In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Within the recent past, the last few weeks, we have celebrated, memorialized, brought back into our consciousness a number of outstanding figures. We had Saint Benedict, we had the Saint Alphonsus Liguori. We had Saint Bonaventure.
We had Saint Ignatius of Loyola. We touched upon the great Saint Teresa of Avila. Today, we have Saint John Viognet. Well, it's quite a crowd. It's a motley crew.
There's scarcely any similarity among as far as their backgrounds are concerned, how they arrived, where they did it finally arrived, what they achieved, and what they achieved. Now, all the first ones I mentioned were in a sense normal. Normal, whatever that word means. But anyway, they went through the usual procedures of their times. Notice the space there.
You're going all the way from Saint Benedict fourth century AD all the way down today to about 1856. That's the span in time. This I don't overlook this. This I think is a very important thing that these are our friends. These are the people we associate with.
This is the church we know. This is the church we belong to. Not something that came in the sixteenth century or in the twentieth. And so that outside of Saint John Viognet, these other people were, we would say, quite normal. You can't say that about this the curry of ours.
His name was of course Saint John Viognet. He's mostly known by as the the parish priest of Arce, a city not too far away from Lyon. He, there was nothing normal about him as far as being a priest is concerned. He not only was deprived because of this political situation at the time, he was born I think around 1780 something after the French Revolution, but he was caught up in its tide and he had practically no formal education. At a very early age, he was let out of the home to go out and take care of some sheep or some cattle or something.
He had practically no formal education whatsoever at any time, at any time. And by a strange coincidence, was inducted into the army. And he just stopped in the wayside church to say some prayers and forgot to join the troops, so he became AOL. And even in the eighteenth century, that wasn't acceptable conduct or this is the beginning now of the nineteenth. The government didn't like people going AOL, So he had to go into hiding.
He came out of that, was granted a pardon with a lot of others, and then he decided to become a priest. You can see this was a very fine beginning of a priestly education. When in order to study anything like philosophy or theology, you had to know some Latin. Now there's one important factor in this man's life, and that's a priest that he met early. A man by the name of b a l l e y.
Ballet, I would say, but that's probably wrong, but it's b a l l e y. This man took a very deep and persevering interest in the this guy, G. Vianney, who had the crazy idea of becoming a priest because it was absurd. And yet and of course, he tried it. He went to the seminary and was kicked out because he couldn't make the grade.
And this wasn't merely because of lack of education. He wasn't naturally an intelligent bright student. I mean, just normally bright. You didn't have to be a genius, you know. Some men are in the priesthood who aren't geniuses.
They just kind of slip in accidentally. But he didn't have anything going for him except one thing. I mean, there were others, this one, that was this friend of his, Abbe Bale, who wouldn't give up on him. He took him into his own home, tried to teach him something. And finally, after he thought he had him sufficiently educated, he presented him to the seminary at Leon and they with great reluctance accepted him as a candidate for the priesthood and the bishop ordained him.
That's how he got into the priesthood. Wasn't anything normal about this at all. Then he went and you might guess that he became the assistant of father Baveh. And he was there about two years when he was shipped off to a little mission with about two fifty people in the parish. And that was Ars, this little town of Ars.
And that's where he stayed until he died. Now, in a in a very real sense, this man's preparation for the priesthood was extraordinary. And if you contrast it with a man like Bonaventure and Ignatius Loyola or a saint Teresa of Avila or a saint Alphonse Ligure or a Benedict, there is nothing you see here in the sense of the formal education or most anything you want to pick up except one important thing, and that is this prayer. A personal consciousness and awareness of God and doing the job. Doing the job at hand.
When this young man goes into this little parish, it wasn't a parish of ours. It was not a very good place to go. It was practically abandoned. And all his life, he was extraordinarily devoted to prayer. That's how he missed becoming a soldier.
So when he got into this parish, his ascetical practices as well as his prayer increased. That's one thing he had in common with all these other people. All of them. Every one of them. No exceptions here at all.
The kind of prayer, yes, they differ. But actually, this personal approach to God is the totality of their existence. There was no difference there. It's a difference of quality, not in direction. Now, these three what's I depend mostly on a fallible memory of Henri Gayon's story of the secret of the Courier of Ars is what he called it and I read it a few years ago.
But the thing that strikes you when he went into this parish, he did the things which seemed to be needed doing. You see, you don't have to search around and do God's will generally. It's usually on your doorstep if you're willing to look. The first thing he saw was the ruined church. So he set about doing something about that, building up the house of I mean, the physical building.
The second thing he tried to do was to to know his parishioners. So he took a he only had about 250, but he took it upon himself to visit them, to try to get to know them even though he was not always a welcome visitor. And then the third thing he did, which obviously needed to be doing, needed doing was to teach him something. So he became the village, the parish catechist. These are the things that were very obvious and they are obviously on the threshold today of every pastor.
These things don't change. But he saw them and he did something about it. Meanwhile, he hadn't given up a bit on his prayer and his ascetical life, which was extreme. He practically Well, I don't like to go in, but he practically lived on moldy potatoes. Course, he may have had a lot of penicillin in them, I don't know.
But that's what he did. And then as you know, he made his reputation as far as the world is concerned on being a confessor, hearing confessions. And of course, there are all kinds of stories told about that. Furthermore, beyond all dispute, beyond all controversy, some very curious things happened to that man like having a fire in his bed. That's not exactly normal.
I mean, having the real fire. And very funny things happened to him all during his life. He was not an ordinary person. That's for sure. It's not ordinary that he ever became to be formally canonized.
As someone said, nobody is deader than a dead bishop than a dead pastor. And yet for some reason or other, he managed to be finally canonized about I think it was about 1925 or some time in there. So that this man's extraordinary. You can look at it from all kinds of points of view and you'll always and you'll come up with the same thing, he was an extraordinary man. In many ways, much more extraordinary than any of these other people we've mentioned as far as their personal lives are concerned, as far as their lives being out of the ordinary, the normal, as I say whatever that means.
He was totally different and totally committed to God. And in being totally committed to God, he was not so much different from all others totally committed to God. Now, I know, and if you've read any of his like if you read Gayon or any reliable life, he was an extremist. No one's holding him up as a model that everybody should follow, nobody. And he was wrong in many ways.
His moral theology was far too severe. But we mustn't lose sight of what he accomplished, what he did, And what comes out clearly is what happened to him happened to him. In most instances, passive voice. Passive voice. But when you it's easy to overdo that and you say, here was an instrument of God, you know, all that kind of talk.
That's fine, and he was. He was certainly the empty vessel. But on the other hand, when God spoke, he listened and he moved. That's the important thing. He didn't look into the tomorrow.
He didn't look into those fine father pastures. He didn't look beyond his little, old, broken down, practically abandoned where he had been officially put of ours. He went there as a it was a hopeless case. Really, I can't exaggerate it. And yet, what did he do?
What he did, you can't say he did. It's too obvious that something was working here beyond that man. But on the other hand, the man was working too. When God spoke his name, he replied, here Lord, am I. The name of the father, son, and holy spirit.
Amen.