Life of St John Vianney.pdf - the Catholic Kingdom!

CARDINAL MANNING SPREFACEJ N presenting to the Catholics of England the followingLife of the Cur<$ of Ars, few words are needed. Thewhich surrounds the name ofreputation of sanctityM. Vianney makes all commendation superfluous. Acommon consent seems to have numbered him, evenwhile living, among the servants of God ;and an expectation prevails that the dayis not far off when theChurch will raise him to veneration upon her altars.*It would seem as if God were dealing with us now asHe dealt with the world in the beginning of the Gospel.To the corrupt intellectual refinement of Greece andRome, He opposed the illiterate sanctity of the Apostles ;to the spiritual miseries of this age He opposes thesimplicity of a man who in learning hardly compliedwith the conditions required for Holy Orders, but, likethe B. John Colombini and St. Francis of Assisi, drewthe souls of men to him by the irresistible power of asupernaturallife. It is a wholesome rebuke to the"Thishope was to be happily fulfilled at the close of the year ofOur Lord 1904, when the Beatification of the Venerable John-Baptist Vianney was decreed in St. Peter s, with due rites, byPius X. The final seal was set to the Church s recognition holiness by his canonisation by Pope Pius XI. in 1925.vof his