St. Jean Vianney - Rector's Rambling for August 4, 2019

Today we are celebrating the Seventh Sunday after Trinity.  But August 4 is also the Feast of St. Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney.

Jean Vianney was a most unlikely candidate for the priesthood, but God doesn’t look on earthly circumstances or human measure of skill when choosing who will serve him, and ultimately become a saint.

Born to a poor family in France, he was not given a formal education but rather was given the charge at a young age (8) to tend the sheep to help support the family.

He may not have been properly schooled but what was instilled in him was a deep faith and burning desire to serve the Lord as a priest in His Church.  This was happening at a time when the Church in France was under brutal attack by the revolutionary forces with priests and bishops being killed for the faith by the secular French leadership.

His own parish priest, sensing his vocation, took it upon himself to begin tutoring his parishioner, despite his being described as “slow of mind and could scarce master his lessons”.  Jean Vianney gave all the credit for what he was able to learn, just enough to qualify him for ordination at a time and place where the Church was desperate for clergy, as a result of prayer rather than academic ability or labor.

After serving as an assistant in his own parish, he was sent to a small town called Ars, where it was thought he couldn’t do much damage.  But the sheer force of his submission to God’s will, and his deepening holiness brought the parish and the town to great conversion.  It also in his lifetime became a place of pilgrimage by those seeking the holy priest who “apart from the time necessarily devoted to sleeping or eating, he was either at the altar, in the pulpit, or hearing confessions”.

A Third Order Franciscan, he died at the age of 73 on August 4, 1859, and is venerated as the patron saint of parish priests.

~ Quotations from The Anglican Breviary, p. 1372–1373