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Aug 8 – S John M Vianney
Description
Sources Used Today:
- "Prayer" — From Trinity Sunday to the Assumption
- "John Senior: What the American Professor Thought About the Crisis in the Church (2)" (FSSPX.news)
- The Spiritual Life — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (Angelus Press)
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Saint John Marie Vianney is remembered as the Curé of Ars, the little French village where he spent more than forty years as parish priest. But when he first arrived, almost nobody would have predicted that thousands of people would eventually travel across Europe just to stand in line outside his confessional.
He was born in 1786, just before the French Revolution. As a child, John grew up in a world where Catholic priests were being hunted and Mass was sometimes celebrated secretly in barns or private homes. His family sheltered priests, and young John occasionally attended these hidden Masses. That experience stayed with him. He had seen what Catholics were willing to risk simply to receive the sacraments.
John desperately wanted to become a priest.
There was one problem.
He was a terrible student.
Latin was especially difficult for him, and at one point he was dismissed from the seminary because he simply couldn't keep up academically. A patient priest continued tutoring him, and eventually John was ordained. His superiors apparently weren't convinced they had ordained the next great theologian, so they sent him to Ars, a tiny village of only a few hundred people.
John decided that if he couldn't impress people with scholarship, he could pray for them.
He fasted, visited families, taught catechism, preached simply, and spent hours in the confessional. Slowly, the parish changed.