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Depression: How the Devil poisons humility...
"St. John Vianney, the famous Cure of the tiny French
village of Ars, is most popularly known as the holy and humble priest
who spent sixteen to eighteen hours a day hearing confessions and giving
advice to long processions of people. He practiced extraordinary
penances and fasts for the conversion of sinners and was subject to
diabolic persecution all his priestly life. It is said that the devil
revealed once that if there were but three priests in the world like the
Cure of Ars, the devil would lose his kingdom.
What is less known
is the overwhelming depression that weighed upon John Vianney’s soul
without relief his entire life. Though he was the most sought-after man
in all of France, he seemed incapable of seeing the immense amount of
good he was doing. Despite the tens of thousands of pilgrims who
traveled to Ars each year in the hope of receiving the sacraments or a
word of advice from him, he believed himself useless. The priest who had
reawakened the faith of a village and set all France aflame through his
preaching and holiness felt God so far from him that he was afraid he
had no more faith. He believed himself to have no intelligence or gift
of discernment. It is as if God drew a veil over his eyes so that he
could see nothing of what God was doing through him for others. The Cure
feared he was ruining everything and had become an obstacle in God’s
way.
The root of John Vianney’s severe depression was his fear of
doing badly at every turn, and the thousands who traveled to Ars
increased his terror. It never occurred to him that he might have a
special grace. Instead, he feared that the long line of penitents to his
village church were a sign that he was a hypocrite. He feared facing
the judgment with the responsibility for all these people on his
conscience. There was not a moment when he felt that God was satisfied
with him. A great and profound sadness possessed his soul so powerfully
that he eventually could not even imagine relief.
Whenever the
tempests of depression seemed to have enough power to drown him in the
vision of his own miseries, the Cure would bow his head, throw himself
before God like “a dog at the feet of his master,” and allow the storm
to pass without changing his resolve to love and serve God if he could.
Yet he kept this pain so private that except for a few confidantes, most
people saw only tranquility and gentleness in his bearing."
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