FOREWORD
Of ALL the sermons that are preached in the Church throughout the world how few are published. Priests labor to instruct and inspire their flocks to a better life; they preach Sunday after Sunday—many priests more than once on a Sunday—and most of these efforts go unrecorded, for the sermon is an ephemeral and short-lived composition; even more than a newspaper story, it is dead immediately it has been preached. And the sermon needs to be fitted to its audience, it must be in terms that are understood, it must be of its own times, and in an idiom suited to those it is intended to influence. Consequently, the few sermons that are published, usually those by famous preachers, speak to people of the present; the voices of dead preachers rarely come to us by the printed word, or if they do how seldom do they move us. And if this is true of men of one’s own country and language, how much more true it is of those not only from a past century but from another country, who spoke another language, who preached under conditions and within a context that never could have been ours.
Yet in this book we have a selection of sermons from the pen of a man who died just a century ago, a parish priest in a small agricultural village just north of Lyons in France, to which he was appointed in 1818, three years after Napoleon’s downfall, They are the sermons he preached to his little flock endeavoring to make them better Christians, before the time came when he could speak of his parish as completely converted.
To appreciate these sermons, therefore, our first task is to put them back into their context—the context of the life of the man who preached them and of those whom he addressed. Most readers are probably acquainted with the main facts of the life of 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.
In those early days at Ars its young parish priest had to bring his people back to the practice of their religion. And there is the first difference between those days and our own, for his problems are not exactly the problems of the priest today. Nowadays the great obstacle is not so much morality as faith; priests have to preach the faith, to kindle the spark that through grace will cause men to believe in God and the teaching of the Church. In Ars at the beginning of the nineteenth century St. John Vianney was confronted with a flock that possessed the faith but were exceedingly lax in its practice; it had grown dim no doubt but it was there and for that reason his task was easier for morality in general is a consequence of belief. He preached therefore principally on morality, the sinfulness of dancing and drinking (the besetting sins of the people of Ars), the need to reform, the terrors of hell, the joys of heaven. Reading these efforts nowadays we are at once struck by their severity, their seeming lack of compassion and indeed what we are tempted to call their Jansenistic approach. We know that St. John Vianney was a saint and therefore ex hypothesi no Jansenist. He certainly did not preach heresy nor condone it, but be followed scrupulously the practice of his times and in taking his teaching from the approved sources of those days inevitably presented it in a form that was colored by a contemporary approach and preoccupations. It will help us to realize this more clearly if we examine the method of composition that he used and the sources from which he took his sermons.
How did he prepare for what was a considerable ordeal for him on those Sunday mornings? We know that his sermons cost him an enormous effort and that he prepared them with immense care. With the aid of certain works of reference he wrote out his sermons at length. He had never been much good at his books and the effort at actual composition, for he wrote out every word, took him some time. Occasionally he would leave the sacristy, where he wrote on the vestment press, and go to kneel before the altar. Hours were spent in this way in the preparation of a sermon and once it was all down on paper he set about learning it by heart, thirty or forty pages of it covered with his spidery, unformed handwriting, with never a paragraph and hardly a margin. His memory had always been poor. ‘When he thought that he had mastered his sermon he would try it over in the churchyard out aloud late on Saturday night and more than once, to his embarrassment, passers-by caught him in the act.
The congregation that at the beginning of his pastorate at Ars came to hear these sermons was scanty enough—a few old peasant women, the lady of the manor, perhaps a couple of men and some of the children. And the new parish priest made so much noise that they could not go to sleep while he preached. He shouted and declaimed. After the Gospel at the sung Mass on Sunday mornings, when he put off his chasuble and went up the rickety wooden steps to the pulpit, they knew that he would be there for a good hour, that they would be forced to listen and that they would hear nothing for their comfort.
Examples of these sermons of his early days at Ars are still extant. In later years, when he ceased to write them down beforehand and preached, not without preparation—his entire life was that—but without the set form that he at first adopted, the whole style was changed. In those first months as a parish priest he preached to his flock about the proper way to behave in church, about keeping Sunday holy and the purpose of his work in Ars as their priest which was, he told them, to lead them all to heaven. His instructions were moral rather than dogmatic; dancing, the frequentation of taverns, Sunday work, earned his severest reproofs.
There were occasions when he lost the thread of his sermons, stumbled over a phrase and, remembering no more, was obliged to leave the pulpit. After a short night, worn out with his efforts to learn it all by heart, chronically undernourished and still fasting at perhaps nearly eleven of a Sunday morning, he could hardly have expected it otherwise. There came a time when, caught in the pulpit and remembering nothing of his carefully prepared discourse, he began to improvise and in doing so found himself as a preacher.
The complete written sermons of the Curé d’Ars number eighty-five; taken as a whole they are extremely revealing on the subject of the preacher. This point can hardly be explored here for a whole biography would be needed for the purpose. What is more to the point in our present context is to examine the sources laid under contribution by the Curé d’Ars and the extent of his indebtedness to them.
A careful textual examination of the Curé’s sermons reveals the use that he made of other sources. He had a few sermon manuals, nearly all of which he acquired before 1830. Some few sermons are copied out almost verbatim from Bonnardel’s “familiar instructions,” others come from Msgr. Joly’s “Prones,” but here the Curé was more discriminating. He was prepared to follow his author into the high-flown oratory (that, one may imagine, came strangely from the lips of this simple country parish priest), but when Msgr. Joly became involved in learned and intricate theological discussion there his follower abandoned him not, as a rule, to write something of his own but to seek in another, more homely source (possibly the missionary sermons of Lajeune or Cochin’s book) the application and explanation of the point that he was trying to make.
Rodriguez’ book figures among those at Ars but it does not seem to have been used as a source save for anecdotes (those who are familiar with this classic on Christian perfection will remember that it is crammed with them, and they read strangely to modern ears). It has been said that the sermon on humility came from the Curé’s mastery of Rodriguez’ treatment of that subject, but we now know that this sermon came from another source.
It is interesting to notice that if the Curé d’Ars was indebted to Bonnardel the good canon himself was not above doing a little copying: he took the Sunday sermons of one Reguis (the book figures in the library at Ars) of something like half a century earlier and endowing them with a trifle more concision and a more polished literary style gave them to the public. Bonnardel was humble enough to say whence his material came. Most of the Curé’s sermons owe something to Bonnardel and several are an anthology of passages taken from this book but from different sermons. One of the Curé’s characteristic sermons on “the sanctification of the Christian,” considered for long as one of his most personal efforts, comes almost entirely from Bonnardel’s “How to behave throughout the year.”
The Curé’s other favorite source was the (anonymous) Catechiste des Peuples. Here he found the matter of something like twenty sermons and, unlike Bonnardel’s book, plenty of anecdotes to drive home the points. If some of the sermons reveal that, apart from a few reflections, whole long passages were copied, others, it must be acknowledged, show that several sources were laid under contribution, that points were arranged differently from the treatment in the original and that in some cases the preacher’s own contribution was somewhat more extensive than in other instances, though it was never very great.
‘What are we to make of all this? The published sermons of the Curé’s are priceless evidence of what he thought appropriate for the people of his parish in the early years of the nineteenth century. If they show us nothing else they are, we can be certain, the choice that he made, and even this small indication reveals to us something of the man. Then, too, they are evidence of his humility. He was neither learned nor eloquent and indeed, save in the technical sense, he was hardly literate (examination of his manuscripts and letters shows this clearly) but he knew what he was about and by his life and preaching successfully inculcated the “one thing necessary” and changed the whole face of his village so that what had been almost the worst and the least regarded parish in the diocese, became the model for the whole country and drew to it thousands upon thousands of pilgrims from all over the world.
So these sermons, put together with such labor have something to tell us, even if it is not what we expect. We can still read what 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 hundred years to see that while moral principles remain constant their application in a given situation undergoes variations of emphasis, Read St. Francis de Sales on dancing, study a little of St. Benedict Joseph Labre’s attitude to everything (in his view) concerning chastity, consider what some doctors of the Church have said about the theatre and then reflect on our times, not on their specifically evil manifestations but on those things that we take for granted—parish dances, card parties, theatrical entertainments and the like. We have our difficulties and grievous temptations but it is probable, I think, that if another saint like the Curé d’Ars arose in our midst the things that he would castigate might well lie elsewhere, things, possibly, that have not occurred to us.
That the Curé d’Ars may have used a severity in dealing with his flock that now appears foreign to our present habits is really unimportant; he was of his times, he spoke to them in their own idiom, but we should not forget that as years went on his severity diminished and, though dancing remained his especial aversion, he did not defer absolution as he had previously done, and the burden of his sermons—copied from no one: he had not the time—welled up from a heart overflowing with love of God. That is just another way of saying that as a young priest his steps were firmly set on the path to heaven but he had not come to the heights of holiness; when as an old man he stood in his pulpit, toothless and mumbling so that few could hear him, the burden of his message was the love of God and the very sight of him standing there moved many to tears and contrition. His sermon was his life. But he had reached the goal of sanctity principally through his devotion to duty as a parish priest, and that duty had included preparing sermons as best be could for his erring parishioners in those far-off days; for he realized well his limitations. And that is only one of the lessons of that incredible life of his: devotion to duty that led him to heaven and, we may be sure, many of his flock with him,