ST. JOHN VIANNEY – PART 5

Saint John Vianney “One ought to pray earnestly, especially at the Ember Seasons, that God will give us good priests. If they are saints, what good they are able to do! But, what ever they are, never speak against them.” (St. John Vianney, On the Priesthood)

John Mary Vianney was ordained to the priesthood on August 12, 1815. The next day this great and future saint celebrated his first Mass and received his assignment as curate to M. Balley in the town of Ecully. A few months after his assignment he received faculties to hear confessions and thus began his famous career as a confessor. This gift of his would occupy more than three quarters of his time at Ecully but it would turn out to be time well spent, as we shall later see.

The two clerics of Ecully excelled in austerity and a good friend was to remark that their people were lucky to have such priests to do penance for them. In 1817 M. Balley, the man to whom John Mary owed so very much to died and early the following year John was ordered to leave his beloved Ecully and take a new post as the curate of the town of Ars-en-Dombes, a remote and neglected village of 230, in short and in every sense of the term, “a real hole in the wall”. The debased state of the village of Ars seems to be somewhat overstated. While not a bastion of sanctity, it was not a Sodom and Gomorrah. The main problem of Ars it was said is that it suffered the “deadly scandal of ordinary life” neither cold nor hot, much like the Laodicean church of the Apocalypse and it was to this lackluster parish that John Mary Vianney was sent to begin his long and illustrious career.

Upon his arrival at Ars the new curate began his struggle for the full conversion of his tiny flock by redoubling his efforts at personal austerity. For the first six years of his ministry he sustained himself on potatoes, seeking to make himself an example to his small, meager parish. It was only after he had visited every household in his parish and established a catechism program for the children that he got down to the business of whipping his village into spiritual shape.

Next month…His ministry begins in earnest.