Page:The sermons of the Curé of Ars - Vianney, tr. Morrissy - 1960.djvu/215

 and the Eucharist, so severe on public sinners, on habitual sinners and on recidivists.

The teaching received in his clerical youth explains the rigorism of which M. Vianney gave evidence during the first fifteen or twenty years he spent in the parish of Ars. Moreover, in showing himself a severe moralist, he held to the tradition of the clergy of Belley, the older men of whom had followed, before the Revolution, the courses in the seminary of St. Irenaeus, composed on the order and according to the direction of Msgr, de Montazet. This manual, without directly professing Jansenism, does in fact reproduce its spirit. The work, published in 1780, was not altogether to the liking of M. Emery and his Sulpicians, who were charged with the curriculum of St. Irenacus, but they continued to teach it “without changing anything of importance in it after taking the advice of Monsignor.”

Neither in advance of nor behind his clerical contemporaries in this, the Abbé Vianney availed himself of the theology of his time—not that, in Catholic theology, there is a time or a truth which may be admitted at one time and rejected at another. We would say simply that the Curé of Ars, when it was a matter of giving practical solutions from the pulpit, followed the customs he had been taught.

To most of his listeners he could have appeared very slightly “jansenist” when he uttered in his first years such pronouncements as the following: “Alas! that Christians who leave the church (after assisting at Mass) have perhaps more than thirty or fifty mortal sins more than when they came in!” The preacher considered himself severe, for he formulated the objection which he sensed in the minds of the listeners: “But,” you will say, “it would be much better not to assist at it then.” And he replies with of shift of ground: “Do you know what you should do? You should assist at it, and assist at it as well as you can. . . .”

In the sermon on The Thought of Death he puts this despairing statement into the mouth of St. Jerome as he was dying: “I