What G.K. Chesterton Said about St. John Vianney

For the memorial of St. John Vianney, Joe Grabowski reads a rarely reprinted G.K. Chesterton essay—The Challenge of the Curé d'Ars—written as an afterword to F.J. Sheed's 1929 translation of Henri Ghéon's The Secret of the Curé d'Ars. Chesterton's portrait is not the gentle village priest most readers expect but a militant one, a walking contradiction who denied everything his century most confidently affirmed. You'll hear why Chesterton thought the critics who file the Church under the medieval past have misread her entirely, and why the Curé's holiness shone brightest in the full daylight of the age of reason.

In This Episode:

Where to find G.K. Chesterton's rarely reprinted essay on St. John Vianney—and why it sits at the back of Ghéon's book rather than the front Chesterton's argument that the Church predates every nation, and why that makes "international" the wrong word for her The sharp line Chesterton drew between an apologia and an apology, and what Catholic argument lost when the two words collapsed into one Chesterton's reading of the Curé d'Ars as provocative rather than merely pious—a priest whose entire life functioned as a denial of his age How Chesterton used Lourdes and Ars to answer critics who treat the Church as a relic of a particular past Resources Mentioned:

Main biographies of the Curé d'Ars, including Abbé Francis Trochu's The Secret of the Curé d'Ars by Henri Ghéon, translated by F.J. Sheed The Challenge of the Curé d'Ars by G.K. Chesterton (1929 edition, full text) Act of Love of the Holy Curé d'Ars Chapters:

00:00: Cold Open 00:26: Welcome and the Memorial of the Curé d'Ars 02:50: Making Reparation in the Aftermath of the Revolution 05:08: Introducing G.K. Chesterton's Essay on the Curé d'Ars 07:26: The Church, the Nations, and the Word Apologetics 09:43: A Militant Faith and the French Religious Quarrel 12:06: A Denial at the Height of the Revolution 14:26: Neither Medieval Nor Modern 16:44: St. John Vianney's Act of Love FOLLOW US

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