04/08/2026
Sunday’s (02/08/2026) homily from Fr John Browne 🙏🏽
Today is the feast day of St John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests.
St John Vianney was born in 1786 near Lyon during the upheaval of the French Revolution. As a boy, he
experienced the persecution of the Church first-hand, with his family secretly attending Mass celebrated by priests in hiding. Those years taught him both the cost of remaining faithful and the real value of the sacraments.
His education was disrupted, leaving him to struggle later with seminary studies, in particular Latin. Yet the perseverance and deep faith formed in his family home proved far more important, preparing him to become one of the Church’s greatest parish priests and saints.
When he arrived as a newly ordained priest in the village of Ars in 1818, he did not inherit a flourishing parish.
The chaos of the Revolution had left Catholic France weakened. Many people no longer practised, Sunday had become an ordinary working day, and religious knowledge was poor. Faced with this situation, Father Vianney did not begin with a strategic plan or a programme of renewal. He began by learning people’s names, visiting their homes, praying before the Blessed Sacrament, celebrating Mass with care, and making himself available.
It sounds almost disappointingly ordinary. Yet over time, things began to change, because the people saw consistency. They knew where he would be. They knew he would pray. They knew he would listen. They knew he would tell them the truth without humiliating them. In a world that had become anarchic, he became dependable.
That may be one of the greatest shortages in our own age. The world prizes innovation. Every week there is a new idea, a new controversy, a new technology promising to transform our lives. We are constantly encouraged to reinvent ourselves. Yet most of life is not lived like this. It is lived going to work, caring for family, keeping promises, turning up when we said we would, praying when we do not particularly feel like it.
Christian discipleship is much the same.
There is a revealing comment that St John Vianney made about being a priest: “The priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus.” He was not talking about status or authority. He meant that the priest exists to make Christ’s compassion visible. Which Father Vianney did, and indeed which we are all called to do.
Many thousands travelled from all over France and beyond to Father Vianney for confession, because they sought someone who would listen to them, and take their lives seriously before God. Vianney spent several hours each day hearing the confessions of visitors.
Listening has become surprisingly rare. We hear opinions everywhere, but genuine attention is harder to find. Families struggle to speak with one another. Friendships are interrupted by phones. Public debate rewards bluster rather than reflection. One reason people sought out John Vianney was that he gave them something immensely precious: his full attention.
Perhaps that is a lesson worth carrying away from his feast. Most of us cannot and will not solve the world’s problems. We cannot remove every injustice or heal every wound. But we can become people whose presence is reliable, whose word can be trusted, whose faith is steady.
St John Vianney changed Ars (now one of the biggest pilgrimage sites in France) not through charisma but through perseverance. He remained at his post for more than forty years, doing the same things day after day celebrating the Mass, preaching, hearing confessions, visiting the sick, praying, and quietly leading people back to Christ.
That is not an exciting story by modern standards. It is, however, how the Church has always been renewed.
The Curé of Ars reminds us that holiness is simply this: to be faithful to the vocation and duties God has entrusted to us today, trusting that his grace is at work beneath the surface, often in ways we cannot yet distinguish.
I’ll conclude with some of his own words: “Do not try to please everybody. Try to please God, the angels and the saints - they are your public. The door of God’s mercy is always open; it is us who close our hearts. If someone asked you, ‘What is a Catholic?’ your answer should be:
‘A Catholic is one who belongs entirely to Jesus Christ.’”
