John Vianney

Statue in Ostende

Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney (8 May 1786 – 4 August 1859) was a French Catholic priest who is venerated in the Catholic Church as a saint and as the patron saint of parish priests.

Quotes

• God has filled our hearts with desires so vast and so magnificent that nothing in creation is capable of satisfying them. Thus it is that in the hope of finding some pleasure, we attach ourselves to created objects and that we have no sooner possessed and sampled that which we have so ardently desired than we turn to something else, hoping to find what we wanted. We are, then, through our own experience, constrained to admit that it is but useless for us to want to derive our happiness here below from transient things. If we hope to have any consolation in this world, it will only be by despising the things which are passing and which have no lasting value and in striving towards the noble and happy end for which God has created us. Do you want to be happy, my friends? Fix your eyes on Heaven; it is there that your hearts will find that which will satisfy them completely.
  • Do You Want to Be Happy?

• How many things would be better, if we in our daily lives gave a larger place to the Virgin!

• Quoted in Natale Ginelli, La tua via, Edizioni Paoline, 1957 (in Italian).

• If we did not have the Sacrament of Order, we would not have Our Lord. Who put it in the tabernacle? The priest. Who received your soul upon its entry into this world? The priest. Who feeds her to give her strength to make her pilgrimage? Always the priest. Who will prepare her to appear before God, washing her soul for the first time in the Blood of Jesus Christ? The priest, every time the priest. If the soul, then, comes to the hour of passing away, who will resurrect it, making it calm and peaceful? Once again the priest. You cannot think of any benefit of God without encountering, along with this memory, the image of the priest. If you went to confess to the Holy Virgin or an angel, would they absolve you? No. Would they give you the Body and Blood of Jesus? No. The Holy Virgin cannot send Her divine Son down to the Holy Host. Even two hundred angels could not absolve you. A priest, however simple he is, can do it. He can tell you, "Go in peace, I forgive you." What a great thing the priest is!

• Quoted in Gianpaolo Romanato, Pio X. La vita di papà Sarto, Rusconi, Milano, 1992, p. 224-225. As reported in Cristina Siccardi, San Pio X. Vita del papa che ha ordinato e riformato la Chiesa, edizioni San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo (MI), 2014, p. 30. ISBN 978-88-215-9276-8.

Catechismo

AA. VV., Liturgia horarum iuxta ritum Romanum, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, ed. italiana, Roma, 1972

• My children, your heart is small, but prayer expands it and makes it capable of loving God.
• The treasure of the Christian is not on earth, but in heaven. Our thought therefore must turn to where our treasure is.
• Man's most beautiful work is to pray and love.
• In the well-made prayer the pains melt like snow in the sun.
• If you pray and love, behold, this is the happiness of man on earth.

Pensieri

• I love St. John very much because he was so pure and took such care of Our Lord and the Holy Virgin.
• (About the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception) How happy! I have always felt that this ray was missing from the brilliance of Catholic truths. It is a gap that could not remain in religion.
• Consecrate yourselves to Mary. Pray to this Holy Mother well, honor her especially in her Immaculate Conception.
• O Immaculate Virgin, who obtains from God whatever you want...
• If hell could be redeemed, you Mary would obtain his grace.

Pensieri scelti

Giovanni Maria Vianney, Pensieri scelti e fioretti, traduzione dal francese di Alessandra Ruzzon, Edizioni San Paolo, 1999 (in Italian)

• Alas! It is difficult to understand how and why what an insignificant creature like us can become proud of. A dust fist as big as a walnut: this is what we will become after death. You can be very proud of that!
• Go from continent to continent, from kingdom to kingdom, from wealth to wealth, from pleasure to pleasure: you will not find the happiness you seek. The earth and what it contains cannot satisfy an immortal soul any more than a pinch of flour, in the mouth of a hungry man, can satisfy him.
• He who has lost the purity of the soul is like a piece of cloth soaked in oil: you can wash and dry it, the stain will continue to bloom again; in the same way it takes a miracle to wash the impure soul.
• He who does not pray leans toward the ground, like a mole trying to make a hole to hide.
• One hundred years without priest and people will end up worshipping animals.
• We understand the value of our soul from the efforts the devil makes to corrupt it.
• I believe that a person who does not listen to the word of God properly cannot be saved: he will never know what must be done to obtain salvation.
• Before a well-crafted prayer, sorrows melt like snow in the sun.
• This is how you can overcome evil with good, and this is what it means to be holy. How many souls without history in the world will one day appear rich in all the victories against evil achieved instant after instant.
• My children, the saints had died to themselves to such an extent that they did not care whether others were of the same opinion or not. It's common to say, "Oh! How simple the saints were!". Yes, they were simple about the things of the world, but, about the things of God, they understood each other, indeed! Of course, they understood nothing of the things of the world! But only because they appeared to their eyes of so little importance that they paid no attention to them.
• My children, we realize how much power a pure soul can have over the good God: she obtains from Him everything she wants.
• My children, I often think that most Christians who damn themselves, damn themselves because of their ignorance.
• The saints knew themselves better than they knew others: that is why they were humble.
• The devil leaves the bad Christians alone: no one takes care of it.
• The sin is the executioner of the good Lord and the murderer of the soul. It is sin that takes us from heaven to fall into hell. Nevertheless, we love him! How crazy! If we thought about it carefully, we would have such a horror of sin that we could not commit it.
• In Paradise there is no resentment. For this reason, good and humble hearts, who endure insults and slander with joy or indifference, begin to enjoy their paradise in this world; those who hold grudges, however, are unhappy: their expressions are worried and their gaze seems to devour everything around them.
• Humility is like a scale: the lower you get on one side, the higher you get on the other.
• Humility is the best way to love God. It is our pride that prevents us from becoming saints.
• The only way to disorientate the demon, when he arouses in us feelings of hatred towards those who harm us, is to pray for them immediately.
• Man was created for heaven: the devil broke the ladder that led to heaven.
• The earth is like a bridge to cross a river: it only serves to support our feet. We are in this world, but we are not of this world, since every day we say: "Our Father who art in heaven..." To have our reward we must therefore wait to be "in our house" in the Father's house.
• The most common temptations are pride and impurity; one of the best means of resisting these temptations is an active life for the glory of God.
• Many are the Christians, my children, who know absolutely not why they are in the world.
• In the soul united with God, spring always reigns.
• We do not believe there is a place on this earth where we can escape the fight against the devil.
• We put pride everywhere, like salt.
• We do not have the courage to bear our cross: we are wrong; for, no matter how much we do, the cross holds us and escapes it and is impossible.
• We postpone our conversion until the moment of death; but who assures us that we will have one last attack?
• One must never despise the poor, because this contempt falls on God.
• Take a vase full of liquor and cap it carefully: only then will you keep the liquor for as long as you want. Likewise, if after the communion you carefully guarded Our Lord in recollection, you would feel that fire devouring longer.
• When our hands have touched aromatic plants, they perfume everything they touch; so let us pass our prayers through the hands of the Holy Virgin; and she will make them fragrant.
• Those who humiliate us are our friends, not those who praise us.
• If you are not saints, you will be reprobate; there is no middle ground; you must be either one or the other: be careful.
• If a person is educated there is always the possibility that he or she will recover.
• You can be holy to work miracles but, if you don't have charity, you won't go to heaven.
• The grace and the cross are required.
• All the saints have had great devotion to the Holy Virgin; no grace comes from heaven without first passing through her hands.
• Everything we do outside of [serving God] is wasted time.
• A pure soul is with God like a child with his mother: he caresses her, kisses her and his mother gives him back the caresses and hugs.
• An educated person always has two guides who walk before him: counsel and obedience.

Quotes about

• The curate of Ars [...] shows us as if it were the first time what confession is. He frees her from the nausea of Christians and makes her a luminous revelation of the Holy Spirit.

• Adrienne von Speyr, Mistica oggettiva, edited by Barbara Albrecth, translation into Italian by Benedetto Testa, Jaca Book, Milano, 1989. ISBN 88-16-30175-9, pp. 85-86.

• [In Paradise] Up there is St. Thomas, a saint so phlegmatic that, if an ox had entered his room, he would have continued to study; and there is also St. John Eudes, who felt himself boiling with anger at the mere sight of a heretic. There's Francis de Sales, the saint of fine manners, an artist in speaking and writing; and there's the Curate of Ars, a champion of discipline on his back and potatoes eaten with mold a week after cooking.

• Albino Luciani, Illustrissimi, foreword by Igino Giordani, commented by Giovanni Mocchetti, Edizioni A.P.E., Mursia, Milano, 1979, p. 94.

• Probably the greatest confessor of the Church is the holy Curate of Ars.

• Joachim Meisner, quoted in Tragedia per la Chiesa: il sacramento della confessione dimentica