The Memorial of Saint John Mary Vianney, priest, who for more than forty years ministered in a wonderful way to the parish entrusted to him in the village of Ars near Belley in France, by his earnest preaching, his prayer, and the example of his penance. Daily catechizing children and adults, reconciling penitents, and shining with the ardent charity drawn from the Holy Eucharist as from a fountain, he advanced his people so greatly that he spread his counsels far and wide and wisely led very many to God.
Lifespan: 1786–1859
Beatified: 8 January 1905 by Pope Pius X
Canonized: 31 May 1925 by Pope Pius XI, Vatican Basilica
Memoria liturgica: 4 August
“If we truly understood what a priest is on earth, we would die — not from fright, but from love.”
Known as “the Curé d’Ars,” John Mary Vianney was born on 8 May 1786 at Dardilly, near Lyon. His parents were farmers who put him to work in the fields from an early age, so that John reached the age of seventeen still unable to read or write. Thanks to his mother’s teaching, however, he knew many prayers by heart and lived with a deep religious sense.
Meanwhile, the winds of Revolution were sweeping France. John received the Sacrament of Confession at home rather than in church, through a “refractory” priest who had refused to swear loyalty to the revolutionaries. His First Communion was received in a barn, at a clandestine Mass.
At seventeen John felt the call to the priesthood: “If I were a priest, I would want to win many souls,” he said. The road was not easy, given his meager education. Only through the help of wise priests — among them the Abbé Balley, parish priest of Écully — was he ordained a presbyter on 13 August 1815, at the age of twenty-nine.
Three years later, in 1818, he was sent to Ars, a small village in southeastern France with a population of two hundred and thirty. There he devoted all his energies to the care of his people: he founded the “Providence” institute to shelter orphans, visited the sick and the most destitute families, restored the church, and organized patronal feasts. But it was in the Sacrament of Confession that the mission of the Curé d’Ars found its fullest expression: always available to listen and to forgive, he spent up to sixteen hours a day in the confessional.
Day after day, crowds of penitents from every part of France came to confess to him, until Ars came to be called “the great hospital of souls.” Vianney himself kept vigils and fasted to share in the expiation of his people’s sins: “I will tell you my remedy,” he explained to a fellow priest, “I give sinners a small penance and I do the rest in their place.”
Given entirely to God and to his parishioners, he died on 4 August 1859 at the age of seventy-three. His remains rest at Ars in the Shrine dedicated to him, which receives four hundred and fifty thousand pilgrims each year. Beatified in 1905 by Pius X, John Mary Vianney was canonized in 1925 by Pius XI, who in 1929 declared him Patron of all parish priests of the world.
In 1959, on the centenary of his death, Saint John XXIII dedicated to him the encyclical Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia, holding him up as a model for priests; while in 2009, on the 150th anniversary of his death, Benedict XVI proclaimed a “Year for Priests” to “contribute to the promotion of the commitment to interior renewal of all priests, for the sake of a more vigorous and incisive witness to the Gospel in the world of today.”