John Mary Vianney was born Jean-Marie Vianney on 8 May 1786 at Dardilly, near Lyon, into a family of peasant farmers. From early childhood he worked in the fields and remained illiterate until the age of seventeen. Through his mother's teaching he learned many prayers by heart and grew in a deep religious sense. During the French Revolution he received the sacrament of Confession at home from a refractory priest who had refused the revolutionary oath, and he made his First Communion in a barn during a clandestine Mass.
At seventeen he felt the call to the priesthood, saying that if he were a priest he would wish to win many souls. His lack of formal education made the path extremely difficult. Only with the patient help of learned priests, above all Abbé Balley, parish priest of Écully, was he finally ordained a priest on 13 August 1815 at the age of twenty-nine. Three years later, in 1818, he was sent to Ars, a small village of some 230 inhabitants in the southeast of France near Belley.
There he devoted all his energies to the care of souls. He founded the Institute of Providence to shelter orphans, visited the sick and the poorest families, restored the parish church, and organized patronal feasts. His preaching, daily catechesis for children and adults, and works of ardent charity, which he drew from the Holy Eucharist as from a fountain, gradually renewed the spiritual life of the place. Above all he became known for his ministry in the confessional. Always available for listening and forgiveness, he spent as many as sixteen hours a day reconciling penitents. Crowds came from every part of France; Ars came to be called "the great hospital of souls," and each year more than seventy thousand people made the pilgrimage to him. He himself kept vigil and fasted to help atone for the sins of the faithful, telling a confrere that his method was to give sinners a light penance and to do the rest himself in their place.
Wholly given to God and to his parishioners, he died at Ars on 4 August 1859 at the age of seventy-three. His remains rest in the sanctuary dedicated to him at Ars, which receives hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year. He was beatified on 8 January 1905 by Pope Pius X and canonized on 31 May 1925 by Pope Pius XI in St. Peter's Basilica. In 1929 Pius XI proclaimed him patron of all the parish priests of the world. In 1959, on the centenary of his death, Saint John XXIII dedicated to him the encyclical Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia, holding him up as a model for priests; in 2009, for the 150th anniversary of his death, Benedict XVI proclaimed a Year for Priests so that his example might foster the interior renewal of the clergy.
May Saint John Mary Vianney, Priest intercede for us, and may we imitate today the holiness this Life has shown.
