The Spirit of the Curé of Ars

St. John Vianney went straight from the confessional to the pulpit without notes, in a country French he never bothered to correct, and two or three hundred people a day came out to Ars to hear him. Fr. Alfred Monnin, one of the priests who worked beside him there, admits that the best of what he heard could not be written down. Then he gives you what could: twenty-one of the daily catechisms, on salvation, prayer, the Mass, confession, Communion, sin, pride, and suffering; extracts from five Sunday homilies; and the sayings that came out of the Curé by the fire at the end of his long days.

What comes through is a man sharper and funnier than the holy card. He calls purgatory the infirmary of the good God, says we are going toward eternity as if by steam, and describes himself as a goose, a turkey, and a crab. A visitor who announces that he has no faith and has come to reason with him is pointed to the kneeling stool anyway. Underneath the wit the teaching is plain and demanding, on Sunday work and the seven deadly sins, and on going to Communion when you feel unworthy because you need it, and he is as plain about mercy as he is about hell.

Seventeen of his exhortations, on death, judgment, the capital sins, grace, prayer, the love of God, and paradise, were added for the English edition of 1865 by Fr. John Edward Bowden of the London Oratory. Most pieces run a few pages. It suits a priest or catechist who wants the hard things said simply, and anyone who wants a saint’s own voice at the bedside.