There was an old farm labourer in the village of Ars who used to stop in at the church on his way home from the fields. He would leave his spade by the door, sit down at the back, and stay there. No book. No beads that anyone noticed. Just a tired man in a pew, for a long time, most days.

His parish priest eventually asked him what he was doing all that while. The answer he gave is one of the few sentences a nineteenth-century French farmhand has contributed to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

I look at him and he looks at me.A peasant of Ars, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2715

The priest who asked the question was St. John Vianney, and the Church keeps his memorial on the fourth of August. He is the patron saint of parish priests, which is a title that undersells him. He is really the patron saint of everyone who was told they were not good enough at this.

The worst student in the room

He was born in 1786 at Dardilly, outside Lyon, into a farming family, three years before the Revolution came and drove the Church in France underground. He made his First Communion at about thirteen, in a barn, with the windows curtained and hay carts pulled across the yard so that no one passing would see what was happening inside. That is the world he was formed in, and it is worth remembering when he turns out later to be inflexible about certain things.

He wanted to be a priest. The obstacle was that he could not learn Latin. Not "found it difficult." Could not do it. He was in his late teens before he began serious study, sitting in classrooms with boys years younger who were fluent, and by every account he was the slowest person in every room he entered. He was dismissed from one seminary. His examinations went badly enough that his ordination was genuinely in doubt.

What saved him was somebody's judgment call. The vicar general asked whether the young man was pious, whether he knew how to pray, whether he had devotion to Our Lady. Told yes, he let him through, on the reasoning that the Church has need of holy priests as well as learned ones and that a small country parish would not tax him. Vianney was ordained at Grenoble in August of 1815.

There is a footnote to those years that his biographers usually handle briskly and I find hard to look away from. In 1809 he was conscripted into Napoleon's army, fell ill, missed his unit's departure, and while trying to catch up was taken in by villagers at Les Noes, where he stayed hidden for more than a year under an assumed name, teaching the local children. He was, technically and accidentally, a deserter. An amnesty cleared it in 1810. The future patron of priests spent a year of his young life as a fugitive in a hayloft.

Two hundred and thirty people

In 1818 he was sent to Ars, a village in the Dombes so small and so unimportant that he got lost trying to find it. The population was somewhere around two hundred and thirty. The Revolution had done its work there. People farmed on Sundays, the taverns did better business than the church, and the accounts agree that religion in Ars had not been persecuted out of existence so much as quietly allowed to lapse.

He set about it with a stubbornness that reads, at this distance, as slightly alarming. He slept a few hours a night on the floor. He lived largely on boiled potatoes, sometimes cooking a week's worth at once and eating them as they went bad. He gave away everything he had. He also went after the village dance halls and taverns with a persistence that eventually closed them, which is the part of his story most likely to make a modern reader wince, and I am not going to smooth it over. He was a nineteenth-century French curate and he behaved like one.

What is harder to argue with is the result. Within a decade the parish had changed, and then something happened that nobody planned. People from outside started coming. Then more of them.

Sixteen hours

By the 1840s and 50s, Ars was receiving something in the range of twenty thousand pilgrims a year. A village of two hundred and thirty. They built up a coach service to bring people in. And nearly all of them had come for one thing, which was to confess their sins to the man in the box.

The figures given for his hours in the confessional are staggering enough that people assume they are pious exaggeration, but they come from his own parish and the pilgrims who queued there: eleven to twelve hours a day in winter, as many as sixteen in summer. He would begin around one in the morning. Women waited days for a turn. He was doing this in his sixties, on almost no sleep and almost no food, for thirty years.

He also reported, throughout those decades, being harassed at night by something he referred to almost casually as the grappin, the grappling hook: noises, his bed shaken, once a fire in his room. He talked about it the way a man talks about a leaking roof. His own reading of it was that the disturbances tended to increase when a great sinner was on the road to Ars, which he found encouraging.

And three times, at least, he tried to run away. He wanted to be a contemplative somewhere, alone, and he made actual attempts to leave in the night. Each time he was found out and brought back. The most sought-after confessor in France spent thirty years trying to escape the job.

The long look

Which brings us back to the man with the spade.

Vianney was not a theorist of prayer. He did not write a system. When people asked him how to pray he tended to point at somebody who was doing it, and the peasant at the back of the church was his favourite illustration, repeated so often that it survived him, went into the tradition, and was eventually written into the Catechism as the plain definition of contemplation: a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus.

If you pray the Rosary, that is your own prayer described. St. John Paul II wrote that the Rosary is at heart a contemplation of the face of Christ, made in the company of his Mother, and anyone who has prayed it seriously knows the sensation he meant. The words go on. The fingers move. And underneath the Hail Marys something quieter is happening, which is that you are looking at something, and being looked at.

This is also the answer to the most common complaint about the Rosary, that the mind wanders and the words become automatic. They do. That is not the failure of the prayer, it is the mechanism. The repetition occupies the part of you that needs occupying so the rest of you can stay still and look. The old man in the pew had no technique at all. He had a bench, a habit, and thirty years of showing up. Vianney thought that was the whole of it.

Keeping his day

Two suggestions, and the first is the harder one. If it has been a while since your last confession, this is his day. He gave thirty years and most of his health to sitting in that box waiting for people exactly like you, and he was, by every account, gentle with them. Whatever you are carrying, someone has heard worse before lunch.

The second is easier. Take five minutes today, in a church if you can get to one, and do nothing. No words, no petitions, no list. Sit down and look at him. Then pray a decade slowly on top of that silence, and let it stay a looking rather than a saying.

St. John Vianney, who could not learn Latin and learned everything else, obtain for us a love for the sacrament of mercy, patience with our own slowness, and the grace of the long look. Pray for our priests. Amen.

If you want beads to keep that habit with, our handmade rosaries are built to be carried and prayed daily, which is the only kind he would have had any use for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. John Vianney?

A French parish priest, born in 1786 near Lyon, who served the village of Ars from 1818 until his death in 1859. Despite great difficulty with his studies, he became the most sought-after confessor in France, drawing an estimated twenty thousand pilgrims a year. He was canonized in 1925 and named patron of parish priests in 1929.

When is the feast of St. John Vianney?

August 4, kept as a memorial on the Church's General Roman Calendar.

Why is he called the Cure of Ars?

"Cure" is the French word for a parish priest, and Ars-sur-Formans is the village where he served for forty-one years. The title simply means "the parish priest of Ars," which is how he was known in his lifetime and how he is known still.

What is St. John Vianney the patron saint of?

Parish priests, named such by Pope Pius XI in 1929. Pope Benedict XVI later proposed him as a patron for all priests during the Year for Priests in 2009 and 2010, marking the 150th anniversary of his death.

What did the peasant of Ars say about prayer?

Asked by St. John Vianney what he did during his long hours before the tabernacle, the man answered, "I look at him and he looks at me." The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes the exchange in paragraph 2715 as a definition of contemplative prayer.