Saint John Vianney (1786-1859)

Birth and family (1786)

Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney was born on 8 May 1786 in Dardilly, a farming village a few miles north-west of Lyon.^[8][9] He was the fourth of the six children of Matthieu Vianney and Marie Beluze, a deeply Christian and charitable farming family: the Vianney household readily welcomed beggars, and family tradition holds that Benedict Joseph Labre, the holy beggar on his way to Rome, was received there — even before Jean-Marie's birth, Labre having died in 1783.^[10] His mother's simple piety marked the child very early, and he kept all his life a tender and trusting devotion.

A childhood under the Terror: clandestine faith

Jean-Marie was three years old when the French Revolution broke out; he thus grew up in a persecuted Church. After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), most priests in the region refused the schismatic oath: these were the non-juring priests, hunted down, forced to celebrate Mass in secret at the peril of their lives.^[11][12] The child thus learned the catechism and the faith underground, amid barns and isolated farms where the faithful gathered by night.

This decisive experience taught him very young the worth of the priest and of the Mass: he saw lay people risk prison to attend a Eucharist celebrated in hiding. The conviction that would dominate all his preaching — that a village without a good priest is an abandoned village — took root here.

First Communion in a barn (1799)

It was in this climate of peril that Jean-Marie made his First Communion in 1799, at thirteen, in a barn whose windows had been barricaded with carts of hay to hide the light of the candles, while lookouts watched the paths.^[13] All his life he kept the memory of that hidden Eucharist. The supernatural was never an abstraction for him: he had received it, as a child, like a forbidden treasure.

A late calling and the school of Abbé Balley

Jean-Marie felt the desire for the priesthood growing within him, but everything seemed opposed to it. First there was the farm work, then his lack of schooling: past seventeen, he could barely read and write. In 1806, Abbé Charles Balley, parish priest of Écully, opened a small school in his presbytery to form late vocations, and accepted this twenty-year-old peasant who knew almost nothing.^[14][15] Balley became for him a master, a father and a model; his death, in 1817, would be one of the great bereavements of the saint's life.

The ordeal of Latin

The most humiliating obstacle was Latin, the language of the Church and of ecclesiastical studies. Vianney's mind was upright and profound, but his tired, late-developing memory refused declensions. At the seminary of Verrières, which he entered around 1812, he had to be allowed to follow the philosophy course in French, being unable to follow it in Latin.^[16] Dismissed for a time, taken back out of charity, he several times came close to being definitively turned away.

This long scholastic failure is one of the keys to his holiness: there he learned humility to the root, and all his life he held himself to be the last and most unworthy of priests. When the examiner finally asked him what he knew, Abbé Balley pleaded for him, assuring them that this mediocre candidate would be a great confessor — a prophecy fulfilled beyond all measure.^[17]

The conscription episode (1809-1810)

In 1809, after beginning his studies, Vianney was called up by Napoleon's conscription: the war in Spain and the urgent need for recruits had lifted the exemption enjoyed by ecclesiastical students of Cardinal Fesch's diocese, and his father tried in vain to procure him a substitute. Falling ill at the moment of departure, separated from his convoy, he found himself, almost without having willed it, a deserter. He then lived fourteen months hidden in the hamlet of Les Noës, under a false name, as a schoolmaster, while his younger brother served as his substitute in his place.^[18][19] The general amnesty of 1810, on the occasion of the Emperor's marriage, put an end to this situation and allowed him to resume the path to the priesthood in peace.

Seminary, failures and ordination (1815)

At the end of a journey strewn with failures, his superiors, moved by his piety, his penance and his purity, decided to admit him to orders. He was ordained deacon at Lyon on 23 June 1815, then priest on 13 August 1815 at Grenoble, by Bishop Claude Simon, Bishop of Grenoble.^[20][21] He was twenty-nine. Appointed curate at Écully under Abbé Balley, he served there for three years, in his master's shadow, until the latter's death in 1817.

"Oh! How great the priest is! If he understood himself, he would die... If we did not have the sacrament of Orders, we would not have Our Lord." — Saint John Vianney^[22]

Arrival in an indifferent village (1818)

In 1818, Abbé Vianney was sent to serve Ars, a hamlet of some two hundred and thirty souls lost in the damp plain of the Dombes, in what is now the department of Ain. Tradition relates that, unable to find his way in the fog, he asked a young shepherd for directions, and said to him: "You have shown me the way to Ars; I will show you the way to Heaven."^[23] He arrived on 13 February 1818.^[24]

The village he discovered was religiously lukewarm: people worked on Sundays, the taverns were never empty, dances drew the youth together, Mass was deserted. The new parish priest resolved to reconquer everything, not by brilliance of speech — he was no great orator — but by prayer, penance and patience.

Reconquering a parish: penance and preaching

The Curé of Ars began by making himself a victim for his parishioners. He slept little, on a straw mattress, often ate only a few potatoes cooked once for the whole week, multiplied vigils, disciplines and fasts, convinced that souls are converted only at the price of one's own flesh.^[25][26] He repeated, in substance, that God refuses nothing to one who offers himself in sacrifice for souls.

His preaching, at first laboriously written out and learned by heart, became over the years burning with simplicity. He spoke of sin and mercy, of death and Heaven, with tears; he would weep in the pulpit as he evoked God's despised love. Little by little, the parish changed its face: people returned to Mass, to confession, to family prayer.

The war on taverns and dances

The saint waged a relentless battle against all that, in his eyes, ruined souls: blasphemy, Sunday work, tavern drunkenness and above all dancing, which he judged an occasion of sin for the youth of his time.^[27] He went so far as to refuse absolution to those who persisted in frequenting dances, and obtained the closing of the taverns near the church. This intransigence, which may surprise us, went hand in hand with infinite gentleness in the confessional: he was hard on sin and tender with the sinner.

La Providence (1824)

In 1824, the Curé of Ars founded a work particularly dear to him: La Providence, a shelter and free school for the poor and orphaned girls of the district, which he entrusted to devoted young women, among them Catherine Lassagne, who would become one of his most precious witnesses.^[28][29] He put into it all his income and all his tenderness, begging himself to feed his children. The establishment operated until 1847, before being entrusted to religious sisters.^[30]

"My secret is quite simple: it is to give everything and to keep nothing." — Saint John Vianney^[31]

These facts are reported here with their testimonial weight: many of them were gathered under oath during the canonization trial, from numerous witnesses — priests, parishioners, pilgrims. In what follows, a distinction is made between what is solidly attested and what belongs to tradition.

The assaults of "le grappin"

From around 1824, and for more than thirty years, the presbytery of Ars was, according to many testimonies, the scene of unexplained nocturnal phenomena: violent blows against the doors, voices, noises of crowds, bed curtains shaken, and even, one night, the unexplained burning of the saint's bedding.^[32][33] The Curé of Ars attributed these torments to the devil, whom he called with disarming familiarity "le grappin" ("the grappling hook"). Several priests and visitors who spent the night at the presbytery witnessed them.

Far from frightening him, these assaults reassured him: in them he saw the sign that a great conversion was in preparation, and he maintained, in substance, that the devil is cunning but powerless before a simple sign of the cross.^[34] Classical spiritual theology well knows these exterior vexations of the devil, distinct from possession, and permitted by God to purify and to warn.

Saint Philomena and the healings

The Curé of Ars had an ardent devotion to Saint Philomena, a young Roman martyr whose relics had been discovered in 1802 and whose cult was then spreading. He built her a chapel at Ars and readily attributed to her the miraculous healings obtained by pilgrims, out of humility, to deflect attention from himself.^[35] When he was himself healed of a grave illness in 1843, he gave all the credit to "his dear little saint".

The multiplication of wheat

Among the facts reported at the trial, one of the most famous is the multiplication of grain around 1829, during a bad harvest, when the granary of La Providence was almost empty and the priest had to feed his orphans. He is said to have slipped a relic of Saint Francis Régis into the little wheat that remained and entrusted the matter to prayer; shortly after, according to the testimony of Mayor Mandy, who held the key to the granary, and of Catherine Lassagne, the reserve was found mysteriously replenished.^[36][37] A multiplication of flour at the kneading trough was likewise reported. These facts, gathered under oath, cannot be claimed as scientific certainties, but the seriousness and agreement of the witnesses forbid dismissing them out of mere bias.

Sixteen hours in the confessional

The ministry that made the glory of Ars was confession. As the priest's reputation for holiness spread, penitents flocked from all over France and soon from abroad. In the last ten years of his life, the Curé of Ars spent sixteen to eighteen hours a day in the confessional in summer, and eleven to twelve hours in winter, beginning before dawn and stopping only at nightfall.^[38][39] It was a daily martyrdom: shut in a narrow box, freezing or stifling, barely fed, he gave himself without respite to the forgiveness of sins.

"God knows all things. In advance, he knows that after you have confessed, you will sin again, and yet he forgives you." — Saint John Vianney^[40]

The gift of reading hearts

Very many witnesses attested that the Curé of Ars was gifted with discernment of spirits and that he read souls: he revealed to penitents forgotten or hidden faults, forestalled their avowals, foretold conversions or deaths.^[41][42] This charism, frequent among great spiritual directors, was for him only an instrument at the service of salvation: he never used it to astonish, but to awaken sleeping consciences and restore hope to the despairing.

The pilgrimage of Ars

Ars became one of the great pilgrimage sites of the nineteenth century. The figures, to be handled with caution, give the measure of the phenomenon:

The figure of 20,000 pilgrims in 1855 is the best established; the end-of-life estimates, much higher, are reported by local chronicles without being guaranteed with the same rigour. From 1853 on, the influx was such that a team of diocesan missionaries, including Abbé Toccanier, came to assist the exhausted old priest.^[46]

Four flights toward the cloister

Crushed by this burden and by the sense of his unworthiness, the Curé of Ars aspired all his life to the solitude of a monk. On four occasions, he fled his parish by night to weep for his sins in silence — the last time in 1853 — but each time his parishioners caught up with him and brought him back, and each time he resumed, out of obedience and love, the road to the confessional.^[47] This struggle between the attraction of the cloister and pastoral duty is one of the most moving traits of his holiness.

The Curé of Ars left no treatise; his doctrine has come down to us through his catechisms, collected and published by Abbé Alfred Monnin as early as 1864, and through collections of sayings, including that of Bernard Nodet quoted by Benedict XVI.^[48][49] It is a theology of priest and pastor, simple, concrete, burning — but of a depth that great theologians have saluted.

"The priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus"

At the centre of everything stands his vertiginous vision of the priesthood. For the Curé of Ars, the priest prolongs on earth the action of Christ: without him, neither absolution, nor Eucharist, nor viaticum.

"If we understood well what a priest is on earth, we would die: not of fright, but of love... The priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus." — Saint John Vianney^[50]

"Leave a parish twenty years without a priest, and they will worship beasts there." — Saint John Vianney^[51]

It is precisely this doctrine that earned the Curé of Ars being held up as a model to priests the world over, from Pius XI to Benedict XVI.

"He is there": the Eucharist

The heart of his piety was the Real Presence. He could be seen spending long hours motionless before the tabernacle. Asked what he was doing, he would answer with the now-famous anecdote of a peasant of Ars who remained for hours in silence in the church — an anecdote which the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself reports to define contemplation:

"I look at Him, and He looks at me," the peasant of Ars used to say to his holy curé while praying before the tabernacle. — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2715^[52]

"He is there, He who loves us so much! Why should we not love Him?" — Saint John Vianney^[53]

Prayer, union with God

The Curé of Ars taught a humble and continual prayer, within reach of the simplest. He rejected verbiage and invited the gaze of the heart.

"Prayer is nothing else but union with God... It is a foretaste of Heaven, an outpouring of Heaven upon earth." — Saint John Vianney^[54]

"One does not need to talk so much to pray well." — Saint John Vianney^[55]

This doctrine of simple and trusting prayer brings him close to Saint Teresa of Avila and foreshadows the little way of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who would, like him, be a great French saint of the childlike gaze fixed upon God.

Mercy greater than sin

Against the Jansenist rigour that had withered so many French consciences, the Curé of Ars preached tirelessly the mercy of God, greater than every fault.

"Our faults are grains of sand beside the great mountain of God's mercies." — Saint John Vianney^[56]

"This good Saviour is so filled with love for us that He seeks us everywhere." — Saint John Vianney^[57]

Mary, the Virgin given as inheritance

Faithful to the great French Marian devotion of Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, the Curé of Ars saw in the Virgin the last gift of Christ on the cross.

"Jesus Christ, after giving us all that He could give us, still wishes to make us heirs of what He holds most precious, that is, His Holy Mother." — Saint John Vianney^[58]

The last days (1859)

Worn out by forty-one years of penance and the confessional, the Curé of Ars died at Ars on 4 August 1859, around two o'clock in the morning, at the age of seventy-three, surrounded by a crowd of weeping priests and faithful.^[59][60] News of his death spread at once throughout France. His body, exhumed desiccated but intact during the canonical recognitions, rests today exposed in the basilica of Ars, the face covered with a wax mask applied before burial.^[61]

Beatification (1905) and canonization (1925)

The heroicity of his virtues was recognized as early as 1874 under Pius IX, who declared him Venerable. Saint Pius X beatified him on 8 January 1905 and gave him as patron to the priests of France. Then Pius XI canonized him on 31 May 1925, during the Holy Year, before an immense crowd.^[62][63] The relative speed of this trial, barely two generations after his death, testifies to the evident nature of his holiness in the eyes of the Church.

Patron of priests: from Pius XI to Benedict XVI

In 1929, Pius XI proclaimed Saint John Mary Vianney patron of all parish priests in the world. Thirty years later, for the centenary of his death, John XXIII devoted to him the encyclical Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia (1 August 1959), a long meditation on the identity of the priest in the light of the Curé of Ars.^[64] Finally, in 2009-2010, Benedict XVI opened a Year for Priests for the 150th anniversary of his death and proposed him as a model not only for parish priests, but for all the priests of the world.^[65]

Legacy

Saint John Mary Vianney remains the universal model of the parish priest: not the scholar nor the administrator, but the man of God who sanctifies himself and sanctifies his people through prayer, penance and the sacrament of reconciliation. At a time when the place of the priest and the future of parishes are questioned, his lesson remains burning with relevance. The little village of Ars, now a shrine (see the article Shrine of Ars), continues to attract each year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and priests come to be renewed beside "the most extraordinary of ordinary parish priests".

"A good shepherd, a shepherd after God's heart, is the greatest treasure God can grant to a parish." — Saint John Vianney^[66]

• Shrine of Ars — the village and the basilica, a great pilgrimage site where the saint's body rests; for the history of the shrine itself.
• Saint Vincent de Paul — the great renewer of the French clergy and of charity, whose pastoral spirit the Curé of Ars continues.
• Saint John Eudes — apostle of priestly formation and of the Heart of Jesus, source of French priestly spirituality.
• Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716) — missionary and master of Marian devotion by whom the Curé of Ars was inspired.
• Saint Benedict Joseph Labre (1748-1783) — the holy beggar whom family tradition associates with the roof of the Vianneys, before the birth of the Curé of Ars.
• Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) — the other great French saint of the childlike gaze and of trust, co-patroness of the missions.
• Confession — the sacrament of which the Curé of Ars was, par excellence, the tireless minister.