St. John Mary Vianney

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

August 4 is the Feast of the Curé of Ars, St. John Mary Vianney.

Ars was the name of the small town in France of which he was the parish priest. He was named the patron saint of all parish priests and of all priests, and so August 4 is a day of prayer for priests of the Universal Church.

It's a good moment to pray for the priests who have, in one way or another, influenced your life: the priest who baptized you; the priest who gave you your First Holy Communion; the priests who have said your Sunday or weekday Masses—maybe over years, they were there for you—the priests who heard your Confession, in season and out of season; the priest who married you; and ultimately, the priest whom God has chosen who will bury you.

All these people are priests that God has chosen in a special way to form your soul.

On Holy Thursday in 1986, Pope St. John Paul II wrote a letter to priests about the Curé of Ars, in which he talked about “the matchless example of the Curé of Ars,” a great example for our priestly life and for all those who have a priestly soul (Pope John Paul II, Letter to all the priests of the Church, March 16, 1986).

All lay people as well are called to have a priestly soul with a fully lay mentality.

Christ was a priest. A priest is someone who offers sacrifices. In the Old Testament, the sacrifices were of blood from bulls and goats. But in the New Testament, the most perfect sacrifice is the Sacrifice of the Blood of Christ.

Christ was most of all a priest on the Cross, and our Christian vocation calls us also to be on the cross with Christ.

Every day we have to try and live out our priestly soul with a fully lay mentality, because to be a lay person in the middle of the world may be our vocation.

In that letter to priests, Pope St. John Paul II said, “We wish to thank Christ, the Prince of Pastors, for this extraordinary model of priestly life and service which the saintly Curé of Ars offers to the whole Church, and above all, to us priests.” His example is not just for priests but for everybody.

He says, “How many of us prepared ourselves for the priesthood, or today exercise the difficult task of caring for souls, having before our eyes the figure of St. John Mary Vianney!

“More than ever we need his witness, his intercession, in order to face the situations of our times when, in spite of a certain number of hopeful signs, evangelization is being contradicted by a growing secularization, when spiritual discipline is being neglected, when many are losing sight of the kingdom of God, when often, even in the pastoral ministry, there is a too exclusive concern for the social aspect, for temporal aims.

“In the last century, the Curé of Ars had to face difficulties which were perhaps of a different kind but were no less serious. By his life and work, he represented, for the society of his time, a great evangelical challenge which bore astonishing fruits of conversion.

“...he died on the 4th of August 1859, after some forty years of exhausting dedication. He was 73 years of age.

“When he arrived in Ars, it was a small, obscure village in the Diocese of Lyons, now in the Diocese of Belley. At the end of his life, people were coming from all over France, and his reputation for holiness, after he had been called home to God, soon attracted the attention of the Universal Church.

“St. Pius X beatified him in 1905, Pius XI canonized him in 1925, and then in 1929 declared him the patron saint of parish priests of the whole world.

“On the centenary of his death, Pope St. John XXIII wrote an Encyclical to present the Curé of Ars as a model of priestly life and asceticism…, a model of pastoral zeal, and this, in the context of the needs of our time” (John XXIII, Sacerdotii nostri primordia, August 1, 1959).

St. John Mary Vianney had “a tenacious will in preparing for the priesthood.”

He had to undergo many trials. There were the trials of “the upheaval of the French Revolution, the lack of opportunities for education in his rural environment, the reluctance of his father, the need for him to share in the work of the fields, the hazards of military service” (Pope John Paul II, Letter to all the priests of the Church, March 16, 1986).

And above all, he had his own personal weaknesses. He had “great difficulty in learning and memorizing,” and therefore great difficulty “in following the theological courses in Latin” (Ibid.).

All of that resulted in his dismissal from the seminary in Lyons. It was only a number of years later that his vocation was finally acknowledged, and he was able to be ordained at the age of 29.

St. John Paul II says, “Through his tenacity in working and praying, he overcame all obstacles and limitations.” A rather beautiful statement, but irrelevant for our priesthood or seminary training.

“He persevered in laboriously preparing his sermons or spending the evenings reading the works of theologians and spiritual writers.

“From his youth he was filled with a great desire to ‘win souls for the good of God’ by being a priest. He became this model of priestly zeal for all pastors.”

We’re told, “The secret of his generosity is to be found…in his love for God, lived without limits, in constant response to the love made manifest in Christ crucified.”

He liked to say, “The priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus. “In his sermons and catechesis, he continually returned to that love: ‘O my God,’ he said, ‘I prefer to die loving you, rather than to live a single instant without loving you … I love you, my divine Savior, because you were crucified for us…because you have me crucified for you” (Bernard Nodet, Sa pensée, Son Coeur).

“For the sake of Christ, the priest seeks to conform himself…to the radical demands of Jesus in the Gospel, those demands He places before the disciples whom He sends out: prayer, poverty, humility, self-denial, voluntary penance.

“Like Christ, he had a love for his flock that led him to extreme pastoral commitment and self-sacrifice. He was enormously aware of his responsibilities, consumed by a great desire to wrest people from their sins and their lukewarmness.”

He prayed, “O my God, grant me the conversion of my parish: I consent to suffer whatever you wish, for as long as I live.”

There were wonderful fruits of his ministry. When he went to that Parish of Ars, there were just 230 people in that village.

It was going to be "profoundly changed. There was a great deal of indifference there, with very little religious practice, especially among the men. The bishop who sent him there warned him: ‘There is not much love of God in that parish, but you will put some there.’

“Quite soon, far beyond his village, he became the pastor of a multitude coming from the entire region, from different parts of France, and from other countries. It was said that in the year 1858, 80,000 people came to see him.”

That's about 400 jumbo jets, although there were no jets in those days.

“People sometimes waited for days to see him, to go to Confession to him. What attracted them was not merely curiosity, or even a reputation justified by miracles and extraordinary cures that he always wished to hide.

“It was much more the realization of meeting a saint, amazing for his penance, so close to God in prayer, remarkable for his peace and humility in the midst of popular acclaim, and above all so intuitive in responding to the inner disposition of souls and in freeing them from their burdens, especially in the confessional.

“God chose as a model for pastors one who could have appeared weak, defenseless, and contemptible in the eyes of men.”

There was a story told of an initiative of some priests in the diocese who felt that St. John was not up to the task of this village when so many people were coming there. He didn't have the spiritual preparation, the intellectual preparation, or the human preparation.

They felt that he should be removed from that parish, so they circulated a letter of petition to the bishop that John Mary Vianney should be removed from that parish for all those reasons.

By mistake, the letter fell into the hands of the Curé of Ars. He read it, and he saw that people were petitioning for his removal because of his lack of awareness and preparation and ability.

When he read it, he said, “I agree with what's written here on this piece of paper,” so he also added his name to the list of people requesting for his removal. That gives an indication of his humility.

“Sometimes it is a simple presence of a priest over years” in a parish, “with the silent witness of faith in the midst of non-Christian surroundings” that brings about conversion.

“Or being near to people, to families and their concerns; there is a preliminary evangelization that seeks to awaken faith in the unbelievers and the lukewarm; there is the witness of charity and justice shared with Christian lay people, which makes the faith more credible and puts it into practice.

“These give rise to a whole series of undertakings and apostolic works which prepare or continue Christian formation. The Curé of Ars taxed his ingenuity to devise these initiatives, adapted to his time and to the parishioners.

“But all those priestly activities were centered on the Eucharist, on catechesis, and the Sacrament of Reconciliation.”

It's probably in the Sacrament of Reconciliation that he devoted himself most. It was “an untiring devotion to the Sacrament of Penance.” It was “his principal charism and the main reason for his renown.

“It is good that we have such an example to give time and effort to the ministry of Reconciliation, to give it all the time it deserves.

“Without that step of conversion, penance, and seeking pardon” the conversions won't come about. And so, we ought to untiringly encourage and welcome as many as we can to the sacrament of Confession.

“His first care was to teach the faithful to desire repentance. He stressed the beauty of God's forgiveness.”

He said that, above all, it was “in the confessional that God's mercy manifested itself.”

He never rejected the penitents who came from all over the world, to whom he devoted sometimes ten hours a day, sometimes fifteen or more.

“For him, this was often the greatest of his mortifications, a form of martyrdom…a martyrdom in the physical sense from the heat, the cold, or the suffocating atmosphere, but also in the moral sense, because he suffered for the sins confessed, and even more from the lack of repentance. ‘I weep,’ he said, ‘because you do not weep.”

“In the face of a lot of indifferent people, whom he welcomed as best he could and tried to awaken in them the love of God, the Lord enabled him to reconcile great sinners who were repentant and also to guide to perfection souls thirsting for it.”

Sacramental forgiveness “always requires a personal encounter with the crucified Christ through the mediation of a minister” (John Paul II, Encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, March 4 1979).

The Archbishop of Paris, many years ago, told a story of five young guys who came into the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and they made a bet with each other to see who would make a mock Confession. The bet was about five francs or 200 shillings.

One guy took on the bet, and he went in, and he made a mock Confession. And then he came out and looked for his money.

But the guys told him, “Well, if you made a mock Confession, you would have been given a penance. You go up to the front of the church there and say your penance.”

He marched up to the front of the church and he stood in front of the altar, in front of the crucifix, and he took out his fist and he shook it at the crucifix. He said, “You died for me? Well, for you, I don't give a...” But then he found he couldn't finish it.

God used that moment to enter into his heart and soul and let him see what it meant that Christ died for his sins on the Cross.

The Archbishop of Paris ended his homily saying, “I was that young man. I was the one who came into the church. I was the one who made the mock Confession.

“I shook my fist to the crucifix. And God used that moment not just to let me see what He did for me on the Cross, but also to let me see that He needed, He wanted, a little bit more from me in my life.”

Pope St. John Paul II said, “Always be convinced…that the ministry of mercy is one of the most beautiful and most consoling. It enables you to enlighten consciences, to forgive them, and to give them fresh vigor in the name of the Lord Jesus.

“It enables you to be for them a spiritual physician and counselor. It remains ‘the irreplaceable manifestation and the test of the priestly ministry’” (Pope John Paul II, Letter to all the priests of the Church, March 16, 1986).

From the Sacrament of Penance, St. John Mary Vianney was content “and happy to direct his reconciled penitents to the Eucharist.The Eucharist was at the very center of his priestly life and pastoral work” (Ibid.).

A famous phrase of the Curé of Ars says, “All good works put together are not equivalent to the Sacrifice of the Mass, because they are the works of men and the Holy Mass is the work of God” (Bernard Nodet, Sa pensée, Son Coeur).

If you think for a moment, if you were to take all the Mother Teresas in the history of the Church, all the charitable work the Church has done down through the ages, in health care, in education, for the poor, the elderly, all the great things the Church has done, and to pile all of those works up together, all of that would not come to the value of one Mass.

Because all those things “are the works of men, but the Mass is the work of God.”

Pope St. John Paul II says, “It is in the Mass that the sacrifice of Calvary is made present for the Redemption of the world. Clearly, the priest must unite the daily gift of himself to the offering of the Mass.”

Something very special is taking place there.

“How well a priest does,” St. John Mary Vianney says, “therefore, to offer himself to God in sacrifice every morning! Holy Communion and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass are the two most efficacious actions for obtaining the conversion of hearts.”

“The Mass was, for St. John, the great joy and comfort of his priestly life. He took great care, despite the crowds of penitents, to spend more than a quarter of an hour in silent preparation.

“He celebrated with recollection, clearly expressing his adoration at the Consecration and Communion. He remarked, ‘The cause of priestly laxity is not paying attention to the Mass!’

“He was particularly mindful of the permanence of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. It was generally before the Tabernacle that he spent long hours in adoration, before daybreak or in the evening. It was towards the tabernacle that he often turned during his homilies, saying with emotion: ‘He is there!’

“It was also the reason that he, so poor in his presbytery, did not hesitate to spend large sums on embellishing his church. The result was that his parishioners quickly took up the habit of coming to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, discovering, through the attitude of their pastor, the grandeur of the mystery of faith” (Pope John Paul II, Letter to all the priests of the Church, March 16, 1986).

We're told in a later Synod of the Church, “The liturgy must favor and make shine brightly the sense of the sacred” (Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, Final Report, December 8, 1985).

St. John Paul II liked to say that we go to the great spiritual mysteries through physical signs and symbols, and so all the liturgical objects are important. There's a message there, and every child can see, can hear, the message of the sacred.

“Dear brother priests,” said St. Pope John Paul II, “the example of the Curé of Ars invites us to a serious examination of conscience: what place do we give the Mass in our daily lives?

“Is it, as on the day of our Ordination…, the principle of our apostolic work and personal sanctification? What care do we take in preparing for it? And in celebrating it? In praying before the Blessed Sacrament? In encouraging our faithful people to do the same?

“In making our churches the House of God to which the divine presence attracts the people of our time who, too often, have the impression of a world empty of God?” (Pope John Paul II, Letter to all the priests of the Church, March 16, 1986).

In a recent document, Pope Francis talked about the “spiritual emptiness” of the world (Pope Francis, Angelus, June 19, 2016). We replace that emptiness with the spiritual wealth that we possess.

“The Curé of Ars never neglected the ministry of the Word. … He had the courage to denounce evil in all its forms; he did not keep silent.

“He said: ‘If a pastor remains silent when he sees God insulted and souls going astray, woe to him! If he does not want to be damned, and if there is some disorder in his parish, he must trample upon human respect and the fear of being despised or hated.’”

But generally, St. John “preferred to show the attractive side of virtue rather than the ugliness of vice.

“If he at times spoke in tears about sin and the dangers for salvation, he insisted on the tenderness of God who had been offended, and of the happiness of being loved by God, united to God, living in his presence and for him.”

He talked a lot about the identity of the priest: “He finds his identity in Christ. It is not the world which determines his status, as though it depended on changing needs or ideas about social roles.”

He said, “The priest is marked with the seal of the Priesthood of Christ in order to share in his function as the one Mediator and Redeemer.”

The priest must always be ready to respond to the needs of souls. He is not for himself; he is for you.

“He is for the laity: he animates them and supports them in the exercise of the common priesthood of the baptized—so much emphasized by the Second Vatican Council—which consists in making their lives a spiritual offering, in witnessing to the Christian spirit in the family, in taking charge of the temporal sphere, and sharing in the evangelization” of everybody around us.

“But the service of the priest belongs to another order. He is ordained to act in the name of Christ the Head, to bring people into the new life made accessible by Christ, to dispense to them the mysteries—the Word, the forgiveness, the Bread of Life—to gather them into his Body, to help them form themselves from within, to act according to the saving plan of God.”

There is a lofty mission there.

The Curé of Ars took care to configure himself to Christ. He “wasn’t content with the ritual carrying out of the activities of his ministry. It was his heart and his life that he sought to conform to Christ.”

St. John Paul II says, “Prayer was the soul of his life: silent and contemplative prayer, generally in his church at the foot of the tabernacle. He kept a constant union with God in the middle of an extremely busy life.

“He didn’t neglect the Breviary or the Rosary. He turned spontaneously to the Virgin. His poverty was extraordinary. He literally stripped himself of everything for the poor. He shunned honors.

“Chastity shone in his face. He knew the value of purity in order ‘to rediscover the source of love which is God.’ Obedience to Christ consisted, for John Mary Vianney, in obedience to the Church and especially to the Bishop.

“This obedience took the form of accepting the heavy charge of being a parish priest, which often frightened him.”

But he saw that “the Gospel insists on renouncing self, on accepting the Cross. Many were the crosses that presented themselves to him in the course of his ministry: calumny on the part of the people, being misunderstood by an assistant priest or other confrères, contradictions, mysterious struggle against the powers of hell, and even sometimes the temptation to despair in the midst of spiritual darkness.

“... he didn't content himself with just accepting these trials without complaining. He went beyond them by mortification, imposing fasts and other rugged practices in order ‘to reduce his body to servitude’ (1 Cor. 9:27).

“He asked a discouraged fellow priest: ‘You have prayed..., you have wept..., but have you fasted, have you kept vigil...?’—mindful of the words of Our Lord: ‘This kind is cast out only by prayer and fasting’” (Matt. 17:21).

We have a lot to learn for our preparation for the ministry from this great saint.

“He spoke of the greatness of the priest and of the absolute need for him. Those who are already priests, or those who are preparing for the priesthood, and those who will be called to it, need to fix their eyes on his example and follow it…The figure,” says St. John Paul II, “of the Curé of Ars does not fade.”

We can ask him today for many priestly vocations from our parishes. We ask God also that the memory of the Curé of Ars may help us to stir up our own personal zeal in His service.

“We ask the Holy Spirit to call to the Church's service many priests of the caliber and holiness of the Curé of Ars: in our age, she has so great a need of them, and she is no less capable of bringing such vocations to full flower.

And we can “entrust our priesthood to Our Lady, the Mother of priests, to whom St. John Mary Vianney ceaselessly had recourse with tender affection and total confidence” (Pope John Paul II, Letter to all the priests of the Church, March 16, 1986).

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JM