the preacher, St. John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, and know that when he was appointed to Ars he came to a parish that, owing to the French Revolution and the shortage of priests, had been neglected for many years, a place where very few of the people went to Mass on Sundays or made their Easter duties. ‘We have to remember also that the Curé d’Ars was not a learned man and that he had been sent away from the seminary because he knew so little Latin that he could not follow the course of lectures. He was obliged to study his theology from a book (the Rituel de Toulon) that in reality was not a theological treatise at all; it was a handy “Inquire Within upon Everything” for the busy parish priest which told him the minimum that he had to know to run his parish, what his duties were, what his rights, and gave a summary of the dogmatic and moral theology that would be all that he might be expected to need.
We also know how by dint not of his persuasive speech but by the mute eloquence of his holy life he converted his parish and indeed attracted to it thousands from all over the world so that in the last year of his life (1858-9) something like a hundred thousand persons made the journey to Ars. But they did not come for his preaching but to consult him in the confessional and to lay their troubles at his feet, perhaps even to ask for a miracle (and there were miracles at Ars). Yet they would have heard him preach, quite informally at the morning instruction that he gave every day or, at greater length, on Sundays.
These were not the sermons that we can now read. Then he had not time to prepare and write them down besieged as he was by day and by night, at the mercy of the countless pilgrims. It was in his early days as a priest at Ars that he prepared his sermons, writing them all down beforehand and learning them by heart. These in the main are the sermons of his that we have; what few morsels of his later pulpit utterances have come down to us have done so from the pens of others who put down what they remembered and unconsciously perhaps polished what they reported.
