Saint John Mary Vianney: the Curé of Ars, Patron of Parish Priests

Today, 4 August, the Church keeps the feast of Saint John Mary Vianney (1786–1859) — a farm boy who could not learn Latin, was very nearly never ordained, and was then sent to a village of some two hundred souls precisely because nobody expected anything of him there. He stayed forty-one years. By the end, a hundred thousand pilgrims a year were coming to Ars to kneel in front of his confessional, and the railway company had opened a ticket window for them in Lyon. This is his life, the parish he rebuilt, the spirituality that did it, and the prayer of his Mass in Latin and English.

A child of the Revolution

He was born on 8 May 1786 at Dardilly, near Lyon, into a family of farmers. Three years later the Revolution came, the churches were closed, and priests who refused to swear to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy were hunted. Jean-Marie grew up with a faith learned at his mother’s knee and a Mass celebrated in barns by night, on a kitchen table, with a lookout at the door.

He made his First Communion at about thirteen, in a house with the shutters closed and a cart of hay drawn up against the window so that nobody outside would see the candles. A man who learns as a boy that the Mass is worth risking prison for does not later treat it as routine — and everything he would become was already contained in that room.

The vocation nobody believed in

He was twenty when he began to study for the priesthood, under Abbé Charles Balley at Écully — a good priest who saw something in him that the examiners never would. The obstacle was Latin. He could not hold it. He was older than the other students, slower, and humiliated by it.

Then in 1809 the army took him. Clergy students were exempt, but the paperwork failed; he was conscripted into Napoleon’s forces, fell ill on the way to the front, missed his unit, and ended up — at first without meaning to — among deserters in the mountains at Les Noës, living for over a year under the name Jérôme Vincent and teaching the village children. An amnesty in 1810 released him.

Back at his books, he was sent to the major seminary at Lyon and sent home again: the theology was taught in Latin and he could not follow it. Balley took him back, taught him privately in French, and staked his own word on him. At the examination the question was put whether the candidate was pious, whether he knew how to pray, whether he had devotion to Our Lady. He did. He was ordained on 13 August 1815 at Grenoble — the only man ordained that day.

God does not call the capable. He makes capable the ones He calls — and the Curé of Ars is the proof the Church keeps on hand for anyone who thinks himself too small.

Ars: two hundred souls and no love of God

In February 1818 he was sent to Ars-sur-Formans, a village so small and so indifferent that it was considered a place where a mediocre priest could do little harm. The vicar general said the sentence that has followed him ever since: “There is not much love of God in that parish — you will put some there.”

He found four taverns, dancing on Sundays, work in the fields on feast days and a church nearly empty. He did not begin with programmes. He began by staying in the church himself: whole nights before the tabernacle, and a diet that was mostly boiled potatoes. He learned every family by name. He taught catechism to the children in words a farm labourer could carry home. And he preached, at first badly and always plainly, against the things that were eating his village.

It took years. The taverns closed one by one, not because he shut them but because their customers stopped coming. In 1824 he founded La Providence, a free school and refuge for orphaned and abandoned girls, and for a long time he fed it out of nothing.

The confessional

From around 1827 strangers started arriving. Then the strangers became a flood. By the 1850s roughly a hundred thousand pilgrims a year were coming to a village of two hundred; people waited three days for their turn; the railway opened a booking office at Lyon for the Ars route, and the tickets were valid for a week because that was how long the queue took.

What drew them was not eloquence. It was that he saw. Penitents came out shaken because he had named what they had not said, or answered the question they had not managed to ask, or told them plainly to go home and repair a specific injustice. He also wept — visibly, constantly — and when asked why, said it was because sinners would not weep for themselves.

He was attacked for it. He gave the devil a nickname — le grappin, the grappling-hook — and spoke of him the way a farmer speaks of a troublesome animal. There were noises in the presbytery at night, and in 1824 his bed was burned. He treated the whole business as a good sign: the grappin is angry, so a big fish is coming.

The four attempts to run away

Not once but several times he tried to leave Ars in the night, to go and be a monk somewhere and, in his own words, weep for his poor life. Each time he was found and brought back, and each time he returned to the confessional. He was convinced he was a bad priest. He is the patron saint of parish priests.

The heart of his spirituality

Nothing he did was original. That is rather the point: he took the ordinary means of the Church and used them without reserve.

• The Mass above everything. He would stand at the altar unable to go on, so overcome by what was in his hands. Everything else in Ars grew out of that altar.
• Penance, and not for himself. He fasted and watched for his parishioners, on the conviction that a priest cannot ask of God what he is unwilling to pay for.
• The confessional as the front line. Not administration, not projects — hours upon hours of one soul at a time.
• Catechism in plain words. He taught farm children and their parents in the language they actually spoke, and his instructions were written down by others because they were worth keeping.
• Our Lady and St Philomena. He put his parish under Mary’s protection, and every cure that happened at Ars he attributed to St Philomena, never to himself.
• An enormous idea of the priesthood. He thought a priest could not understand himself in this life and would only weep with joy in heaven at what he had been.

Death, and what the Church did with him

He died at Ars on 4 August 1859, at seventy-three, worn out, in the middle of a heatwave, with the village and a crowd of pilgrims around the presbytery. Pius X beatified him in 1905; Pius XI canonised him on 31 May 1925 and, four years later, declared him patron of parish priests. His body rests in the basilica at Ars, and in 2009 Benedict XVI opened a Year for Priests on the 150th anniversary of his death, holding him up as a model for every priest in the world.

The lesson the Church drew is not that he was clever. It is that a parish can be raised from the dead by one priest who prays, fasts, and sits in the confessional until he is asked for.

The prayer of his Mass

The Collect the Church prays on his feast asks for exactly what he had: pastoral zeal, and an unbroken ardour of prayer and penance.

And this second one is his own, written in French, the prayer he is said to have repeated all his life:

Words of the Curé of Ars

These are already kept in the collection of saints’ quotes on this site — blunt, rural, and impossible to misunderstand:

You can read them alongside the others in the growing collection of quotes of the saints here on the site.

Sancte Ioannes Maria Vianney, ora pro nobis. Saint John Mary Vianney, pray for us — and pray for our parish priests, who carry more than we know and are thanked less than they deserve.