Page:The sermons of the Curé of Ars - Vianney, tr. Morrissy - 1960.djvu/11



f ALL the sermons that are preached in the Church throughout the world how few are published. Priests labor to instruct and inspire their flocks to a better life; they preach Sunday after Sunday—many priests more than once on a Sunday—and most of these efforts go unrecorded, for the sermon is an ephemeral and short-lived composition; even more than a newspaper story, it is dead immediately it has been preached. And the sermon needs to be fitted to its audience, it must be in terms that are understood, it must be of its own times, and in an idiom suited to those it is intended to influence. Consequently, the few sermons that are published, usually those by famous preachers, speak to people of the present; the voices of dead preachers rarely come to us by the printed word, or if they do how seldom do they move us. And if this is true of men of one’s own country and language, how much more true it is of those not only from a past century but from another country, who spoke another language, who preached under conditions and within a context that never could have been ours.

Yet in this book we have a selection of sermons from the pen of a man who died just a century ago, a parish priest in a small agricultural village just north of Lyons in France, to which he was appointed in 1818, three years after Napoleon’s downfall, They are the sermons he preached to his little flock endeavoring to make them better Christians, before the time came when he could speak of his parish as completely converted.

To appreciate these sermons, therefore, our first task is to put them back into their context—the context of the life of the man who preached them and of those whom he addressed. Most readers are probably acquainted with the main facts of the life of