Author: J. S. Paluch Co., Inc.

SAINT JOHN MARY VIANNEY (1786-1859)
August 4
	A busy pastor jokingly suggests the secret of John Vianney’s holiness: “He died seventeen years before telephones!” Call they didn’t, but visit they did, keeping Vianney eighteen hours a day in the confessional. Stories abound of reading hearts and exorcisms, but Vianney’s first miracle was getting ordained. Difficulty with studies delayed him, prompting the rector’s apology to the bishop, “So far to ordain just one, especially this one!” The bishop, who could not know he was ordaining the future patron saint of parish priests, replied, “No burden to ordain one good priest!” In Ars, only an elderly handful attended Mass, “praying,” one told Vianney, “for a priest with brains.” But he stayed forty-two years, fulfilling the promise he made the day he arrived. In a sculpture just outside the village Vianney points skyward: “Show me the way to Ars,” he tells a boy, “and I’ll show you the way to heaven.” To someone who feared there was no heaven beyond the grave, Vianney smiled, “My child, it would have been heaven enough to have lived as Jesus’ disciple on earth.”
—Peter Scagnelli