RITE AND REASON:St John Vianney died just over 150 years ago. SOLINE HUMBERTwrites about this most humble of men whose path was strewn with obstacles
HE IS the saint who most inspired pope John XXIII. A few months into his papacy and after having declared his intention of convoking an ecumenical council, pope John devoted his second encyclical to St John Vianney, on the 100th anniversary of the saint’s death.
In it pope John wrote that he saw it as “a special design of God’s providence that the saint would twice cast the brilliant light of his holiness over our priestly life at moments of great importance”.
First, as a newly ordained priest he had attended the beatification ceremony in 1905 and had been moved to the depths of his soul. Then in 1925 he had become a bishop the same year as John Vianney had been canonised.
St John Vianney’s path to the priesthood was strewn with obstacles: paternal opposition to losing a pair of hands on the farm, desertion from conscription in the Napoleonic army, and above all lack of instruction.
The seeds of his vocation had been planted during the upheaval of the French Revolution. John received his First Holy Communion at home from a priest on the run for his life. Illiterate until his late teens, learning Latin proved nearly impossible. Six weeks into his seminary studies he was sent home for failing his exam. Without the support of a devoted priest who gave him grinds and urged him not to give up, that would have been the end of the dream.
Enlisting heavenly help by going on a pilgrimage to the tomb of St Francis Regis, he finally just scraped through. However, he still was not trusted to hear confessions for another year.
He was then sent as curate to an isolated little village north of Lyons and later became its parish priest. He died there at the age of 73 on August 4th, 1859. The Curé d’Ars, as he is best known, is now patron saint of all priests. As his reputation for sanctity spread, people came from France and abroad, seeking healing for their souls and spiritual counsel.
Some years he heard over 70,000 confessions, spending up to 17 hours a day in the confessional.
He had shed the Jansenistic influences in his spirituality and while he remained fiercely ascetic he became an ever more passionate witness of God’s infinite mercy: “Our sins are like grains of sand beside the great mountain of the mercies of the Good God.”
He himself described priesthood as “love of the Heart of Christ”. No doubt he would have agreed with Thomas Merton’s description of the Holy Trinity: “Mercy within Mercy within Mercy”. The secret of his sanctity and of the fruitfulness of his ministry lay in the fact that John Vianney depended on God for everything. “We are but beggars before God.” His pastoral life was nourished by deep prayer: “Prayer is the inner bath of love into which the soul plunges itself“. He lived the mysteries of the faith he celebrated in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.
Being in intimate communion with the God who is compassion and love, his whole being came to be transfigured and to radiate that love. To others he appeared full of light. “In Ars I saw God in a man” many a pilgrim would say. He was radically humble, radically poor and above all radically loving. “All our religion is but a false religion, and all our virtues are mere illusions and we ourselves are only hypocrites in the sight of God if we do not have that universal charity for everyone: for the good and for the bad, for the poor and for the rich, and for all those who do us harm as for those who do us good.”
St John Vianney was canonised on the feast of Pentecost. He used to tell his parishioners to ask for the gift of the Spirit.
No doubt he is urging us to do the same in these turbulent times.
Soline Humbert is a Catholic woman who believes she has a vocation to the priesthood.