Bishop of Grenoble
June 1815. Napoleon was forced to abdicate a few days after the crushing defeat at Waterloo on June 18. The archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Fesch, although of great quality and exemplary loyalty to Rome, was criticized for being the uncle of the routed Emperor and had to flee his diocese. And so it was that the young deacon Jean-Marie Vianney, whose cause had been strongly pleaded by Abbé Balley at the archbishop’s palace, was to be ordained priest by Mgr Simon, bishop of Grenoble. It was this same prelate who ordained him sub-deacon on July 2, 1814 and deacon on June 23, 1815 at the primatial church of Saint-Jean in Lyon. While it was customary for the cardinal’s replacement to travel to Lyon, the fact that Abbé Vianney was the only one called to the priesthood at the time meant that he had to walk to Grenoble. In addition to the summer heat, the twenty-nine-year-old deacon had to brave a Dauphiné dotted with Austrian troops since Napoleon’s defeat.
Jean-Marie Vianney ordained priest
It was on the evening of Saturday August 12 that the future Curé d’Ars arrived in the Dauphiné capital, to be ordained a priest the following day. The bishop’s famous reply to a vicar general who remarked that he had gone to a lot of trouble to ordain the only ordinand was: “It’s not too much trouble to ordain a good priest”. How prophetic! A revealing word from a bishop who was “deeply pious, full of heart and condescension”.
Claude Simon was born in Semur-en-Auxois (Burgundy) on November 15, 1744. Canon of Avallon, then vicar-general of Autun, he was appointed bishop of Grenoble in July 1802 by Bonaparte and consecrated in the church of Saint-Roch in Paris on August 8.
A desire for reconciliation
Delayed by illness, he did not arrive in Grenoble until October 7. As soon as he was installed, Mgr Simon demonstrated his desire for reconciliation by asking all the priests present, “whatever party they belonged to”, to exchange the kiss of peace.
In a letter dated November 17, he asserted that the authority of the Church is “the equal and sister of civil authority”, that “there is unity in the priestly body […]; your repugnances, your predilections, your particular affections must melt and be lost in the feeling of obedience which we owe to the Church”.
With a new wind of freedom blowing through the Church, Mgr Simon set about rebuilding his diocese by reconciling refractory priests and those who had embraced the ideas of the Revolution.
This concern for priests and vocations was further illustrated in 1806, when he moved the Grand Séminaire into the renovated premises of the former Minimes convent on rue du Vieux-Temple.
It was in the seminary chapel that he ordained Jean-Marie Vianney to the priesthood.
He brought back the Ursulines in 1801, the Carthusian monks around 1815 and founded the Petit Séminaire in 1818. He recreated the Cathedral Chapter and endowed the cathedral, which had been plundered during the Revolution.
Firm on principles, he was flexible in their application and, over time, succeeded in this work of reconciliation. He died on October 3, 1825.
From Annales d’Ars no. 336 [janvier-février 2011].
