, 1790, the so-called “civil constitution” of the clergy was passed by the National Assembly. All ecclesiastics who refused the oath to this constitution within a week were to be deprived of their benefices. By a decree of the Legislative Assembly, two years later, the non-jurors were to be banished. The following year saw the outbreak of a fierce and bloody persecution. However, the prospect of the guillotine, which was working overtime in most parts of the unhappy country, held no terror for a great many priests who, by the adoption of various disguises and by frequent changes of domicile, somehow contrived to minister to the religious needs of the faithful remnant. Two such priests were M. Balley and M. Groboz. Both worked at Ecully, the one as a baker, the other as a cook, and both were destined to help Jean Baptiste towards the fulfilment of his dearest wish, that of becoming a priest.

Jean Baptiste made his first Communion at Ecully, his mother’s home. The all-important event took place in the early hours of a summer’s day, in a room carefully shuttered for fear of prying eyes. In order to disarm still further any suspicion that might have existed, haycarts had been drawn up beneath the windows and were unloaded with a great show of activity, whilst the solemn ceremony was in progress. The boy was thirteen years old. Even in his old age tears streamed down his cheeks whenever he spoke of that unforgettable day and all his life he treasured the plain rosary beads his mother gave him on the occasion.

Bonaparte’s rise to power gradually brought freedom to the Church. Priests returned from exile or cast away their disguises and, as always, the blood of so many martyrs proved the seed of a new generation of fervent Christians. For a short time Jean Baptiste had frequented a very homely village school, but now that he was growing up the labours of the fields claimed his days. It was during those long hours of toil that the conviction grew in his mind that he must be a priest: “If I were a priest I could win many souls for God,” he said to himself and to his fond mother. In her he found a ready ally, but the rugged father was not to be won over so easily—the lad could ill be spared. Two years had to go by before the head of the family fell in with his son’s aspirations. The new archbishop of Lyons, no less a person than Bonaparte’s uncle, realised only too well that his first care must be the training of recruits for the priesthood. Parish priests were instructed to look out for suitable candidates. M. Balley, now parish priest of Ecully, opened a small school for such boys in his presbytery. Here was young Vianney’s chance. He could go to M. Balley for lessons whilst receiving board and lodging at the house of his aunt. Even Matthieu Vianney saw the advantages of such a scheme. So to Ecully the lad went.

The future Cure’ of Ars was twenty years old when he entered on the studies that were to lead him to the foot of the Altar. Alas ! the first steps in his scholastic career proved arduous in the extreme. Not a few writers and preachers have said, in their haste, that Jean Baptiste Vianney was dull, not to say stupid. Nothing could be further from the truth. A look at the Saint’s authentic picture still suffice to refute these assertions. Every feature of his magnificent head betokens the fine intellect glowing within. His judgment was never at fault, but his memory had lain fallow for so long that it seemed unable to hold what the hapless student strove so manfully to entrust to its keeping. He himself said that “he could not lodge a thing in his bad head.” As he pored, all in vain it seemed to him, over his Latin grammar, pictures rose before his imagination—it was always a vivid one—of the cosy fireside at Dardilly, of his gentle mother, of his beloved brothers and sisters, and the flowery meadows of the valley of Chante-Merle, so that, in an hour of despair, the poor youth almost decided to go home. Happily M. Balley sensed the peril. He bade his pupil go on foot to the shrine of St Francis Regis, at La Louvesc. The pilgrimage proved a turning point. Henceforth his progress was at least sufficient to save him from that awful feeling of discouragement which had so very nearly caused him to give up his studies.

At this very moment an even more formidable crisis arose. Napoleon was astride of Europe, but his brilliant success was paid for with torrents of French blood. More and yet more drafts had to be levied to fill the gaps made in his regiments by their very victories. In 1806 the class to which young Vianney belonged was summoned to the colours before its time. Two years went by, but in the autumn of 1809 Jean Baptiste was summoned to join up, though as a Seminarist he was in reality exempt from conscription. It would seem that the Saint’s name was not on the official list of Church students supplied by the diocesan authorities. Someone had blundered. The recruiting officer would listen neither to expostulation nor to entreaty. Young Vianney was destined for the armies in Spain. His parents tried to find a substitute. For the sum of 3,000 francs and a gratuity, a certain young man agreed to go in his stead but he withdrew at the last moment. On October 26th Jean Baptiste entered the barracks at Lyons only to fall ill. From Lyons they sent him to a hospital at Roanne where the Nuns in charge nursed him back to a semblance of health. When, on January 6th, 1810, infantryman Vianney left the hospital, he found that his draft had set out long ago. There was nothing for it but to try and catch up with it. His only equipment was a heavy bag. An icy wind chilled him to the bone, and a violent fever shook his emaciated frame. Soon he could go no further. Entering a coppice which provided some shelter from the wintry blast he sat down on his bag and began to say his rosary: “Never, perhaps, have I said it with such trust,” he used to say later on. Suddenly a stranger stood before him: “What are you doing here?” he asked. Poor Vianney explained his sorry plight. Thereupon the stranger shouldered the recruit’s bag, at the same time bidding him follow him. By devious paths, through thickets and bushes, the two made their way to the hut of a sabot-maker. Here Vianney lay low for a few days whilst recovering from his fever. As he tossed on his sick bed it suddenly flashed across his mind that, through no fault of his, he was a deserter. He deemed it best to present himself to the mayor of the commune of Les Noes, one Paul Fayot, who was at that very moment sheltering two other deserters. The worthy mayor told the recruit not to worry: it was too late to join his draft; he was now considered a deserter so that his only care must be not to be discovered by the gendarmes. The mayor himself could not keep him, so he handed him over to the care of his cousin, Claudine Fayot, a widow with four children.

Henceforth Vianney assumed the name of Jerome Vincent. Under that name he even opened a school for the village children. For a time, for the sake of greater security, he lived and slept in the byre attached to the farmhouse. During the winter months the village was almost inaccessible, but as soon as the snows melted the danger from visiting gendarmes was constant. One hot summer’s day he nearly died of asphyxiation as he lay hid in a stack of fermenting hay into which one of the gendarmes drove his sword thereby wounding the young man who, as he afterwards confessed, endured such agony that he could not have held out for many more moments. The conduct of all concerned in this affair may seem strange to us, but in those days conscription was not the cast-iron law it subsequently became. Exemptions were numerous and desertion habitual, so much so that in certain parts of France desertion was the rule, obedience to the law the exception and the woods were more densely populated than some of the villages (Cf. Trochu, Life of the Curé d’Ars, page 57). In any case young Vianney was not subject to the law. His being called to the colours was a mistake. Evidently our Saint did not carry in his pack the proverbial marshal’s baton, but even in those early days a supernatural radiance seemed to form a halo round his noble brow. In 1810 an imperial decree granted an amnesty to all deserters of the years 1806 to 1810.

Jean Baptiste was covered by this decree, so that he was free to return home and to resume his studies. Alas ! his beloved mother died shortly after this happy reunion. He was now twenty-four years old and time pressed. Soon the young man returned to the Presbytery of Ecully: On May 28th, 1811, he received the Tonsure. M. Balley deeming it essential that his pupil should go through a regular course of studies, sent him to the Petit Seminaire of Verrieres. Here young Vianney suffered and toiled much but never shone as a philosopher. In October, 1813, he entered the Grand Seminaire of Lyons. His inadequate acquaintance with Latin made it impossible for him either to grasp what the lecturers said or to reply to questions put to him in that learned tongue. At the end of his first term he was asked to leave. His grief and disappointment were indescribable. For a while he toyed with the idea of joining one of the many congregations of Brothers. Once again M. Balley came to the rescue and studies were privately resumed at Ecully. But the student failed at the examination preceding ordination. A private examination at the presbytery proved more satisfactory and was deemed sufficient—his moral qualities being rightly judged to outweigh by far any deficiencies in his academic equipment.

On August 13th, 1815, Jean Baptiste Vianney was raised to the priesthood—to that ineffable dignity of which he spoke so frequently and with so much feeling: “Oh! how great is the priest!” he used to say. “The priest will only be understood in Heaven. Were he understood on earth people would die, not of fear, but of love.” He was twenty-nine years old when, on the morrow of his ordination, he said his first Mass in the chapel of the Seminary of Grenoble where the ceremony had taken place, for Cardinal Fesch had had to flee from Lyons on the fall of his imperial nephew. Two Austrian chaplains of the armies that had invaded France were saying Mass at the same hour at side altars.

On his return to Ecully the Abbe Vianney’s cup of happiness was full when he learnt that he was to be curate to his saintly friend and teacher. The diocesan authorities had decided that for the time being he who was to spend the greater part of his life in the confessional should not have faculties to hear confessions. However, M. Balley secured them for him within a few months and himself became his first penitent. Though in the opinion of his favourite sister Marguerite, who came over from Dardilly on purpose to hear him, “he did not preach well as yet, people flocked to the church when it was his turn to preach.” Between rector and curate there now sprang up a holy rivalry as to who should outdo the other in fasts and penances. Things came to such a pass that the former reported the latter to the ecclesiastical superiors “for exceeding all bounds.” The accused pleaded the example set him by his rector and the Vicar-General laughingly dismissed the two incorrigibles. On December 17th, 1817, M. Balley died in the arms of his beloved pupil who wept for him as one weeps for a father. And he, who was so detached from all things earthly, until the end of his life clung to a small hand-mirror that had belonged to his teacher and father because, he said, “it has reflected his countenance.” Not long after M. Balley’s death M. Vianney was appointed to Ars—a tiny village sleeping among the ponds and monotonous fields of La Dombes which he was destined to make famous for all time.

Even on a large map Palestine is but a narrow strip of arid, desert like land. Yet all that is really great and worth while happened in that barren hill country. The land was made for ever holy in the blessed hour when the heavens opened above it in order to send down the Light of the world.

La Dombes is an uninteresting district of the department of the Ain. The soil is clayey, ponds of stagnant water render the atmosphere moist and heavy, no large woods give colour and life to a landscape of almost unrelieved drabness. Rain is frequent and the climate is soft and enervating. The village of Ars lies in an undulating plain, a knoll rising from its centre and providing as it were a platform for the village church. A small stream, the Fontblin, meanders through the valley and traverses the village. On the west the horizon is shut in by the hills of the Beaujolais. Even today Ars is in no way remarkable, except for the new church, an hotel or two, some charitable institutions and the shops in which is displayed the usual assortment of rosaries, gaudy pictures, and postcards which seem to be the inevitable and commonplace feature of a place of pilgrimage. The inhabitants themselves, for the most part descendants of the good folk who constituted the flock of the most wonderful parish priest the world has known, are seen going about their rustic avocations just as their forefathers did; but the infinitely attractive personality of the immortal Cure seems even now to haunt the streets of the village and the rough tracks—one cannot call them roads—that divide farm from farm.

In 1815 the village consisted of some forty houses. An exceedingly dilapidated church, with no less wretched presbytery, stood on one side of the shallow valley. The only outstanding building was the family mansion of Les Garets d’Ars, but even that structure had lost its turrets and battlements and the moat that surrounded its walls in bygone days had been filled in long ago.

In clerical circles Ars was looked upon as a kind of Siberia. The district was dull, but its spiritual desolation was even greater than the material. It was in the first days of February, 1818, that the Abbe Vianney received official notification of his appointment—it could hardly be called a promotion—to Ars. “There is not much love in that parish—you will instill some into it,” the Vicar-General told him. On February 9th, M. Vianney set out for the place that was to be, for the next forty-one years, the theatre of his astonishing and indeed unprecedented activities. He journeyed on foot, the distance between Ecully and Ars being about 38 km. A wooden bedstead, a few clothes and the books left him by M. Balley followed in a cart. A thick, dank mist lay over the fields so that he lost his way repeatedly. When he got his first glimpse of the village he commented on its smallness but with prophetic instinct added: “The parish will be unable to contain the crowds that will flock hither.”

Though religion was at a low ebb it would be wrong to imagine that none was left. The mere reopening of the churches could not undo the untold harm wrought by the Revolution. The softness of the climate reacted on the natives, making them flabby and pleasure-loving. The faith, however, was not dead and there was at least a nucleus of fervent souls, chief among whom was the lady of “the great house,” Mlle. des Garets, who divided her time between prayer and good works. In company with an old retainer, this wonderful old woman daily recited the whole of the Divine Office.

M. Vianney’s first care was to establish contact with his flock. He made a point of visiting every household in the parish. In those first days he still found time to walk in the fields, his breviary in his hand—he was hardly ever without it—and his three-cornered hat under his arm, for he scarcely ever wore it on his head. He would speak to the peasants about the state of the crops, the weather, their families, so as to win their goodwill. Above all he prayed, and to prayer he joined the most awe-inspiring austerities. He made his own instruments of penance, or at least “improved” them by weighting them with bits of metal or iron hooks. His bed was the bare floor, for he gave away almost at once the mattress he had brought from Ecully. Subsequently he used to speak of the terrible penances of those days as his “youthful follies.” Happy they who have none other to be sorry for or ashamed of! He would go without food for several days at a stretch. There was no housekeeper at the presbytery. Until 1827 the staple of his food was potatoes, an occasional boiled egg and a kind of tough, indigestible, flat cake made of flour, salt, and water which the people called matefaims. Subsequent to the foundation of the orphan girls’ school, to which he gave the beautiful name of “Providence,” he used to take his meals there. At one time he tried to live on grass, but he had to confess that such a diet proved impossible. He himself reveals his mind, as regards all this, in the words he addressed to a young priest: “The devil,” he said, “is not much afraid of the discipline and hair-shirts what he really fears is the curtailing of food, drink and sleep.”

The holy Cure was gifted with a noble imagination and a keen sense of the beautiful. He enjoyed the beauty of fields and woods, but he loved even more the beauty of God’s house and the solemnities of the Church. He began by buying a new altar, with his own money, and he himself painted the woodwork with which the walls were faced. The vestments were worn to shreds. He set himself the task of replenishing what he called, in a touching phrase, “the household furniture of the good God.” Thus it came about that the goldsmiths and embroiderers of Lyons had the amazing experience of seeing a country priest, wearing a shabby cassock, rough shoes, and a battered old hat and who seemingly had not a sou in his pocket, ordering the most expensive articles in their shops. Only the best was good enough for his little village church. The pilgrim to Ars cannot fail to share the wonderment of the craftsmen of Lyons as he reverently contemplates the rows of vestments in the glass cases that line the walls of the Saint’s old presbytery.

The most disastrous sequel of the Revolution was the people’s religious ignorance. The holy Cure resolved to do his utmost to remedy so deplorable a state of affairs. However, his sermons and instructions cost him enormous pain: his memory was so unretentive! Whole nights were spent by him in the little sacristy, in the laborious composition, and in the even more toilsome memorizing of his Sunday discourse. Sometimes he worked thus for seven hours on end. The sermon was delivered with immense energy, often in a high pitched voice, so that he was utterly exhausted at its conclusion. A parishioner asked him one day why he spoke so loud when preaching and so low when praying: “Ah!” he replied, “when I preach I speak to people who are apparently deaf or asleep, but in prayer I speak to God who is not deaf.” The children excited his pity even more than their elders. He began by gathering them in the presbytery and then in the church, as early as six o’clock in the morning, for in the country the day’s work begins at dawn. He was a stern disciplinarian and demanded a word for word knowledge of the text of the catechism.

In those days profanation of the Sunday was rampant in rural France. In the morning the country folk worked in the fields; the afternoon and evening were spent at the dance or in the far too numerous taverns. The holy man inveighed against these evils with astonishing vehemence. At that time inns and taverns were definitely looked upon as places of evil resort. “The tavern,” the Saint declared in one of his sermons. “is the devil’s own shop, the market where souls are bartered, where the harmony of families is broken up, where quarrels start and murders are done.” As for the men who own or run a tavern, “the devil does not greatly trouble them; he despises them and spits on them!” So great did his influence eventually become that the time came when every tavern of Ars had to close its doors for lack of patrons. At a subsequent date modest hostels were opened for the accommodation of strangers, and to these the holy Cure did not object.

Even more strenuous, if possible, were his efforts in bringing about a suppression of dancing—an amusement to which the people were passionately addicted but which the Saint knew only too well to be a very hotbed of sin. Here he met with the most obstinate resistance, and his victory was very slow in coming. At times he himself paid the fiddler engaged for a dance as much as, or more than, the fee he would have earned by his playing, on condition that he stayed away. As a counter-attraction he revived Sunday Vespers. In his struggle against dancing, his zeal carried him to surprising lengths. In I895 an old woman told Mgr. Convert, another parish priest of Ars, that from the age of sixteen to twenty-two she did not make her Easter Communion because the Saint refused her absolution. The reason was that once a year when visiting her relatives in a neighbouring village, on the occasion of the fete of the place, she used to dance for a little while on the village green. The woman added that she went to confession on the eve of all the great feasts but the Saint never absolved her. She only received absolution when, after a resistance of six years, she at last made up her mind to forgo this annual fling.

The Saint was determined to suppress dancing as far as his authority and jurisdiction reached. His master stroke in this long-drawn campaign was to persuade the young women to stay away from these entertainments. Instead of the dance they attended some sodality meeting. The Cure’s success led to an explosion of rage on the part of his enemies: such a man was bound to make enemies ! Their fury vented itself in the vilest calumnies and the grossest libels against this angel in the flesh, and no persecution was deemed too petty or too coarse where he was concerned. That he was keenly sensitive—to it all we gather from a remark he let fall towards the end of his life—had he known all he was to suffer at Ars, he said, he would have died on the day of his arrival. Yet such was his humility that he was perfectly sincere when he expected to be suspended by his bishop and even to be thrown into gaol: “But,” he said, “I do not deserve such a grace.” To these external vexations was added the far more searching trial of dryness in prayer, and at times the lowering clouds of despair cast their dark shadow upon the naturally sunny fields of his spirit.

Two years had gone by when news went forth that M. Vianney was to be cure of Salles, in the Beaujolais. Ars was struck with consternation. Mlle. d’Ars, in a letter to a friend, talked of nothing less than strangling the Vicar-General. The mayor headed a deputation which went to Lyons, where it easily secured the cancelling of the appointment to Salles. To make sure of the future the good people obtained that their village should be erected into a regular parish. M. Vianney was appointed parish priest, for until then he had only been a chaplain who could be removed at a moment’s notice.

That same year the Cure initiated extensive work on the fabric of the church. A low tower was built, a chancel was added to the vane, several side-chapels were erected, particularly a Lady chapel at whose altar he said Mass every Saturday for forty years, and many statues and pictures were placed along the walls of the lowly sanctuary. All these features may still be seen, for when the new, somewhat pretentious church was erected Pius X strictly enjoined that the old church, sanctified by the holy Cure, should remain as he left it. Thus the new basilica is only a prolongation of the lowly village church so dear to the Saint, as it is to the happy pilgrim to Ars. M. Vianney was no obscurantist. He wished to have good schools in the village. To start with he opened a free school for girls, which he called “Providence.” It soon became a boarding school as well as a day school. From 1827 he received none but destitute children as boarders. For them he had to find both food and raiment. More than once God intervened miraculously, multiplying a few grains of wheat in the presbytery attic, or the dough in the kneading trough of the bake-house. The Saint loved the “Providence” above all his undertakings because it existed for the good of destitute children. For the space of twenty years he himself daily came to the establishment to receive the pittance which he dignified with the name of dinner.

Ars Basilica

In a letter dated November 1st, 1823, to the widow Fayot who had mothered him whilst he lay at Les Noes he wrote that he was in a small parish which was very good and served God with all its heart. Two and a half years had wrought this change. Sunday was now indeed the Lord’s day. The whole village attended Vespers. He found it less easy to induce the good folk to frequent the Sacraments. Jansenism, though moribund, was not yet dead. At the end of his life the Saint declared: “I have done all I could to persuade the men to communicate four times a year: if they had but listened to me they would all be saints.”

The holy priest dearly loved the ceremonies of the Church. He personally trained his altar servers. Corpus Christi was the climax of the liturgical year. On that day he went so far as to forsake his confessional for a few hours. He could be seen walking round the village, admiring and praising the decorations. He himself carried the Blessed Sacrament. No one was allowed to be a mere spectator: strangers were not suffered to line the processional route but everybody had to fall in, and walk in the procession. On his last Corpus Christi day—only forty days before his death—the mayor of the village, Comte des Garets, had secured, unknown to him, the services of a band. At the first crash of the brass and the drums the Saint trembled for sheer joy, and when all was over he could not find words with which to express his gratitude.

His tender love for Our Lady moved him to consecrate his parish to the blessed Queen of Heaven. Over the main entrance of the little church he placed a statue of Our Lady which is still in position. On the occasion of the definition by Pius IX of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he asked his people to illuminate their houses at night and the church bells were rung for hours on end. What with the blaze visible for miles and the noise of the bells, the surrounding villages imagined Ars was on fire and the fire brigades with their primitive engines were soon on the scene. To this day a silver heart hangs near the statue of Our Lady at Fourvieres containing a parchment on which are written the names of all the parishioners of Ars.

It was to be expected that so signal a triumph of religion, as well as the personal holiness of him who was instrumental in bringing it about, would rouse the fury of hell. The Scriptures tell us that Satan at times disguises himself as an angel of light. In our days he is even more cunning: he persuades people, all too successfully, that he does not exist at all. One of the most amazing features of the life of the Cure of Ars is that during a period of about thirty-five years he was frequently molested, in a physical and tangible way, by the evil one.

It should be borne in mind that all men are subject to temptation—for to tempt to sin is the devil’s ordinary occupation, so to speak—and temptation is permitted by God for our good. Infestation is an extraordinary action of the devil, when he seeks to terrify by horrible apparitions or noises. Obsession goes further: it is either external, when the devil acts on the external senses of the body; or internal, when he influences the imagination or the memory. Possession occurs when the devil seizes on and uses the whole organism. But even then mind and will remain out of his reach. Most of the Cure of Ars’ experiences belong to the first category, viz., infestation.

The powers of darkness opened the attack in the winter of 1824. In the stillness of a frosty night terrific blows were struck against the presbytery door and wild shouting could be heard coming, so it seemed, from the little yard in front of the house. For a moment the Cure suspected the presence of burglars so that he asked the village wheelwright, one Andre Verchere, to spend the following night at the presbytery. It proved an exciting night for that worthy. Shortly after midnight there suddenly came a fearful rattling and battering of the front door whilst within the house a noise was heard as if several heavy carts were being driven through the rooms. Andre seized his gun, looked out of the window but saw nothing except the pale light of the moon: “For a whole quarter of an hour the house shook—and so did my legs,” the would-be defender subsequently confessed. The following evening he received another invitation to spend the night at the presbytery but Andre had had enough.

These and similar disturbances were of almost nightly occurrence. They happened even when the Saint was away from home—in the early years when he was still able to lend a hand to his clerical neighbours. Thus on a certain night during a mission at St Trivier, the presbytery shook and a dreadful noise seemed to proceed from M. Vianney’s bedroom. Everybody was alarmed, and rushing to the Saint’s room the priests found him in his bed which invisible hands had dragged into the middle of the room. M. Vianney soon perceived that these displays of satanic humour were fiercest when some great conversion was about to take place, or, as he playfully put it, when he was about to “land a big fish.” One morning the devil set fire to his bed. The Saint had just left his Confessional to vest for Mass when the cry, “Fire! fire!” was raised. He merely handed the key of his room to those who were to put out the flames: “The villainous grappin!” (it was his nickname for the devil) “unable to catch the bird, he sets fire to the cage!” was the only comment he made. To this day the pilgrim may see, hard by the head of the bed, a picture with its glass splintered by the heat of the flames. It must be remembered that at no time was a fire lit in the hearth and there were no matches in the presbytery.

These molestations were both terrifying and ludicrous. The holy man ended by getting inured to them, so much so that he often poked fun at their author who showed himself in a very poor light indeed. With a smile the Saint once remarked: “Oh! the grappin and myself—we are almost chums.” As a sample of Satan’s sense of humour the following is characteristic of one whom somebody called “God’s ape.” The devil would go on for hours producing a noise similar to that made by striking a glass tumbler with the blade of a steel knife; or he would sing, “with a very cracked voice,” the Saint said, or whistle for hours on end; or he would produce a noise as of a horse champing and prancing in the room, so that the wonder was that the worm-eaten floor did not give way; or he would bleat like a sheep, or miaow like a cat, or shout under the Cure’s window: “Vianney! Vianney! potato-eater.” The purpose of these horrible or grotesque performances was to prevent the servant of God from getting that minimum of rest which his poor body required and thus to render him physically unfit to go on with his astonishing work in the confessional by which he snatched so many souls from the clutches of the fiend. But from 1845 these external attacks ceased almost entirely.

The Saint’s constancy amid such trials was rewarded by the extraordinary power God gave him to cast out devils from the possessed. Nevertheless, horrible as may be the condition of one whose body is possessed by the devil, it is as nothing by comparison with the wretched plight of a soul which, by mortal sin, sells itself, as it were, to Satan. The holy priest may be said to have spent the best part of his priestly career in a direct contest with sin through his unparalleled work in the confessional. The Cure’s confessional was the real miracle of Ars, one that was not merely a passing wonder, or the sensation of a few weeks. Great as were his penances, assuredly the greatest of them all was the endless hours spent by him within the narrow confinement of a rugged, comfortless, unventilated confessional. This miracle went on for forty years. The astonishing thing about M. Vianney is that he himself personally became the object of a pilgrimage, people flocking to Ars in hundreds of thousands just to get a glimpse of him, to hear him, to exchange but a few words with him, above all, to go to confession to him.

The afflux of strangers—the pilgrimage as it soon came to be called—began in 1827. From the year 1828 onward the holy Cure was utterly unable to go away, were it but for one day. Unknown to themselves Saints exercise an irresistible attraction, and however anxiously they may seek obscurity, somehow the children of the Church—and others too—have a knack of discovering them. “Oh, how beautiful is the chaste generation with glory! for the memory thereof is immortal, because it is known both with God and with men! when it is present they imitate it, and they desire it when it hath withdrawn itself.” For all that, no man, perhaps a Saint least of all, can hope to be spared criticism. Thus the Cure’s practice and love of poverty were attributed to avarice: some peculiarly sharp-eyed critics thought they could see in him traces of hypocrisy or a secret desire of notoriety. His meekness and humility ended by winning over his very fault-finders. On one occasion, when his professional competence was questioned by some brother priests, the bishop of the diocese sent his Vicar-General to look into the matter and to report to him. The report was more than favourable. Madame des Garets once remarked in the hearing of the bishop—Mgr. Devie—that people thought M. Vianney was not very learned. The answer was remarkable: “He may or he may not be learned, but I do know that he is enlightened by the Holy Ghost.” The same prelate requested the holy Cure to send in written solutions of his most difficult cases of conscience. In ten years he sent in two hundred admirable solutions.

It may be said that the confessional was M. Vianney’s habitual abode. Even in the depth of winter he daily spent from eleven to twelve hours in that penitential box. The peak of the “pilgrimage” was reached in 1845. At that time there were, on an average, some three to four hundred visitors each day. The railway tickets issued at Lyons had to be made available for eight days, for it was well known that a visitor often had to wait all that time before he could hope to speak to the Saint. In the last year of the Cure’s life the number of pilgrims reached the amazing total of 100 to 120 thousand persons. Parties of pilgrims often camped in the open, for there were only five hostelries in the village and these self-styled hotels could only accommodate some 150 guests between them.

No priestly function is apt to become a greater weariness to the flesh and the spirit than a protracted sitting in the confessional. This arduous duty M. Vianney discharged for many hours, day by day, year in, year out, when chilled to the bone by the hard winters of central France or when all but overcome by the stifling heat of the long summer days. Even his hard-working parishioners had their days of rest—for him alone there was no repose, no respite, no holiday. At all seasons his working day consisted of twenty hours out of twenty-four. In summer he spent as much as fifteen and even sixteen hours in the confessional. Yet he loved the beauty of nature. How he would have revelled in the sunshine, the charm of mellow autumn days, the fragrance and colour of blossoming orchards and flowery meadows! But all he had to look forward to, day after day, was the same confinement in the dark, ill-ventilated wooden box which was for him what the cangue was for the martyrs of Cochin-China.

God alone knows the miracles of grace wrought within that rough confessional which stands to this day where he himself placed it in the chapel of St Catherine; or in the tiny sacristy where he usually heard the men. It was there that his prophetic intuitions and illuminations were most in evidence. In dealing with souls he was infinitely kind. His exhortations were brief and to the point. He said little, only a word or two—but coming from him it meant so much: “To Heaven!” was all he said to a certain priest and when his bishop knelt at his feet he merely said: “Be kind to your priests.”

One day he was hearing confessions in the sacristy. All of a sudden he came to the door and told one of the men who acted as ushers to call a lady at the back of the church, telling him how he could identify her. However, the man failed to find her. “Run quickly,” the Saint said “she is now in front of such a house.” The man did as he was told and found the lady who was going away, bitterly disappointed at not having spoken to the Saint. When reproached with excessive leniency, he replied that he could not be hard on people who had undergone so many hardships merely to see him. At times he came out of the confessional and summoned certain persons from among the crowd and those so selected declared that only a divine instinct could have told him of their peculiar and pressing need.

Of his gift of prophecy one instance must suffice—it is of enormous interest to us in England. On May 14th, 1854, Bishop Ullathorne called on the holy man and asked him to pray for England. The bishop of Birmingham relates that the man of God said with an accent of extraordinary conviction: “Monseigneur, I believe that the Church in England will be restored to its splendour.” May this prophecy receive a full and speedy fulfilment—not least through the prayers of him who made it!

No account of the life of the Cure of Ars would be complete without at least a passing mention of his singular devotion to St Philomena, the celebrated Virgin and Martyr of the early Church, whose tomb was found in the Roman catacombs at the beginning of the last century. Between the austere priest and the youthful Martyr there existed a friendship of extraordinary tenderness. Maybe there are across the centuries spiritual affinities between the Saints to which we have not the key. Be this as it may, the holy Cure looked upon St Philomena as his special guardian: his “agent with God,” as he used to say. He erected a chapel and a shrine in her honour when he undertook the restoration of the village church. This shrine may be seen to this day. In May, 1843, he fell so ill that the end seemed at hand. He promised to have a hundred Masses said at the Saint’s shrine. On May 12th, whilst the first of them was being said, he entered into a trance or ecstasy during which he was heard to murmur repeatedly: “Philomena!” Presently he exclaimed: “I am cured!” He attributed his recovery to St. Philomena. There can be no doubt that he used the Saint as a kind of screen for his own humility, for he attributed to the Martyr the miracles he himself performed. In his wonderful single-mindedness he imagined that the world would be as simple as himself and would not see through this pretty device of his modesty.

One temptation pursued the man of God almost all through his career at Ars, viz., a longing for solitude. There can be but little that, in sheer despair of hurting him in any other way, the devil played on this craving with his wonted astuteness. The Saint’s very humility egged him on towards a step which is almost incomprehensible. In all sincerity M. Vianney deemed himself utterly unfit for his office. The year before his death he said to a missionary: “You do not know what it is to pass from the cure of souls to the tribunal of God.” In 1851 he begged his bishop’s leave to resign. The letter was signed: “J.M.B. Vianney, the poor parish priest of Ars.” On three separate occasions he actually left the village. The first “flight,” as the attempt was called, occurred in 1840—but he returned almost before he had reached the outskirts of the village. In 1843 he had a severe illness—the result of his “youthful follies.” He seemed doomed—but he retained his sense of humour: “I am putting up a grand fight,” he said. “Against whom, M. le Curé?” “Against four doctors! if a fifth joins them I am lost.” He recovered. Again he “fled.” This time he got as far as Dardilly, but after a few days he realized that God wanted him at Ars. In 1853 he made a last attempt, this time with the intention of entering a Trappist monastery. But those on whose assistance he relied betrayed the secret! he was stopped en route. After some parleying he abruptly turned round, took the road to Ars, went straight into the church, put on his surplice and stole and entered his confessional. He realized at last, as he himself confessed, that there was something intemperate in his craving for solitude. Henceforth he was resolved to live and die as Curé of Ars.

Men of the moral stature of the Cure of Ars need no adventitious title or dignity to enhance their personality nor are they ever in danger of attaching undue value to such things. Towards the end of October, 1852, the bishop of Belley arrived unexpectedly at Ars. When his presence was made known to the Saint he issued from his usual abode—the confessional—and came to greet the prelate, in fact, he even made a little speech. Presently the bishop produced a bundle from under his cape which proved to be a Canon’s mozetta which he forthwith tried to put over the Saint’s shoulders at the same time hailing him as Canon Vianney. The poor Cure struggled desperately to shake off the ornament. Meanwhile the bishop intoned the Veni Creator and a procession was formed to escort the unhappy recipient of the honour to the steps of the Altar. All the time the mozetta was hanging precariously from the shoulders of the new dignitary. Not many days later he sold it for fifty francs and wrote to the bishop, thanking him for his providential gift, for just then he needed that much money to complete the sum required for a Mass foundation.

Not long after Napoleon III bestowed on him the Legion d’honneur. On being informed of it, the Saint asked: “Is there any money attached to it? Money for my poor?” When told that there was not, he requested the Comte des Garets to return the decoration to the emperor! Only by a ruse could he be induced to open the box containing the cross: he was told there might be relics in it; but he firmly refused to allow the cross to be pinned to his breast—in fact he gave it to the priest who had been deputed to invest him with it: “Take it,” he said, “my friend, and may you have as much pleasure in receiving it as I have in giving it to you!”

Forty-one years had gone by since the blessed day on which M. Vianney had come to Ars. They had been years of indescribable activity. The lowly priest had become famous not only throughout France—his name had reached the ends of the earth. Eternity alone will reveal the extent of the achievement of those years, so fruitful and blessed for others, but so laborious and exhausting for himself. The end was now in sight. After 1858 he often said: “We are going; we must die; and that soon!” There can be no doubt that he knew the end was at hand. In July, 1859, a devout lady of St Etienne came to confession to him. When she bade the Saint farewell he said: “We shall meet again within three weeks.” Both died within that time and thus met in a happier world.

The month of July of the year 1859 was extraordinarily hot, pilgrims fainted in great numbers, but the Saint remained in his confessional. Friday, July 29th, was the last day on which he appeared in his church. That morning he had entered his confessional about 1 a.m. but after several fainting fits he was compelled to rest. At 11 he gave his catechism—for the last time. That night he could scarcely crawl up to his room. One of the Christian Brothers helped him into bed but, at his request, left him alone. About an hour after midnight he summoned help: “It is my poor end,” he said; “call my confessor.” The illness progressed rapidly. In the afternoon of August 2nd he received the Last Sacraments: “How good God is,” he said; “when we can no longer go to Him, He comes to us.” Twenty priests with lighted candles escorted the Blessed Sacrament—but the heat was so suffocating that they put them out. Tears were trickling down the Saint’s cheeks: “Oh! it is sad to receive Holy Communion for the last time!” he said. On the evening of August 3rd, his bishop arrived. The Saint recognized him though he was unable to utter a word. Towards midnight the end was obviously at hand. At 2 o’clock in the morning of August 4th, 1859, whilst a fearful thunderstorm burst over Ars, and whilst M. Monnin read these words of the “Commendation of a Soul”: May the holy angels of God come to meet him and conduct him into the heavenly Jerusalem, the Cure of Ars gave up his soul to God.

The funeral of the servant of God was a triumph, though all eyes were filled with tears. More than three hundred priests walked before the coffin. So many were the visitors to Ars that provisions gave out and many pilgrims had to go without food. Miracles soon confirmed the reputation for sanctity the man of God had enjoyed during his lifetime. On January 8th, 1905, Pius X, that other lowly yet incomparably great priest, beatified the Cure of Ars. It was reserved for another Pope who bore the name Pius to set the seal upon the heroic virtues of the most wonderful parish priest the world has ever seen. On the feast of Pentecost, May 31st, 1925, amid unparalleled splendour and in the presence of an immense multitude representative of all mankind—for it was the year of Jubilee—surrounded by thirty-two Cardinals and two hundred Bishops, Pius XI pronounced the solemn sentence which amplifiers carried to the furthermost corners of the great basilica: “We declare Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney to be a Saint and inscribe him in the catalogue of the Saints.”

The words were hailed with loud applause; the Te Deum was sung with enthusiasm, all the bells of Rome rang a joyful peal and at nightfall the greatest church of Christendom was illumined with many thousands of lamps whose flickering light appeared to the beholder as so many symbols of the countless souls now shining in heaven, thanks to the heroic toil and self-sacrifice of the new Saint.