Feast of St. John Vianney

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St John Vianney was a blockhead and so am I.

St. John Vianney was born into a peasant family in the small town of Dardilly on 8 May 1786.

His family was poor in material possessions but rich in humanity and in faith. He spent so many years of his childhood and as a teenager in the fields and tending the flocks that at the age of 17 he was still illiterate.

He desperately wanted to be a priest. But soon after he entered the seminary, they asked him to leave mid-semester because he could not keep up with the academic work.

At that point, an old pastor from Ecully took him in and personally prepared him and the Bishop of Grenoble ordained him when he was 29.

Before long, 1000s of people came from all over France to hear his wisdom and were converted.

It was not by virtue of his own human gifts that he succeeded in moving peoples' hearts; he won over even the most rebellious souls by communicating to them what he himself lived deeply, namely, his friendship with Christ.

We all have family and friends we want to help become committed to Jesus. St. John Vianney shows us you don’t have to be a theologian. We just need to develop a deep friendship with Jesus in prayer and then just be yourself.

That is the beauty of the Rosary, Mary helps us develop that friendship with Christ.

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So where does one begin when the culture is totally broken?

St. John Vianney can teach us.

John Vianney began by taking back Sundays. See, the soul of the week is Sunday. If we live Sunday well, it gets the soul of the week healthy and we start to live the rest of the week better.

Now, the problem is that we just use Sunday to get caught up. So how do we take back Sundays? By living in delight. Delight in what God has done at Mass and in the Rosary. Delight in family and friends by sharing life with them. A meal or some activity that helps you experience the truth and beauty and goodness of reality. A meal, a walk, nature, play a game, music, books.

But we’ve gotta get off our screens. And it can’t be a day where we live in a distortion of God’s creation through the viewing of sex, violence, and hyperactivity. And finally, we should delight in the spiritual and materially poor by caring for them.
Sunday is the day to delight in the goodness of God.

Now, if you can do all three, great. If not, just start somewhere. And do it every Sunday. And invite family and friends to join you. Do what St. John Vianney did. Take back Sundays.

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The first gift Jesus gave the Church after his Resurrection was the Sacrament of Confession. He came to the Apostles locked in the Upper Room and said to them, “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you.” After saying this he breathed on them and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained.”

Our sin is the only thing that blocks us from perfect happiness. Jesus gave us the remedy. Confession. If each day we would do a brief examination of our life, and then go to confession at least once a month, Jesus would set us free from our sins and we could reach the happiness we long for.

This is what St. John Vianney taught the people. 300 people a day and 100,000 a year would come to him for confession. Why? Because he could read souls. God gave him the gift of reading souls, of knowing the true state souls were in, that many were dead in sin and needed to be brought back to life by confession so that they would not tragically end in hell. It was love for souls that led him to spend 16-17 hours a day in the confessional.

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Now, Jesus wants to give himself to us as our spiritual food. And without this food, our soul begins to starve.

Jesus said, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you.”

The Eucharist was the most important thing in the life of St. John Vianney.

The Eucharist is also vital for friendship with Jesus. Friends want to be together, face to face, don’t they? And when we spend time with Jesus in Eucharistic adoration we are face to face with God.

John Vianney’s power to bring people to Jesus was in proportion to his friendship with Jesus in adoration. We can be, we should be, the same.

Vianney lived a life of face-to-face encounters with Jesus in the Eucharist. Others found that out and began to imitate him.
One time a farmer found his friend in the church just sitting there. His friend exclaimed, “What are you doing?” To which the man responded, “I look at Jesus and he looks at me.”
If you want to get closer to Jesus, go spend time with him in the Eucharist. It doesn’t have to be adoration. Jesus is present in the Tabernacle in every Catholic church in the world. Just look for the red lamp. Jesus waits for you there, 24/7, 365.

Got any other friends that will do that for you?

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Friendship is the way to help one another become a saint.

In 1815, when St. John Vianney was only newly ordained, a missionary of the order of St. John of God was preaching in Lyon and stayed at the home of Pauline Jaricot. She was only seventeen years old. This missionary gave Pauline a relic of St. Philomena. Pauline then gave part of that relic to St. John Vianney. Soon after, Vianney came to lunch at the home of the Jaricots and had this idea of building a chapel at his church. And the Jaricot family purchased a statue of St. Philomena for him.

Now, as soon as the Cure of Ars built this little chapel to St. Philomena, thousands of miracles began to occur. All kinds of physical healings, almost continuously.

In 1834, Pauline Jaricot, though only thirty-four years old, was dying of a heart disease. She went to Mugnano, to the tomb of Philomena, to seek her help but Pauline stopped in Rome to visit the Pope on the way. At the time, she was too weak to see him so the Pope came to see her. Seeing her so close to death, he asked her to pray for him from Heaven because he didn’t think she would make it.

“Yes, Holy Father, I promise you, but if I walk on foot to the Vatican upon my return from Mugnano, would your holiness further the cause of Philomena?”

“Of course,” replied the Pope, thinking that she was going to die.

By the time Pauline reached Mugnano, she was more like a corpse than a living person. She went to Mass at the shrine of Philomena, no miracle. She attended miracles on the ninth. Still no miracle. The same, on the tenth. No miracle.

By this time the entire town was aware of the drama. They knew the Pope had promised that if Pauline was cured he would promote devotion to Philomena. So the whole town began to remind Philomena that her reputation was at stake. The whole town said to St. Philomena, “Do you hear us? If you do not cure this pious lady, we will stop praying to you! We will have nothing more to do with you. Return her to her health right now.” And the next day, Pauline was completely healed. And she walked a hundred and forty-one miles back to the Vatican.

When the Pope saw her, he promised to keep his word and give Philomena a universal feast day.

Saints go together and saints go in friendship.