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Catholic Saints
St. John Vianney on Parish Priests
00:21:08
Join Dr. Ben Akers and Taylor Kemp as they discuss St. John Vianney, the Cure d'Ars and patron saint of parish priests.
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Narrator
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.
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Taylor Kemp
Hi and welcome to form Now. I'm Taylor Kemp and with me is Dr. Ben Akers. Dr. Ben Akers, today we are talking.
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Dr. Ben Akers
About a Catholic saint, St. John Marie Vianney.
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Taylor Kemp
St. John Marie Vianney, known as the. How do you pronounce it?
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Dr. Ben Akers
Cured ours.
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Taylor Kemp
Cured ours.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Which just means parish priest.
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Taylor Kemp
Parish priest.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So ours France.
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Taylor Kemp
Of ours France. He is a very well known priest. He is very well known saint who is a priest. And we are excited to be talking about him today in our conversation. This is also something that you can listen to on podcast. So what do we need to know about St. John Marie von Vianney?
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Dr. Ben Akers
I can't do him justice in the short time that we have this conversation, but I'm hoping to intrigue you and listener to. I'm ready to be to develop a relationship with St. John Maria Vianney.
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Taylor Kemp
Yes.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He is known as the Cur d'. Arts. That's one of his titles. You might have seen that written somewhere, as we said. Or he's also the patron saint of parish priests. Okay, so he was declared a parish saint of. So if your parish priest, this is why I wanted to talk to him, talk about him is we all have parish priests. We're all been blessed with priests and associate priests. He is their patron. Okay, so you have the different patron saints of married couples, of patron saints of kids and scholars and students. And he is a patron saint of parish priests.
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Taylor Kemp
So clearly there is something about the way that he lived out his Christian witness. Yes, that was something that was a model for a parish priest. So, so what about him?
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yes, so his date. So what I think we could do is go historically through and see why he could be example.
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Taylor Kemp
When did he live?
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Dr. Ben Akers
So he lived in 1786 is the year he was born till 1859. So 1786 to 1859. He's born in France. He is born while the French Revolution.
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Taylor Kemp
Is going on tumultuous time.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Tumultuous time where he, you know, you couldn't find priests because the priests were put on trial. They're, you know, they're being, parishes are being disbanded. Religious sisters are having to go into hiding. And so he grew up going to Masses, his very devout Catholic family. And they went and found Masses, which was illegal at the time too, so they could raise their kids Catholic. And so he actually had his first communion when he was 13 years old. In someone's kitchen.
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Taylor Kemp
Wow.
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Dr. Ben Akers
It was like. This is like the home masses where the shades are drawn so you can't.
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Taylor Kemp
See, like some early church stuff.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah, yeah. And so he grew up seeing priests as heroes.
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Taylor Kemp
That's cool.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah.
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Taylor Kemp
You should all see priests as heroes.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yes, exactly. Well, and this is another thing that I wanted to mention is that we have, you know, unfortunately, the news always highlights the bad priests or priests failing in their vocation. He's a great model for a good, faithful priest. And we want to pray for our priests, who are often very good models to us, and great models as well.
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Taylor Kemp
It's also a time like that when it's not easy to be a priest in the middle of the French Revolution, where people are being dragged off, where it's going to kind of purify the priesthood, too, where it's going to only draw the people who are like, I'm in it for the right reasons because it's going to be costly no matter what. And I feel like today we're moving more into that time. It's not easy to be a priest today. And so I think we will see. We already are seeing many heroic priests, but we'll continue to see them joining.
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Dr. Ben Akers
For the right reason, not just for, you know, three warm meals, you know, pension, all these things. Job security. No, he is heroic, and so many of our priests are heroic. So if we develop a relationship to him to pray for our own priests. But what's neat about his growing up is that he was also just a very good, faithful son. He was four of six children. And so the family needed help at home on the farm, so he just served on the farm. And so his education was delayed. And so this is going to play into. He wanted to be a priest. He saw them as heroes. He thought the Lord was calling to be a priest when he was young and his parents gave him permission, but he's now 17, 18 years old and doesn't know how to read.
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Taylor Kemp
Interesting. Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Doesn't have a good education. And so he was sent to a nearby abbey. And the priest was so kind and patient to him. So. So another good example of a priest in his life who was patient. Everyone said, no, give up on him. He's not gonna. He's too old. He didn't figure it out. And this priest was able to convince the bishop that he was a good and holy man, and it made up for some of his ignorance. And the bishop believed him. He was ordained a priest and he was sent to a little town in Ars, France, named ars, France, about 230 people in the village. And he walks in the village and the bishop said, look, there's no faith here. You need to put the faith into this town. This is your task. You need to show them the love of Christ. So he goes there and he devotes himself and becomes an incredible success in terms of religious success at this parish. So this tiny little parish. What he's facing, besides the. It's now okay to be Catholic. The concordat under Napoleon allowed the Catholic Church to return to France. But what he's encountering is a village that didn't have a priest. And so there's a religious indifference. There's lots of their Sundays were spent working and, you know, doing.
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Taylor Kemp
Watching NFL football.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Watching NFL football. They watch soccer. It's.
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Taylor Kemp
But like not spending their Sunday.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Not spending time on Sundays in worship. And so that was his primary task. And so he saw. So his pastoral plan, if we're going to look at it.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
In terms of a pastoral plan that we can imitate, is that he devoted himself to the Eucharist. So the way he celebrated Mass, the way he celebrated Mass, he had intimate communion with Christ in prayer, especially his great love and devotion for the Eucharist, which led to preaching about confession, which led to conversions of people going to confession and devotion to Mary. So if I had a pastoral plan, I have some stories related to those themes, but it'd be the Eucharist, it would be returning people to the mercy of God in the sacrament of confession and devotion to Our Lady.
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Taylor Kemp
It's a good pastoral plan, one that can be taken up by anybody. I mean, something as. As you're talking about St. John Vianney. There's something very humble about him, clearly, and also very simple. Like, I was even thinking about his education before it was, so to speak, like, formalized. But he probably on the farm, had what you would consider like an education in virtue of, like, of a disciplined way about going about your life, wasn't super well educated, and then took up modes of holiness that are very. Yeah, you. Yeah, it's a. It's a good model.
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Dr. Ben Akers
No. Yeah. And he was taught, as you mentioned, he was taught by his parents this way. His parents were very devout, you know, going heroically trying to get their children to Mass and to the sacraments. And so he was. He knew all his prayers by heart because his mom and dad taught him his prayers. And that's what he was praying in the field.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So you don't have book smarts. He had the incredible heart of love For. For Christ.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, it's all. It's amazing.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So he goes there and, you know, he does incredible penances. So his priesthood is marked with a love for God by, you know, hours of devotion. He kind of, you know, one of his biographers says that he, instead of living in the rectory, he lived in the church. You know, he lived in the rectory, too. But the idea was that his parishioners always knew that he'd be in the church. But he actually went out and met the parishioners at their home, was always visiting the sick, bringing the sacraments to the dying.
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Taylor Kemp
He.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He was going and bringing people that were not going to church and encouraging them to return to church. He started a incredible orphanage, we might call it today, a house for women that were abandoned by their families. And he just raised money for them. He said, you know, I give everything away. So he lived poverty, chastity, obedience, even though he was a doss and priest and didn't need to do that. Those are marked in his life as well. He's such a model of priesthood that actually Pope Benedict the 16th declared a year of priests, if you remember this, from 2009 to 2010. And he started it on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, the year. The 150th anniversary of John Vianney's. That's cool. To show like he is the model for. For priests today.
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Taylor Kemp
Well, you look and he's a saint for our times today. Someone who's going out to the unchurched.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah.
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Taylor Kemp
Someone who is trying to be the light of Christ in the midst of Salt of the Earth. He's trying to bring this into a people. And our American culture is growing much more in need of that.
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Dr. Ben Akers
One of the interesting things that Pope Benedict said in his declaring the year of the priest connected to St. John Vianney's death anniversary is that he said that the age of Vianney would have been marked with the dictatorship of rationalism. So that means coming outside of the French Revolution. The idea of the French Revolution was to get rid of the Church. It's an oppressive regime, in their words. And what they did was they turned Notre Dame, the beautiful cathedral of Notre Dame. They put a prostitute and they dressed her up and they called her Lady Wisdom, Lady Reason, and they put her. They turned Notre Dame into the church, into horse stalls. And it was just a terrible place of debauchery. So blasphemy and def. Sacrilege towards the church. And so what Pope Benedict said is his age was marked by this age of Rational dictatorship of rationalism, which is, I can figure out everything on my own without any reference to God, that that's how powerful reason is. And reason is powerful. There's even higher wisdom and knowledge that's given to us in divine revelation. And so what John Vianney does is brings that to that religious indifference and this, you know, even religious failure in religious education and brings God's word to the people. And that's the antidote to facing that. What PO Bennett says is we're living in a dictatorship of relativism, which again, says that your truth is your truth, and my truth, there's no universal truth. And so we can use them as a model of return to the basics, return to the Eucharist, return to confession, return to a devotion to Mary. And these are ways to combat the errors that we face in rage.
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Taylor Kemp
When you think about St. Paul says, not in eloquence of speech is he convincing people of the gospel, but the power of Jesus Christ crucified. And you can see too, in John Vianney, like, he's not. He's not battling with the rationalists on the grounds of, like, coming up with a better argument, even though those exist, like, in the simplicity of his priesthood. And you can imagine by this witness of, like, tremendous authentic love that that is changing hearts, and that is something that is needed. The dictatorship of relativism is that there is an indifference, and even if with the best arguments, they often fall short. And that the most powerful thing we can do is be witnesses of the. Of a divine kind of love that is flowing through us and can really, like, just make a huge impact on people's lives.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah. And you can't give what you don't have. So if. If you don't have an intimate relationship with Christ in prayer, we can't teach other people that. And so that's why he's a great model of priesthood, is a priest who's completely conformed to Christ, even the suffering Christ. That is how he will transform his parish. So St. John Vianney starts with 230 people in his village. By the end of his priesthood, as he was approaching death, he had on average 20,000 people that would visit the town. So we have priests that have platforms and do a wonderful job of getting the word out of. They share the good news that they're preaching.
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Taylor Kemp
And.
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Dr. Ben Akers
But this is, you know, the 1850s, and the word is getting out about there's a holy priest and people are making pilgrimages to go to confession to him, so he would hear confessions from in the summer, the winter, for 11 hours a day during the summer, hours was lighter outside somewhere, you know, almost 16 to 18 hours a day. He was hearing confession.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Can you imagine?
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Taylor Kemp
No, I cannot.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He could read souls.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He knew if people in line, you know, who were like, we would come back and wait in line for a long time sometimes he would just kind of come out and like, tell somebody something in line that they were really thinking about. There's some incredible stories of where he would just lived a life of austere penance. He said, look, my people that go to confession, they can't do all the penance that's related to their sins. He says, I need to do some of the penance. So he would make up extreme penance. He would be. Could participate in penances for the sake of the penitents.
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Taylor Kemp
Wow.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He says, how can we expect people to, you know, how do we expect to be conformed to Christ who shed his blood for us if we too aren't willing to save our people by giving that much of ourselves? So he would boil at the beginning of the week, he would boil seven potatoes, and he would eat one potato a day.
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Taylor Kemp
Oh, my gosh.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yes. And just let the other six sit in the pot. Right. For the rest of the day. So day six is probably not a great tasting potato. Wow. People would. So the rectory was very connected, was right next to the church. But even walking from the rectory of the church, he couldn't do it because people wanted to stop him, touch him and talk to him. And so he would take medals that he had blessed, and then he'd come out of the door and he'd throw medals in the opposite direction, and people would go chase the medal, and then he would run to the confessional.
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Taylor Kemp
Just a hilarious image.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He's a celebrity. Right. Also, one of the interesting things, one of my favorite stories, is that there was a priest that was nearby that was jealous. So instead of imitating him in his love for Christ, love for the people, and hearing their confessions, he got jealous of his success. And so he started a petition to the bishop saying, look, John Vianney didn't go through all the school he was supposed to go through. He's not very smart. You should not let him be a priest. And so this petition was going around. St. John Vianney heard the petition, was going around, found it, and signed it. He said, yeah, I shouldn't be a priest anymore. I shouldn't be a priest in this parish anymore. Yeah. Kind of this humor of the saints.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, that reminds me of Saint Belle Mary. He would do something like that.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He's like, all right, if that's what the bishop wants, I'll do it. But of course, the bishop did not want that. It was even incredible. At his death, the bishop celebrated the Mass and 300 priests came to celebrate his funeral, plus a full, you know, overflowing church. One of the things that marks John Vianney's life, too, is his interactions with the evil one, the devil. And he was tortured. So you see all the hours that he's in confession, celebrating mass, praying, he only slept one or two hours a night because the devil would torment him at night. So he would torment him with harrowing voices, cat noises. Remember we talked about cats? I'm not making it up. That's real. And then the devil would taunt him in evil voices. You know, Vianney, Vianney, potato eater. It's kind of like, you know, he. The. The evil one even set his bed on fire one night. I've heard that there's a story about where these. He asked for four strong, the four strongest men in the village to come to his, like, you know, to. They didn't believe. You know, people don't always believe him. And so he's, like, great for four strongest people.
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Taylor Kemp
And.
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Dr. Ben Akers
And the men were challenged to hold the bed down while the devil was, like, throwing it around the room. And they couldn't. They ran away screaming, like. But John Vianney knew that the power of Christ's cross was more powerful than the devil. And he just, you know, would not let him disturb his peace by physical harm and emotional, psychological terror that the demon was trying to impress on him. And the devil actually told John Vianney, he said, if there are three priests like you, my kingdom would be destroyed. Yeah, I mean, that's how powerful.
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Taylor Kemp
I mean, that's an incredible story. Right? Like, that is. So when you think about that, when the devil. If there were three priests such as yourself, my kingdom would be destroyed. Like, obviously, we're going to be speculating to some extent, but what do you think it is about St. John Vianney that made his priesthood so powerful? Like, obviously, we've talked about some of these things, but what do you think are the things that make him such a powerful priest?
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Dr. Ben Akers
I think. I think really his intimate union with Christ in prayer, his love for our Lord in the Eucharist, the way they celebrated Mass. They said that his eyes just changed when he would hold the host up as celebrating Mass. He's just a man Completely transfixed and in love with the Lord. And I think the devil hated him so much because he was an instrument of mercy, of God's mercy. I mean, 11 to 18 hours of confession in a day.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
And his, you know, heroically giving God's birth, freeing from the. The bonds of Satan. I think that's why he was so hated. Y was his love for our Lord in the Eucharist and then all the penances that attach for it attached to that that he was willing to make to unite his life to Christ suffering on the cross.
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Taylor Kemp
Yep. Yeah. I, I also, I always like when you think about the Beatitudes. The first one is blessed are the poor in spirit, for this is the kingdom of heaven. And you can interpret that in a bunch of different ways, but one of them is basically, it's a. The. The entry into the Beatitudes, which is kind of the roadmap of the Christian life, is humility that God can do so much with a humble soul. And I feel like when you hear his story, like he comes from a farm, he was behind in his studies. He was sent to this kind of backwater town. He's got his own. He has a brother priest nearby who wants him out of the job. And he's like, okay, like, there's obviously this is a soul who recognizes that any of the work that is being done is by the power of Christ and not his own, and just how much can be done in that. And also it's something that I feel like you always need reminders of. Like, you always need reminders to get out of God's way, to know that the work is not your own, that all of the fruits of it are not your own, and that he's such a great testament to. I always think of him as like this very simple priest who did unbelievable things and that. That came by way of his simplicity in a sense, like this. This great humility, which is kind of a gateway into just being a vessel for God in the world today.
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Dr. Ben Akers
And putting. And he was where the Lord asked him. He wasn't seeking certain positions and trying.
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Taylor Kemp
To be a bishop.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Right. And I always think of David in the Old Testament, where because the temptation is to seek success and worldly recognition and the. You know, when David was going to be anointed king, his own father didn't invite him to the, to the anointing. And he's. But God knew David was in the field. God knew where John Vianney was, and John was faithful where he was. And the Lord poured The graces out and used him as an instrument to transform ours and then as a model for us today in our conversations. He's got this wonderful quotation where he says, the priesthood is the love of the heart of Christ. And he repeated often to show what a great. He said, look, who brought you into this world in a spiritual way. The priest who forgives you of sins, the priest who takes bread and turns it into the body of Christ. He said, the priest. He said, the priest accompanies you at every moment of your life. He said, what a gift from God to give us priests. And so he wanted to be that model of priests here. He lived that life of priesthood in an imitation of Christ, the great priest and good shepherd. I developed a relationship with him. There's some great biographies if you want to look up those stories I was sharing, like they come from those biographies. But the seminary here in Denver, Colorado, where I worked before, I worked at The Augusta Institute, St. John Vianney Theological Seminary. So a seminary, a place where we form priests to be modeled after and named after St. John Vianney. In 2018, St. John Vianney's heart was touring.
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Taylor Kemp
I went and saw it.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah. Yeah. Was touring here around the United States. And my son, my youngest son, now 3, turns out fine the story, but he was sick at the time and weren't sure exactly what was happening. He was going to need surgery. We were blessed to pray in front of St. John Vianney, but many people around the United States, when he was visiting at different people parts that had heard of what was happening with my son, prayed in front of St. John Vianney. So it was really powerful. I'm very grateful to him because I do think that he had his hand in.
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Taylor Kemp
That's amazing.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, that really is. The saints are wonderful friends.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Well. And I love that the heart traveled because he had such a heart for God. That's true.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He shows us the heart of a priest and who loves God, loves his, loves us. And to remind us to always have our heart on the Lord. And I'd say if I had to think of something, well, you know, what do we take away from this, as lay people looking at a holy priest, is we want to thank our priests.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, that's right.
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Dr. Ben Akers
It's a hard position. Again, the media puts out the bad examples, but we know our parish priests, and we may be blessed with a great priest, and praise the Lord. We might be blessed with a bad priest. Praise the Lord. Now we have to do sacrifices and penances for them, pray for them because the devil hates them so much because of what they do, consecrating bread in their hands, forgiving us, forgiving us of our sins, bringing us into life eternal with the sacraments at the end of our life and in baptism. And so so to really pray for our priests, they are in particular under attack. And use St. John Vianney's intercession for that.
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Taylor Kemp
Yep. For sure. And then his kind of pastoral program of eucharistic devotion, prayer, confession and a Marian devotion is just, you're not going to go wrong with any of those.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yep.
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Taylor Kemp
So thank you, Dr. Akers. Thank you so much for joining us. We pray that these Catholic saint shows and podcasts can help us all grow in our friendship with the saints and maybe make some new friends and intercessors. Thank you so much and God bless.
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Narrator
You can watch these interviews in video format by visiting formed.org formed is an online Catholic streaming service created by the Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press with award winning studies and parish programs, inspiring audio content, movies, ebooks and family friendly kids programming to support the mission of the Augustine institute. Please visit missioncircle.org.