John Vianney

(France, 1786–1859)

He escaped the draft into Napoleon’s army by hiding in the mountains under an assumed name in a community of deserters. When an amnesty was declared, he resumed his studies for the priesthood. He was ordained, but could never master Latin and was not considered bright, so he was sent to a village with only two hundred inhabitants. He stayed for over forty years.

The villagers had lost their faith during the Revolution and the Terror. He restored the church, started an orphanage, and persuaded them to give up the sin of dancing. St. Philomena, to whom he was devoted, cured him of a serious illness; he built a chapel and a shrine in her honor, and urged the parishioners to pray to her.

Word of his sanctity traveled. Twenty thousand pilgrims a year came to his village, and he would spend eighteen hours a day in the confessional, where his consul was usually a single revelatory sentence. Six hundred lay people and three hundred priests attended his funeral. He became the patron saint of priests.

In 2018, his incorrupt heart was taken on a six-month “Heart of a Priest Nationwide Relic Tour” of the US. The organizer of the tour explained: “The church in the United States is wounded now, and we are praying for our priests, and looking to a saint who was a model of virtue and dedication to his ministry to help us through this period of injury and to renewal.” A priest in New Haven, Connecticut, was more explicit: “Essentially the Church in recent months in this country is going through difficult times. The sexual abuse crisis, the clergy sexual abuse, is very much in the headlines and on the hearts of many of the Catholic faithful. I felt it important that we as a parish gather together in this way for several days of prayer—to pray for the crisis, to pray for our Church, and to pray for God’s blessings for what we’re going through right now.”