the Curé said on those Sunday mornings that proved so hard an ordeal for him and if we find in many of his utterances “naught for our comfort” we can still obtain some reassurance from the fact that it was the Curé’s purpose to jolt his people out of their laxity—perhaps he will do the same for us.
There remains then the question of the Curé’s alleged rigorism which has been dubbed Jansenistic. This can be disposed of quite shortly. There is no doubt that in certain matters (deferment of absolution, postponement of first communions, his extreme abhorrence of dancing, his diatribes against taverns, for example) he appears to qualify for such an epithet. But before we go so far there are certain points to be borne in mind. Take first the usual practice prevailing at that time in the diocese where he worked. A catechism in circulation in 1818 puts the age for first communion at between eleven and thirteen years of age, especially in boarding schools; it appears clearly enough from the context that children in the countryside might have to wait until even later when they were properly instructed and had “given proof of their perseverance in virtue.” Read the moral theology treatise in use in the seminary at Lyons at the beginning of the nineteenth century—it was not used by St. John Vianney because it was in Latin and he could not follow the classes in that language. This book, by Bailly, displays a rigorism that seems to us nowadays to be quite impossible. (It is interesting that the book was later condemned, but it was nevertheless a mirror of the practice current at that time.) The Rituel de Toulon (the Curé’s makeshift theology course) was of a similar nature. The trend of the times was towards severity (compare the fasting rules in France or even in the U.S.A. then and now) and an arid legalism that strikes us at the present time as devoid of encouragement for men on their road to heaven.
Doctrinally Jansenism was dead—in practice some of its effects lived on. But it is too easy to term Jansenistic all that strikes us nowadays as too hard for man to bear. We have only to read the lives of the saints of those days or indeed of the last three
