Some thirty kilometres north of Lyon, in the heart of the marshy plateau of the Dombes, stands a village with nothing extraordinary about it: Ars-sur-Formans, two hundred and thirty souls when, in February 1818, a thirty-one-year-old priest, John Mary Vianney, arrived there as parish priest. Forty-one years later, at his death, that lost hamlet had become one of the greatest pilgrimage sites in France: up to a hundred thousand people came there each year, by every road in the kingdom, to confess to a man already called “the holy Curé of Ars”.[1][2]
The shrine of Ars was born of that influx and has never died out. Today people venerate there the saint's preserved body, displayed in a glass shrine above an altar, his heart in a neighbouring chapel, the old church where he spent his life in the confessional, the presbytery turned museum, and the charitable work he had founded. Above the humble Romanesque church he had enlarged, a vast neo-Byzantine basilica was raised to receive the crowds.
This shrine holds a singular place in Catholic spiritual geography. At Lourdes or Fatima, it was an apparition of the Virgin that caused the pilgrimage to spring up; at Ars there is no apparition, no miraculous spring, no spectacular wonder at the origin. The shrine was born of the holiness of a single priest — of his endless confessions, his tears, his poverty and his charity. That is why Ars has become, more than any other place, the world shrine of the priesthood: Pius XI attached to it the patronage of all parish priests throughout the world, John XXIII and Benedict XVI made him the model proposed to all priests.[3][4]
This article presents the shrine as it is: why a village became a pilgrimage site in its parish priest's own lifetime, how the death of 1859 fixed the shrine, what the pilgrim sees there today — the basilica, the shrine, the heart, La Providence — and the spiritual meaning of a place that worships God by celebrating an obscure priest. For the saint's complete biography, interior life and canonization process, see the article Saint John Mary Vianney.
Ars-sur-Formans: a village turned spiritual capital
A hamlet of 230 souls in the Dombes
When John Mary Vianney took possession of his parish in 1818, Ars was only a hamlet of two hundred and thirty inhabitants, without relief, set on the marshy plateau of the Dombes, between ponds and fields. The parish was so modest that the diocese hardly knew what to do with it: a priest was sent there whom his superiors judged of limited intelligence but solid piety. “There is not much love of God in this parish; you will put some there,” he is said to have been told on being sent — a phrase that has remained attached to his arrival.[5]
The contrast is total with what the village would become. By the mid-nineteenth century, Ars appeared on the maps of France as a pilgrimage destination; in the twenty-first century, it remains the most visited site in the Ain département, with more than three hundred and fifty thousand pilgrims and visitors a year — and a record of over half a million people welcomed during the Year for Priests of 2009-2010.[6] All this for a village which, without its parish priest, would never have had any reason to attract a single traveller.
The way to Ars and the way to Heaven
Tradition has fixed the scene of the arrival. Lost in the fog of the Dombes, the young parish priest is said to have asked his way of a little shepherd boy, Antoine Givre, who led him to the village. Vianney is said to have then promised him, in substance, to show him in turn the way to Heaven.[7]
The anecdote, handed down by his nineteenth-century biographers, sums up the whole shrine in advance: a man who came to lose himself in a tiny village in order to open to crowds the way to Heaven. It is that promise, not a wonder, which makes the identity of Ars.
Why Ars became a pilgrimage site in the Curé's own lifetime
The shrine of Ars has a rare particularity: it already existed before the saint's death. From the 1830s, the reputation of the confessor of Ars spread beyond the Dombes; in the 1840s and 1850s, the flow became continuous. People came from Lyon, Paris, all of France and abroad, sometimes waiting several days for their turn at the confessional. The village organized itself around this influx — inns, lodgings, services — long before any basilica was built.
That anteriority explains the nature of the place. Ars is not a shrine built a posteriori around a tomb, but a living pilgrimage that simply continued after 1859. Today's pilgrim walks in the footsteps of pilgrims who, in Vianney's own lifetime, already came to seek confession, counsel and prayer in the same place.
The ministry that made the shrine
For the detailed biography — the childhood at Dardilly, the laborious studies, the ordination of 1815, the spiritual combat, the spirituality and the canonization process — see the article Saint John Mary Vianney. Only what explains the birth of the shrine is retained here.
The confessional: up to sixteen hours a day
What made Ars a shrine was above all the confessional. At the end of his life, the Curé of Ars spent up to sixteen hours a day there, held back by the growing crowd of penitents.[8] Benedict XVI, recalling that ministry, wrote:
“Later, the ever-growing crowd of penitents who came from all over France kept him in the confessional up to 16 hours a day.” — Benedict XVI, Letter for the indiction of a Year for Priests, 16 June 2009[9]
That endurance was not a physical feat sought for its own sake: it was the direct consequence of the influx. Penitents arrived by the hundred; the parish priest could not send them away. The confessional of Ars thus became the heart of the shrine, and the reconciliation of sinners its reason for being — a trait that distinguishes Ars from Marian shrines centred on healing or apparition.
The crowds: up to a hundred thousand pilgrims a year
The movement never stopped growing. By the early 1830s, several thousand visitors were already counted; at the end of his life, around 1858, some hundred thousand people came to Ars in a single year.[10] Such an influx, in a village with no station and no main road, presupposed considerable organization: lodging for the pilgrims, queues before the confessional, sometimes several days of patience to approach the parish priest.
The Curé never sought that popularity, nor did he relish it: he tried several times to flee Ars to withdraw into solitude, and was brought back by his parishioners. But it is that popularity which created the shrine: a place draws crowds only when it answers a deep need, and Ars answered the hunger for reconciliation and for God of a dechristianized nineteenth century.
La Providence: the charitable work of Ars
The Curé did not only hear confessions: he built a work. In 1824, he founded at Ars La Providence, a school and refuge free of charge for the poor girls and orphans of the region; he would later add a boys' school (1849).[11][12] He himself took his meagre meals there and gave his famous catechism there. La Providence is an integral part of the shrine: it shows that the holiness of Ars was not only contemplative, but embodied in concrete service to the poorest.
The death of the Curé and the birth of the shrine (1859)
4 August 1859
Worn out by forty-one years of ministry, the Curé of Ars died on 4 August 1859, at about two o'clock in the morning, in his presbytery, at the age of seventy-three.[13][14] His death, far from stopping the pilgrimage, transformed it: the living place became a venerated tomb, and the movement of the crowds, instead of drying up, turned toward his remains and the places of his life.
The Church, for its part, at once set in motion the procedures that would lead to beatification and then canonization. The shrine then entered a second life: that of a canonically recognized pilgrimage site, where people come to pray to a saint whose body rests on the spot.
The exhumations (1885, 1904) and the preserved body
In accordance with the usages of sainthood processes, Vianney's body was exhumed and examined. A first exhumation took place on 12 October 1885: the hands were found mummified and blackened, the head fleshless, but the body recognizable.[15] A second exhumation, in 1904, within the framework of the beatification process, described a body of blackish colouring over its whole surface, with limbs still intact and joints still supple, and no smell of decomposition.[16]
Precision matters here, for popular language sometimes exaggerates: the body of the Curé of Ars did not remain “fresh” or intact like that of some bodies reputed incorrupt. It is preserved but blackened, sufficiently kept to be displayed, but marked by time. It is precisely that honesty which has the value of testimony: the Church never turned Ars into a tale of wonders, but into a place of prayer around remarkably preserved remains.
The wax mask and the shrine
So that pilgrims could contemplate the saint, the Curé's face and hands were covered with a wax mask modelled in his likeness, and the body clothed in priestly vestments.[17] It now rests in a glass shrine, placed above an altar, where the faithful can see it and pray before it. That presentation — a saint visible, accessible to the gaze — is one of the traits that most strike the pilgrims of Ars: one does not pray before a sealed tomb, but before the very body of the parish priest.
The basilica of Ars
The old Romanesque church enlarged by the Curé
The nucleus of the shrine remains the old parish church of Ars, of Romanesque origin (12th century), where the Curé celebrated Mass and spent his life in the confessional. Too small for the crowds, it was enlarged with several chapels in Vianney's own lifetime, and he devoted to that work the money from donations received — notably a chapel dedicated to Saint Philomena, whose devotion he had spread and to whom he attributed the graces obtained at Ars.[18] That old church, preserved, is today enveloped by the great basilica grafted onto it.
Pierre Bossan and the great basilica (from 1862)
To welcome tens of thousands of pilgrims, it was decided to raise a vast basilica on the foundations of the old church. The project was entrusted to the Lyon architect Pierre Bossan (1814-1888), the very man then designing the basilica of Fourvière in Lyon. Construction began in 1862, while the memory of the Curé was still close, and was carried out by his successors, with the help of the painter Paul Borel and the sculptor Charles Dufraine.[19][20]
The edifice, in neo-Byzantine and neo-Romanesque style, unfolds a rich decoration placed under the patronage of Saint Philomena, which earned it the names of “basilica of the Curé of Ars”, “Saint Philomena basilica” or “Saint Sixtus basilica”.[21] The whole — old church and basilica — was listed as a historic monument on 2 February 1982 and underwent a long restoration campaign from 1988 to 2006.[22]
The title of minor basilica (1997)
Long called “basilica” by usage and devotion, the church of Ars officially received the title of minor basilica on 4 August 1997, the feast day of the holy Curé of Ars.[23] The date is not indifferent: it inscribes in canon law what popular piety had long affirmed — that Ars is one of the great pilgrimage churches of the Catholic Church.
The underground church of Our Lady of Mercy (1959)
The crowds of the twentieth century imposed a new extension. From 1959 — the centenary of the Curé's death — a vast underground church dedicated to Our Lady of Mercy was built, to the plans of the architects Pierre Pinsard and Hugo Vollmar, able to receive the great gatherings of pilgrims.[24] That modern space, labelled “Patrimoine du XXe siècle” (“20th-Century Heritage”) in 2003, completes the old church and the basilica: three ages of faith superimposed on the same ground.
The places of the shrine today
The shrine of Ars is not a single monument, but a chain of places which the pilgrim visits in sequence. The table below gives an overview.
| Place | What the pilgrim finds there |
|---|---|
| The basilica (Saint Sixtus church) | Bossan's great church and, within it, the Curé's old Romanesque church; the shrine containing his body |
| The Chapel of the Heart | The reliquary of the saint's heart, removed in 1904 |
| The presbytery | The Curé's house (c. 1614), kept as a museum: bedroom, furniture, objects and clothing |
| La Providence | The former free school-refuge for girls founded in 1824 |
| The underground church of Our Lady of Mercy | The modern space (1959) for great gatherings |
| The wax museum | “A little man as great as the universe”: the saint's life reconstituted in scenes |
The shrine and the saint's body
The central point of the pilgrimage is the shrine where the Curé's body rests, in the basilica. Pilgrims stop there to pray before the saint, covered with his wax mask and clothed in liturgical vestments. Everything in the shrine converges here: the basilica was built to shelter that body and the crowds who come to venerate it.
The Chapel of the Heart and the relic of the heart
At the 1904 exhumation, the Curé's heart was removed and kept separately. After the canonization of 1925, it was placed in a bronze reliquary inlaid with ivory, venerated in a Chapel of the Heart near the saint's house.[25][26] The heart of a priest wholly given to confession and charity thus became, at Ars, a relic apart — a sign of what the Church chose to retain of him: a pastor's “heart”.
The presbytery-museum and La Providence
A few steps from the basilica, the presbytery — the early-seventeenth-century building where Vianney lived for forty-one years — is kept as it was, as a museum. There can be seen his bedroom, his poor furniture, his vestments, the objects of his daily life and the traces of his asceticism. Close by, La Providence recalls the saint's charitable work. Those places give the pilgrimage of Ars its biographical dimension: one venerates not only a distant saint, but visits the house where he lived and the school he founded.
The “pilgrimage of the heart” (since 2022)
The shrine keeps inventing new forms. Since 31 May 2022, within the framework of a diocesan jubilee, the relic of the heart of the Curé of Ars leaves its chapel to visit, deanery by deanery, the communities of the diocese of Belley-Ars, and has been received by other French dioceses.[27] That “pilgrimage of the heart” prolongs beyond the walls what is lived at Ars: bringing to parishes, through the relic of a parish priest, the call to priestly holiness.
The spirituality of the shrine of Ars
The shrine cannot be understood without the spiritual doctrine attached to it. The Curé of Ars left no treatises, but words, gathered in his catechisms and sermons, which the Church made its own. Four themes form their heart.
The priesthood: “the love of the heart of Jesus”
If Ars became the shrine of priests, it is because of the way its parish priest spoke of the priesthood. His most famous formula, taken up by John XXIII and Benedict XVI, sums it all up:
“The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus.” — Saint John Mary Vianney[28][29]
He added words that marked generations of seminarians:
“Oh! How great the priest is! If he understood himself, he would die. […] Leave a parish twenty years without a priest, and they will worship beasts there.” — Saint John Mary Vianney[30]
Those sentences explain why the shrine of Ars became the place of reference for the formation and renewal of priests: people come there to learn, from the Curé himself, what the priesthood is.
The Eucharist: “He is there”
The Curé of Ars spent long hours before the tabernacle, and he taught his parishioners the Real Presence with a disarming simplicity. Tradition has retained his gesture, his hand extended toward the tabernacle, accompanied, in substance, by this word: there stands He who loves us so much, and nothing remains but to love Him in return.[31]
Eucharistic adoration remains one of the great practices of the shrine, prolonging what the Curé himself lived before his altar.
Prayer: “I look at Him and He looks at me”
The best-known anecdote of Ars concerns prayer. Questioning an old peasant who spent long hours in church saying nothing, motionless before the tabernacle, the Curé is said to have asked him what he was doing there. The peasant answered:
“I look at Him and He looks at me.” — Peasant of Ars, words reported by the biographers of the Curé of Ars[32]
“I look at Him and He looks at me”: that peasant definition of prayer, the Curé quoted as a summit of the life of prayer. It has become, through Ars, one of the most widely spread images of Christian contemplation. The Curé also taught, in substance, that prayer is nothing else but union with God, and that the more one prays, the more one wants to pray.[33]
Mercy and the confessional
Lastly, the shrine is inseparable from mercy. The Curé, who wept over the sins of his penitents, repeated to them, in substance, that God's goodness infinitely exceeds their faults: their sins are but grains of sand before the great mountain of divine mercies.[34]
That is why Ars remains a great place of confession: people still come there today to receive the sacrament of reconciliation, in direct continuity with the ministry that founded the shrine. On the meaning of that sacrament, see Why confess to a priest?.
Ars in the teaching of the Church
The radiance of the shrine also owes to what the popes made of it. In a century and a half, Ars passed from the status of a popular pilgrimage to that of an official reference for the Catholic priesthood.
Beatification (1905) and canonization (1925)
The Curé of Ars was beatified on 8 January 1905 by Pope Pius X, who proposed him as patron of the priests of France.[35][36] Twenty years later, Pius XI canonized him on 31 May 1925, inscribing him in the catalogue of the saints of the universal Church.[37][38] Those two acts definitively fix the status of the shrine: Ars is no longer only a place of local devotion, but the tomb of a saint recognized by the whole Church.
Patron of parish priests throughout the world (Pius XI, 1929)
It was again Pius XI who, in 1929, proclaimed Saint John Mary Vianney patron of all parish priests throughout the world.[39][40] That title is the key to the modern shrine: it makes Ars no longer the pilgrimage of one saint among others, but the emblematic place of the parochial priesthood in the whole Church. It is that 1929 patronage, and it alone, which constitutes the officially recognized universal patronage of the Curé of Ars.
John XXIII: “Sacerdotii nostri primordia” (1959)
For the centenary of the saint's death, John XXIII published, on 1 August 1959, the encyclical Sacerdotii nostri primordia, entirely devoted to the Curé of Ars and proposed to all priests as a model of asceticism, prayer and pastoral zeal.[41] The document abundantly quotes his words on the priesthood and the holiness of the priest, sealing for the twentieth century the role of Ars as a priestly school.
Benedict XVI and the Year for Priests (2009-2010)
Fifty years later, Benedict XVI proclaimed a Year for Priests, from 19 June 2009 to 19 June 2010, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of the Curé of Ars, whom he held up as an example to all the priests of the world.[42] His Letter of 16 June 2009 is one of the finest spiritual portraits of the saint ever written by a pope. The shrine of Ars knew that year a record influx — more than five hundred thousand visitors.[43]
A historical clarification is needed here, for confusion is frequent: the idea of then proclaiming the Curé of Ars “patron of all the priests of the world” was considered, then the Holy See abandoned it. The officially recognized universal patronage therefore remains the one established by Pius XI in 1929; Benedict XVI's Year for Priests was a great season of devotion, not a new proclamation of patronage.[44]
The shrine of Ars today
A world centre for priests and seminarians
Faithful to its vocation, Ars has become a centre of formation and renewal for priests and seminarians from all over the world. People come there on retreat, on diocesan pilgrimage, in formation sessions; communities ensure spiritual welcome and the ministry of confessions there, perpetuating the ministry that made the glory of the place. The shrine depends on the diocese of Belley-Ars, whose very name bears the memory of the holy Curé.[45]
Figures of the contemporary pilgrimage
Today, the shrine welcomes more than three hundred and fifty thousand pilgrims and visitors a year, making it the most visited site in the Ain département.[46] The pilgrim of Ars finds there what his nineteenth-century predecessors came to seek: confession, Eucharistic adoration, prayer before the saint's body — and, for priests, the face of a confrere who carried the priesthood through to the end.
Beside Lourdes or Guadalupe, which prolong a Marian apparition, Ars remains a shrine of another kind: one where people venerate, not a sign from heaven, but the holiness of a man — proof, according to Benedict XVI in his Letter for the Year for Priests, that the holiness of a poor, obscure parish priest bears fruit far beyond his parish.[47]
To go further
- Saint John Mary Vianney (1786-1859) — the complete biography of the holy Curé of Ars: childhood, vocation, spiritual combat, spirituality and canonization.
- Confession — the sacrament at the heart of the shrine of Ars.
- Why confess to a priest? — the question that the ministry of the Curé of Ars illuminates from within.
- Incorrupt bodies — to situate the more nuanced case of the preserved body of the Curé of Ars.
- Why venerate relics? — the meaning of venerating the saint's body and heart.
- Our Lady of Lourdes — a shrine contemporary with Ars, born of a Marian apparition.
Notes and References
Benedict XVI, Letter of the Supreme Pontiff for the indiction of a Year for Priests on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the “dies natalis” of the holy Curé of Ars, 16 June 2009. Full text on vatican.va. The letter recalls that Ars counted “230 souls” on the Curé's arrival and that he spent in the confessional “up to 16 hours a day” (word-for-word quotation in the online text). It likewise quotes word for word his words on the priesthood (“The Priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus”, the letter itself referring to Nodet, Xavier Mappus ed., Foi Vivante, 1966, p. 98) and on the priest (“Oh! How great the priest is!…”, “Leave a parish twenty years without a priest: they will worship beasts there…”). It is also that letter which recalls the universal patronage established by Pius XI in 1929.
1 3 8 9 28 30 39 42 47Shrine of Ars, official chronology (arsnet.org, timeline). Concordant data: arrival of the Curé in 1818, forty-one-year ministry (1818-1859), influx of about a hundred thousand pilgrims in 1858, foundation of La Providence (1824) and of the boys' school (1849), beatification (1905) and canonization (1925).
2 10 12 13 36 37 40John XXIII, encyclical Sacerdotii nostri primordia, 1 August 1959, published for the centenary of the death of the holy Curé of Ars and entirely devoted to his priestly example. Full text on vatican.va.
4 29 41Words traditionally attached to the sending of the Curé to Ars, reported by his nineteenth-century biographers (notably Alfred Monnin, Le Curé d'Ars. Vie de M. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, Paris, 1861) and taken up by the tradition of the shrine. Benedict XVI takes it up word for word in his Letter for the indiction of a Year for Priests of 16 June 2009 (full text on vatican.va): “There is not much love of God in this parish; you will put some there.”
5Municipality of Ars-sur-Formans (ars-sur-formans.fr, pilgrimage section) and the Villes Sanctuaires en France network (villes-sanctuaires.com): more than 350,000 pilgrims and visitors a year, the most visited site in the Ain département; record influx of more than 500,000 people during the Year for Priests (2009-2010). The shrine belongs to the diocese of Belley-Ars.
6 43 45 46Anecdote of the arrival at Ars (young Antoine Givre showing the way to the parish priest lost in the fog), reported by the classic biographers of the Curé of Ars (Monnin, op. cit.; Francis Trochu, Le Curé d'Ars, saint Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, Lyon, Vitte, 1925). The narrative (“You showed me the way to Ars; I will show you the way to Heaven”) is an anthology piece; as wordings vary between editions with no precisely locatable page, it is rendered here in paraphrase.
7Shrine of Ars (arsnet.org): foundation of La Providence in 1824 as a free school and refuge for poor and orphaned girls, where the Curé took his meals and gave his catechism; opening of a boys' school in 1849.
11John Mary Vianney, reference encyclopaedia entry (fr.wikipedia.org), cross-checked with the shrine's sources: death on 4 August 1859 at about 2 a.m.; first exhumation on 12 October 1885 (mummified and blackened hands, fleshless head); second exhumation in 1904 (body of blackish colouring, intact limbs, supple joints, no odour) during the beatification process; removal of the heart; face and hands covered with a wax mask for display. The entry also recalls that the proclamation of a universal patronage of priests envisaged for the Year for Priests (2009-2010) was ultimately not retained by the Holy See.
14 15 16 17 25 35 38 44General inventory of heritage — Region / Department of Ain, entry “Basilique Saint-Sixte d'Ars-sur-Formans” (patrimoines.ain.fr). Data: great basilica built from 1862 to the plans of the architect Pierre Bossan (1814-1888), with the painter Paul Borel and the sculptor Charles Dufraine, on the foundations of the 12th-century Romanesque church; chapel of Saint Philomena; listed as a historic monument on 2 February 1982; restoration 1988-2006; title of basilica obtained on 4 August 1997; underground church of Our Lady of Mercy built from 1959 (architects Pierre Pinsard and Hugo Vollmar), labelled “Patrimoine du XXe siècle” (“20th-Century Heritage”) in 2003.
18 19 22 23 24Basilica of Ars, encyclopaedia entry (fr.wikipedia.org), cross-checked with patrimoines.ain.fr: neo-Byzantine style of Pierre Bossan, also architect of the basilica of Fourvière in Lyon; patronage of Saint Philomena; names “basilica of the Curé of Ars”, “Saint Philomena basilica”, “Saint Sixtus basilica”; shrine of the saint displayed in the basilica; Chapel of the Heart nearby; visit of John Paul II on 6 October 1986.
20 21Pèlerinages de France (pelerinagesdefrance.fr, “Relique du cœur du saint Curé d'Ars”): the heart, removed in 1904, is kept in a bronze reliquary inlaid with ivory in the Chapel of the Heart, near the Curé's house; since 31 May 2022, within the framework of a diocesan jubilee, the relic of the heart visits the communities of the diocese of Belley-Ars and has been received by other French dioceses.
26 27“Paroles du saint Curé d'Ars” (“Words of the holy Curé of Ars”), collection published by the Congregation for the Clergy on the occasion of the Year for Priests (clerus.org), after the catechisms and sermons gathered by his contemporaries. As wordings vary between collections with no precisely locatable page, they are rendered here in paraphrase: adoration before the tabernacle, prayer as union with God, and faults compared to grains of sand before divine mercy.
31 33 34Anecdote of the peasant of Ars in adoration, reported by the biographers of the Curé of Ars (Monnin, op. cit.; Bernard Nodet, Jean-Marie Vianney, curé d'Ars : sa pensée, son cœur, Le Puy, Mappus, 1958). The formula is fixed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2715: “I look at Him and He looks at me,” said in the time of his holy Curé the peasant of Ars in prayer before the Tabernacle (“je le regarde et il me regarde” in the local speech), a passage taken up by Benedict XVI in his Letter of 16 June 2009.
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