Sanctuaire du Curé d'Ars

Ars-sur-Formans

In 1818, a priest judged mediocre by his superiors, Jean-Marie Vianney, was sent to a hamlet of two hundred souls in the Dombes; he would stay forty-one years and make Ars one of the great pilgrimage sites of France. In 1824 he founded "La Providence", a free school for poor girls, run by young women he trained himself. From the 1830s, crowds flocked to confess to him: in his final years, the church of Ars recorded some 36,000 Masses a year, nearly a hundred a day, and the curé spent most of his time in the confessional. Ars is also the setting for one of the strangest stories in French hagiography: from 1823, Vianney claimed to suffer nightly attacks at the presbytery which he attributed to the devil, whom he familiarly nicknamed "le grappin" (the grapple) — blows, voices, the sound of furniture being dragged, and even his bed being set on fire. The witnesses who kept watch with him mostly heard nothing, as his biographers honestly report, and the Church itself never made these phenomena grounds for canonisation. The saint was beatified in 1905, canonised in 1925, then proclaimed patron of all parish priests in the world in 1929. His body, exhumed in 1878 and again in 1904, preserved and reconstituted, is displayed in a shrine in the basilica raised from 1862 by the architect Pierre Bossan, the architect of Fourvière. Ars now receives more than 500,000 people a year, and as many as 600,000 during the Year for Priests in 2009-2010, including 35,000 priests.

Jean-Marie Vianney — Wikipédia ↗

Getting there : Ars-sur-Formans lies in the Dombes, 33 km north of Lyon and 45 km from Bourg-en-Bresse; the whole village is organised around the shrine, with large car parks. The basilica and the saint's shrine, the Chapel of the Heart, the old church and the presbytery where he lived can all be visited freely. Open all year round.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound