Curé d’Ars
St Jean-Marie Vianney was an inspired pastor. The great message he conveyed concerned the Christian call to holiness, indeed, to divinisation. For Vianney it was axiomatic that the Christian is called to share in the very life of God. The tragedy of sin lay, for him, in the fact that it impedes the divine life in man and thus keeps him from his finality, the goal for which he is made, making it impossible for him to be truly happy. Consider a statement such as the following, from one of Vianney’s sermons: ‘Like a lovely white dove which emerges from the midst of the waters and comes to rustle its wings upon the earth, the Holy Spirit sets out from the infinite sea of divine perfections to come and agitate its wings upon souls that are pure, to impart to them the balm of love.’ Couldn’t we, in our day and age, do with rather more exposure to this message?
