Saint Jean-Marie Vianney (1786-1859)
A life under God’s gaze.
Born into a farming family in Dardilly, near Lyon, on May 8, 1786, Jean-Marie Vianney’s childhood was marked by the fervor and love of his parents. However, the context of the French Revolution had a strong influence on his youth: he made his first confession at the foot of the great clock, in the common room of the house where he was born, rather than in the village church, and received absolution from an underground priest.
Two years later, he made his First Communion in a barn, during an underground mass celebrated by a refractory priest. At 17, he chose to answer God’s call: “I’d like to win souls for God,” he told his mother, Marie Béluze. But his father opposed the project for two years, as there was a shortage of hands at his father’s house.
At the age of 20, he began preparing for the priesthood with Abbé Balley, Curé d’Écully. Difficulties would grow on him: he sailed from discouragement to hope, going on pilgrimage to La Louvesc, to the tomb of Saint François Régis.
He was forced to become a deserter when he was called up to fight in the Spanish war. But Abbé Balley will help him through these years of hardship. Ordained a priest in 1815, he was initially curate at Écully.
In 1818, he was sent to Ars. There, he awakened the faith of his parishioners through his preaching, but above all through his prayer and his way of life. He feels poor in front of the mission to be accomplished, but he lets himself be seized by God’s mercy. He restored and embellished his church, founded an orphanage: “La Providence” and took care of the poorest.
His reputation as a confessor soon attracted many pilgrims seeking God’s forgiveness and peace of heart.
Assailed by many trials and struggles, he keeps his heart rooted in the love of God and his brothers; his sole concern is the salvation of souls. His catechisms and homilies focus on God’s goodness and mercy.
A priest consumed with love before the Blessed Sacrament, giving his all to God, his parishioners and pilgrims, he died on August 4, 1859, having given himself up to the very end of Love. His poverty was not feigned. He knew he would die one day as a “prisoner of the confessional”.
Three times he had tried to run away from his parish, believing himself unworthy of the parish priest’s mission, and that he was more a screen for God’s goodness than a vector of that Love. The last time was less than six years before his death. He was caught in the middle of the night by his parishioners, who had sounded the tocsin. He then returned to his church and began confessing at one o’clock in the morning. The next day, he said, “I made the child”. At his funeral, the crowd numbered over a thousand, including the bishop and all the priests of the diocese, who came to surround the man who was already their role model.
Beatified on January 8, 1905, he was declared “Patron Saint of French Priests” the same year. Canonized in 1925 by Pius XI (the same year as Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus), he was proclaimed “patron saint of all parish priests throughout the world” in 1929. Pope John Paul II visited Ars in 1986.
Today, Ars welcomes 550,000 pilgrims a year, and the Sanctuary offers a wide range of activities. A seminary was opened in 1986, training future priests in the school of “Monsieur Vianney”. Wherever the saints go, God goes with them!
In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI declared a Year for Priests for the whole Church, under the aegis of the Holy Curé.
