It's the Feast of
St. John Marie Vianney,
3rd Class, with the color of
White. In this episode: the meditation: "Prayer", today's news from the Church: "John Senior: What the American Professor Thought About the Crisis in the Church (2)", and today's thought from the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
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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)
Please support our new project, the Archbishop Lefebvre Biography Audiobook!
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.
Then word began spreading.
People discovered that this obscure country priest had an extraordinary ability to understand souls. By the later years of his life, tens of thousands of pilgrims were coming to Ars annually. Special railway tickets were even sold for travelers going there. John sometimes spent sixteen hours a day hearing confessions.
He also had a surprisingly intense spiritual life. For decades, Vianney reported being tormented at night by demonic disturbances, which he jokingly called the work of the "grappin," or grappling hook. Instead of frightening him, the disturbances eventually became almost useful. He noticed that particularly violent nights were often followed by the arrival of a great sinner seeking confession.
His response was essentially: the devil is making noise because somebody is about to come home.
John repeatedly tried to leave Ars for a monastery, convinced he wasn't worthy of his reputation. His parishioners repeatedly brought him back.
Today, the little village he once considered insignificant remains a major pilgrimage destination. His incorrupt body rests in the Basilica of Ars, where pilgrims still kneel near the confessional in which he spent so much of his life.
Saint John Vianney never became a great academic. He became something else entirely: a priest who made people want to go to confession.
Saint John Marie Vianney, holy Curé of Ars and tireless physician of souls, pray for us.
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The main goal of the Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic Faith in its fullness and purity, to teach its truths, and to diffuse its virtues, especially through the Roman Catholic priesthood.
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