On August 4, 1859, Jean-Marie Vianney died in the presbytery at Ars, a village of some 230 souls on the Dombes plateau north of Lyon, worn out at seventy-three by forty-one years in one parish. Six thousand people came to the funeral of a priest his superiors had once judged barely fit for ordination. The Church keeps his memorial on the day of his death.
He was born at Dardilly on May 8, 1786, and grew up under the Revolution's persecution of the Church — he made his First Communion in a barn, before a priest who had refused the oath to the revolutionary government. Latin defeated him at the seminary and he was nearly dismissed; only the private tutoring of Father Charles Balley carried him to ordination on August 13, 1815, at twenty-nine. Three years later his bishop sent him to Ars, where the taverns drew better than the church.
What he did there was pastoral rather than spectacular: he restored the church, founded La Providence as an orphanage for girls, and heard confessions. By the 1830s an average of three hundred pilgrims arrived daily. In summer he spent up to sixteen hours a day in the confessional, and in his last year more than a hundred thousand people came. He attempted to leave four times for the contemplative life he wanted, and his parishioners fetched him back each time.
Pius X beatified him in 1905 and Pius XI canonized him in 1925, naming him patron of parish priests in 1929. In 2009, on the 150th anniversary of his death, Benedict XVI opened a Year for Priests and held up the Curé as the model of the parish clergy. His incorrupt body lies in the basilica at Ars, where some 450,000 pilgrims come each year.
