St John Vianney today

By Fr Enrico Parry

One of the few things I can do properly in a kitchen is to make soup. What I love about preparing it is the peeling and cutting of many different vegetables. When I can afford it, I add some meat. I love soup, come winter or summer.

At the bottom of this attachment to soup must be my love for eating. St John Vianney, the patron saint of priests, had a very rigorous life of penance, of mortification of the flesh. It is well known that he abstained almost completely from food. He slept two hours a night, mostly. And I love my sleep, too.

It is difficult to identify with Jean Marie Baptist Vianney, both as a person and a priest. But it would be foolhardy for me or any of us who enjoy the patronage of this holy man who died 150 years ago, to regard his forms of piety and devotion, his lifestyle as person and priest as odd and therefore amusing and to move it aside and go on with our lives.

John Vianney’s times looked very much like our own. I will isolate only three similarities between his times and ours: intolerance, social upheaval and great poverty, and a world weakened by illness.

Intolerance: Because of a deep-seated hatred for clergy by revolutionists, John Vianney received first Holy Communion when he was 13 in the secrecy of his home. Confirmation he also had to receive in secret, since it was best for priests in certain areas not to be too public about their ministry.

Thank God this did not last too long. In 1801, when John Vianney was 15 years old, Napoleon Bonaparte established a concordat according to which Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism were given the right to exist alongside each other and Judaism.  A law needed to be enacted to force Christians or religionists to tolerate each other.

Our society and church are replete with attitudes that do not allow difference and variety. Either all will be the same, or we do away with you. Not only is racism alive and well in its many different guises in structures of society, but religious differences are often exploited to fan violence in many different parts of the world. Ecumenical dialogue between Christian churches that blossomed towards the end of the former century now look as if they will not succeed in achieving anything worthwhile. Within churches, gender and other differences are often tools for painful conflict and shameful oppression.

Upheaval and poverty: The third decade of the 19th century was a time of political turmoil which saw many protests during civil unrest, repealing of parliament and the dissolution of the National Guard, and so on. When lending agencies shut down in Paris in July 1830, many factories closed their doors. Protesting citizens were armed with stones, paving stones, roof tiles, flowerpots thrown from the higher floors of buildings on to the other side, and the soldiers armed with live ammunition. Slogans were shouted by angry mobs: “Death to the ministers! Down with the aristocrats!” In no time, people were shot and killed. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In South Africa, we have known political violence in many different forms, even up to the latest elections. In many other countries, change of government is often accompanied by violence and bloodshed. In Zimbabwe, up to this day, large numbers of people are displaced because of political intolerance and the desperate holding on to power. Recently, in KwaZulu-Natal, the unemployed poor took to the streets in protest and engaged in violent shopping. Elsewhere, service delivery protests and wage negotiations turned certain parts of our society on their head creating huge uncertainty.

lllness: 1832 saw a huge cholera epidemic in Paris. By the end of the pandemic, in September, more than 100000 people were dead.

Since 1981, more than 25 million people have died of Aids-related illnesses. At the end of 2007, Africa had 11,6 million Aids orphans. Around 67% of people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa. Our world is sick.

What did John Vianney do in his times? How did he read the signs of the times? How did he respond to these events in his day? For me, this is where John Vianney suddenly becomes an astonishing person that speaks in loud volume to priests of today, to those preparing for priesthood, and to those who give the Church priests and support them.

Although he formed a home for girls called The Providence, which soon spread to other parts of France, John Vianney was a priest to these people. Not a fellow revolutionist, not a soldier in the army fighting to preserve the order of the world, not a hospitaller, but a priest who cared for people as priest. He lived his priesthood to the full, visiting his people, praying for his people, celebrating the Eucharist with the greatest devotion with the people, unburdening people in the confessional where he spent ungodly hours, teaching the children in catechism.

John Vianney was a priest through and through. And in this way he transformed not only his own life, but the lives of the people of his parish and the lives of those who travelled to the small town of Ars from all over the world.

All he needed was found within the priesthood Christ had given him. He lived chastity, he lived obedience and he lived an all too simple life. And by these virtues he changed the world. And because of these simple basics people said throughout France: “Go down to Ars, there is a holy man there.”

I dare say we are too ready to underestimate the transforming power of the priest as priest in society today. Perhaps because of too many poor examples of pastors we clergy are too ashamed to stand up and be the priests we are called to be and to let priests be priests. We need to make his example ours, to make his sometimes excessive sounding views of the priest ours, modified by our day and our time.

John Vianney is no odd person and priest, out of touch and ill-suited for his day and ours, but a man who changed his times by simply being a priest. Let us priests embrace our patron and so change our world.

Still, his eating patterns disturb me; I love soup and I love eating!

Fr Parry is rector of St John Vianney Seminary in Pretoria. This is an edited version of his homily on the feast of St John Vianney.