Page:The sermons of the Curé of Ars - Vianney, tr. Morrissy - 1960.djvu/16

 and a more polished literary style gave them to the public. Bonnardel was humble enough to say whence his material came. Most of the Curé’s sermons owe something to Bonnardel and several are an anthology of passages taken from this book but from different sermons. One of the Curé’s characteristic sermons on “the sanctification of the Christian,” considered for long as one of his most personal efforts, comes almost entirely from Bonnardel’s “How to behave throughout the year.”

The Curé’s other favorite source was the (anonymous) Catechiste des Peuples. Here he found the matter of something like twenty sermons and, unlike Bonnardel’s book, plenty of anecdotes to drive home the points. If some of the sermons reveal that, apart from a few reflections, whole long passages were copied, others, it must be acknowledged, show that several sources were laid under contribution, that points were arranged differently from the treatment in the original and that in some cases the preacher’s own contribution was somewhat more extensive than in other instances, though it was never very great.

‘What are we to make of all this? The published sermons of the Curé’s are priceless evidence of what he thought appropriate for the people of his parish in the early years of the nineteenth century. If they show us nothing else they are, we can be certain, the choice that he made, and even this small indication reveals to us something of the man. Then, too, they are evidence of his humility. He was neither learned nor eloquent and indeed, save in the technical sense, he was hardly literate (examination of his manuscripts and letters shows this clearly) but he knew what he was about and by his life and preaching successfully inculcated the “one thing necessary” and changed the whole face of his village so that what had been almost the worst and the least regarded parish in the diocese, became the model for the whole country and drew to it thousands upon thousands of pilgrims from all over the world.

So these sermons, put together with such labor have something to tell us, even if it is not what we expect. We can still read what