The Sermons of the Curé of Ars/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
The Curé of Ars knew no vanity whatsoever, not even the vanity of authorship. All he had printed during his lifetime were “four or five prayers dictated to Mlle. Lassagne, the directress of La Providence,” and even these appeared under the veil of anonymity in the Guide for Pious Souls, a work which was sometimes attributed to him, but which was really that of a priest from Lyons, M. 'Abbé Peyronnet, chaplain at Fourviére.
If Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney had wished to give something to the public, undoubtedly he would have chosen to publish his sermons, of which he had completed easily six volumes. The thought never even occurred to him. He kept his manuscripts for a certain number of years, perhaps as long as he hoped that he would be able to use them again. But the time came—around 1832 or so—when, overwhelmed by the work of the confessional, he no longer had even the leisure to reread his manuscripts, and he did not give any further thought to them.
He had a good hundred sermons. He had put them away on a shelf in his bookcase when, towards 1845, Canon Perrodin, the Superior of the seminary at Brou, in the diocese of Belley, who was preparing a spiritual book, borrowed the Curé’s instructions which had dealt either with the life of our Lord or with the Blessed Sacrament. Most unfortunately, irreparable damage was done, for this series of sermons was lost in the following way:
‘When Canon Perrodin wanted to return to M. Vianney the twenty copies of sermons which he had taken he could not at once meet with him, for the Curé was in the confessional and would be there for many hours to come, He entrusted them to M. Raymond, who was the assistant to the Curé of Ars between 1845 and 1853.
The Abbé Raymond kept them. Though he was perfectly convinced of the exalted virtue of M. Vianney he privately considered him gifted with only a modest eloquence. He had not, therefore, any idea of making use of someone else’s sermons. Nor had his pastor any need for his old manuscripts: having no time to prepare anything, the holy man was at present delivering his sermons and catechisms ex tempore. M. Raymond shoved the scripts away in a drawer. When in 1853 he was appointed pastor at Jayat, he threw them in among a pile of papers that were of no importance. As a witness at the Beatification Process on February 24, 1863, he admitted to this: “I had twenty sermons of the Servant of God, but I lost them.”
‘With regard to the manuscript sermons of M, Vianney which escaped destruction—about eighty-five in number—they are no longer in Ars.
No doubt because they had begged him for them, he had given a certain number of them to the Brothers of the Holy Family at Belley, founders of the school, or workers at the church in Ars; others he had sold to Mlle. Marie Ricotier. This lady, born in Gleize (Rhone), retired in 1832 to the village of Ars, where she lived on a small private income, M. Vianney was often short of money and Mlle. Ricotier, to come to his help in his charitable works and also—as she admitted—to procure very surreptitiously for herself, during the very lifetime of the saint, some honored relics, bought from him all the souvenirs possible: furniture, worn out vestments, and so on. It is very possible that Mlle. Ricotier suggested to the Abbé Vianney that he had in his room some manuscripts which were of no value and that she quite willingly gave him hard cash in exchange for them. The holy man never had enough of it for the poor. Whatever the explanation, a large number of the sermons disappeared that way—as relics—into the hands of this very far-seeing parishioner.
The Abbé Claude Rougemont, missionary of the diocese of Belley, who was appointed pastor of Ars in 1871, declared at the Process (Session of March 3, 1886): “according to Catherine Lassagne and Brother Athanasius, director of the school, when he was sending his sermons to M. Colomb, the Servant of God had forbidden him to have them printed before having them submitted to examination by an ecclesiastical authority.”
It is not known in what way the Abbé Colomb used the manuscripts of his saintly confrere. In any event he did not, apparently, dream of publishing them; but he preserved them carefully, regarding them as his property. He scarcely even spoke of them, to so intimate a friend as Abbé Delaroche, his devoted collaborator in the direction of the Sisters of the Five ‘Wounds,
The years passed. Oblivion descended upon the sermons of the Curé of Ars; nor were the famous catechisms remembered any better. It had got to the stage that people did not even know that there were manuscripts of the Servant of God in existence.
Perhaps they might have been ignored for the rest of time had not the identity of their custodian been quite involuntarily revealed. M. Valansio, one of the clergy of Belley, to whom the role of “Devil’s Advocate” in the Cause of the Beatification of the Curé of Ars had been entrusted, took a walk one day with M. Colomb. During the course of conversation the Abbé Valansio expressed regret that no one possessed anything belonging to M. Vianney except his very few signed letters.
“But there are his sermons,” replied the other.
“His sermons? . . . I would certainly like to see the color of them.”
“That is easy. I have them.”
A few days later official notice was served upon the Abbé Colomb to hand over his manuscripts to the Bishop of Belley. As the Abbé refused to do this Cardinal Caverot, Archbishop of Lyons, approached him in person. Again there was a refusal. The Cardinal spoke of interdict and censures. The Abbé had to give in.
Towards 1880 the manuscript sermons were sent to Rome. As far back as the month of March, 1866, when appointing Cardinal Patrizzi as the Promoter of the Faith for the Cause of the Curé of Ars, Pius IX had authorized him to “designate the censors with a view to examining the writings of the pious Curé.” But in Rome the copyists of the Congregation of Rites were afraid of committing errors in deciphering wrongly certain words which were written too rapidly and too nervously. The unfortunate manuscripts were sent back again to the Bishop of Belley for transcription.
Msgr. Soubiranne entrusted them to the clergy in Lyons, notably to Canon Etienne Delaroche, friend, like his brother Augustin, of the Abbé Colomb. Canon Etienne Delaroche, a doctor of theology, was archpriest of the very old church at Ainay in Lyons, while his brother Augustin had become a disciple of Dom Gréa who, in 1866, had founded at Saint Claude (Jura) the Institute of the Canons Regular of the Immaculate Conception. The French copyists did not delay; thanks to them Rome soon had the authentic and complete text of the sermons of the Curé of Ars.
In France there was also no delay in their becoming widely known. As far back as November, 1882, Etienne and Augustin Delaroche had published at the house of Vitte and Perrussel in Lyons, four volumes entitled the Sermons of the Venerable Servant of God, Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, Curé of Ars, republished by Librairie Beauchesne, and for a long time out of print.
With regard to the original manuscripts of St. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, they are kept in Rome in the Mother House of the Canons of the Immaculate Conception (via Federico Torre, 21, Monteverde). All that escaped destruction are there with the exception of three: one which was presented, in a reliquary of crystal and gilded bronze, to [St.] Pius X in 1905; a second, which was presented in a reliquary less valuable than the first, to Cardinal Coullié, Archbishop of Lyons; a third which was preserved in the collection at Ars in a frame of gilded bronze with double crystal.
The cabiers of the Curé of Ars are generally made up of three or four sheets of good “handmade” linen paper, each folded in two and sewn together. Each cabier contains thus six to eight folios of approximately 7 by 9 or 9 1/2 inches. The text of the sermon, in close handwriting, covers the front and the back of each sheet. A very narrow margin is kept at the left.
The paper, on the whole, is well preserved except that it is slightly soiled; but frequently the ink has run and for that reason several passages are difficult to read. Certain sermons, which must have been written during the winter, with semi-frozen ink or a hand trembling with the cold, can be read only with difficulty. However, there is no passage, it has been seen, that has remained indecipherable.
All these cabiers (except the three mentioned above and a fourth deposited in the archives of the Mother House of the Canons of the Immaculate Conception) have been collected together again in a casket of gilded bronze with crystal sides.
‘The appearance of the Sermons of the Venerable Servant of God, Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney caused a certain amount of surprise among the Catholic public and particularly among the clergy. People did not know that the humble Curé of Ars had left behind him a considerable quantity of oratorical work. They were even more surprised that his manuscripts, lost in the dust of half a century, had been considered worthy of being published. That M. Vianney, already proclaimed Venerable by the Church, had been a great saint no one doubted, but that he had been capable of writing eloquent sermons, that was quite another matter! The servant of God was the victim yet once more of that undeserved reputation for ignorance, even for stupidity, which some had given him during his lifetime.