Saint John Vianney

That priest was John Vianney — Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney — whom the whole Catholic world would come to know as the Curé of Ars. He came from a farming family with little schooling, was once regarded as the dullest student in the seminary, and was nearly expelled because he simply could not master Latin grammar. And yet with silence, tears of penance shed on the cold church floor, and an almost limitless mercy in the confessional, he turned a tiny village where faith had grown cold into one of the greatest places of pilgrimage in nineteenth-century France, and in the end he was proclaimed patron of all priests throughout the world.

John’s childhood fell in the darkest years of the French Revolution, when anticlericalism ran so high that churches were closed, statues of saints were smashed without mercy, and priests who remained loyal to the Holy See — called “refractory priests” in the language of the time — were hunted down to be sent to the guillotine or deported. Little John had to learn his catechism in secret, sometimes even in dark cowsheds, where the smell of straw and dung mingled with whispered prayers. He made his First Communion at thirteen, in a room with every window shut, while outside people deliberately parked a few hay carts to block the view of the patrolling police. Seeing the quiet but steadfast courage of priests who risked their lives to keep serving the faithful in that darkness, the boy formed a dream he never let go of: to become a priest and save souls.

In 1809, he was conscripted into the army of Emperor Napoleon, which was then fighting all over Europe and constantly calling up young men. Because he fell seriously ill, he could not catch up with the troops who had already set out, and ended up in a remote village called Les Noës. Through no intention of his own, he became a deserter in the eyes of the authorities and had to live under a false name, hiding in the loft of a cowshed for more than a year, until an amnesty was declared for deserters.

On August 13, 1815, John Vianney was ordained a priest at Grenoble, at twenty-nine, late by the usual standards, after years of struggle. At first he was not even given faculties to hear confessions, because his superiors still feared that his moral theology was not solid enough to handle the complicated cases of conscience penitents might bring.

As he gave him the assignment, the vicar general said sadly:

“There is no love of God at all in that village; go there and plant the love of God in their hearts.”

Faith in Ars had indeed grown pitifully cold: the villagers spent their days drinking in the taverns, worked hard all day on Sundays, which the Church’s law set aside for rest and worship, and on Sunday evenings held dances the parish priest regarded as debauched. The village church was covered in cobwebs, cold and desolate, and hardly anyone went there.

With his own meager money he refurbished the altar, and cleaned the church with his own hands until it shone. In the pulpit he did not have the flowery eloquence of many learned priests, but his simple sermons, sometimes wet with tears, on God’s mercy and the horror of sin had a power to touch hearts that no argument could match. Patiently, time after time, he urged the villagers to give up the taverns, keep Sunday holy, and put an end to the dances he believed opened the way to so many other sins.

Besides renewing the parish’s spiritual life, he founded the home called “La Providence” — the House of Providence — to feed and educate, free of charge, hundreds of poor, hungry orphan girls of the region, a work of charity he kept going almost entirely through the generosity of benefactors and the Providence he trusted completely, day by day.

Father Vianney was almost “imprisoned” in his cramped wooden confessional. In freezing winter as in sweltering summer, he sat hearing confessions sixteen to eighteen hours a day without a break, leaving only for about half an hour to celebrate Mass and hastily eat a boiled potato. Some penitents had to wait patiently in line for three days and nights before their turn came to be heard.

It is said that God gave him a rare gift of reading souls: he could see clearly the sins penitents deliberately kept hidden, reminding them of details they themselves had long forgotten. But what made him different was not that ability to “read” sins, but how he responded to them: before the most hardened sinners, he did not raise his voice to rebuke them. He laid his head on their chest and sobbed. When one penitent asked in surprise, “Father, why are you crying?”, he answered, choked with tears:

“I am crying because you will not cry for your sins.”

It was those tears — not any eloquence — that melted hearts that seemed to have been frozen for years. He also had the habit of taking the heaviest penance on himself: he would give the penitent a few simple Hail Marys, and then he himself, night after night, stayed awake scourging himself to make reparation in their place.

About the priestly calling, he gave a short definition that has become one of the most quoted sayings in the history of the Church in France:

“The priest is the Love of the Heart of Jesus.”

But the greatest temptation of his life did not come from those nightly disturbances, but from his own longing to withdraw into the life of a hermit. He always felt inadequate and ignorant, and feared the responsibility of caring for a whole parish before the judgment seat of God — a fear that perhaps had its roots in those years of being considered “dull” at the seminary, and that never fully faded even after he had become a priest admired by all France.

Knowing he would soon go to God, he said serenely to those around him: “I am going to rest at last.” Twenty priests from neighboring parishes came to keep watch around his sickbed, an astonishing number for a village priest and a sign of how highly the French clergy regarded him. When the priest brought him Holy Communion as Viaticum, his sunken eyes filled with tears, and he whispered:

“How moving it is that the Lord comes to visit His poor servant one last time!”