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Updated: May 15, 2025
When, a little later, he wished to increase this "Fondement" Father Vianney prayed again in the same vein, adding, however, the request that the 200 francs must be given to him that evening, or the gift would not be considered an answer to his petition. It was but a little while later, when a benefactor approached him with an offering of 300 francs. His prayer was answered.
This question the vicar-general saw fit to settle for himself, and, after examining Vianney thoroughly, he announced with complacency: "You know as much as many a country pastor." The vicar-general, however, had previously conferred with the superior of the seminary and had asked him: "Is young Vianney pious? Is he devoted to the Blessed Virgin?"
Father Vianney exclaimed: "No, my friend, this desire is unfounded; stay where you are." The pastor suggested that as a friar preacher he could be more successful. The blessed cure replied immediately: "Where you are placed there is always more to do than you can really accomplish!" More than once the result shows how imprudent it was to disregard the counsels of that enlightened man.
By degrees the grown up parishioners came to assist at these instructions, which took the place of those which had been held in the parish church. This home was maintained by Father Vianney for twenty-five years.
Those men came to keep watch with him, and for many nights in succession they heard the same sounds which Father Vianney had heard, without seeing any person or thing to account for them. Like their pastor they were much wrought up over the strange occurrences.
The progress in the spiritual condition of the congregation at Ars necessarily became known in the surrounding country and Father Vianney's fellow priests of other parishes begged him to help them in the pulpit and confessional. These requests Father Vianney never refused, so that, in the space of two years, he became the real apostle of the cathedral circuit.
Among other incidents observed by many witnesses it is related that one day there was no flour for the day's supply of bread and no money with which to purchase any. Everyone whom Father Vianney approached upon this subject seemed either to be unable or unwilling to relieve him, so that the cure imagined himself almost forsaken. Never before had he felt so miserable. Then he remembered St.
On Aug. 4th, 1903, at the very hour, when at Ars they were celebrating a solemn High Mass on the forty-fourth anniversary of the death of John Baptist Vianney, another solemn ceremony was taking place at Rome, viz., the election of the former village cure of Salzano, later Cardinal Sarto, patriarch of Venice, to the Papacy, who chose for himself the title of Pius X.
Then Father Vianney described to him his past life, with surprising accuracy and drew from him the admission that all he had told him was true. The light of faith was forthwith rekindled in the soul of the sinner, who, strongly affected, cried out with violent sobs: "My God, I believe; I adore Thee; I love Thee; and beg of Thee forgiveness!"
But his prayers were of the most simple kind. He favored simplicity in every action. In the church, before the Blessed Sacrament, the pious cure's sense of the Real Presence was so vivid that a colleague, who noticed his radiant look, regarded him with astonishment, thinking Father Vianney with his corporal eyes, beheld some one there.
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