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

"52 THE CTTR OP ARS.worked secretly on Sunday ; for, as one rf these goodpeople said, with us human respect is turned the otherBut theway."holy cure was not content with forbidding labour and repressing noisy amusements on Sunday;he taught his people to find a blessed substitute for bothin the ever-open house of God, which scarce sufficedcontain the number of worshipers who flocked to Mass,and returned to the mid-day catechising, and again totoVespers, Compline, and Rosary.At nightfall the bell athird time called the whole parish, as one family, together,to listen to one of their pastor s simple and touching homilies.says M. Monnin, "when,in consequence of the number of strangers who have been"At this distance of time,*induced by the pilgrimage to settle at Ars, a second formation has covered this primitive vegetation, it has becomedifficult to trace the deep labours of our great husbandmen ;but five-and-twenty or thirty years ago Ars was averitable Christianoasis.*I have oftenwalked in thefields in harvest-time, said a frequent visitor of Ars,without hearing a single oath or a single unseemly expression. I once remarked this to one of the peasants,who replied with great simplicity, We are no better thanother people ;but we should be ashamed to do such things^o near to a saint. At the sound of the mid-day Angelusthe men would stop in the midst of their labour and recite the Ave Maria with uncovered head. No scenes ofdrunkenness, none of the quarrels which are its unfailingconsequence, are to be seei>. Such is the attendance atthe Sacraments that an ordinary Saturday evening at Arsis like the eve of a great festival elsewhere, so isgreat thethrong around the confessional. In what other of ourparishes do we see women, and even men, at their prayers