- 34 - When the Catholic clergy of his immediate and more remote neighbourhoods saw their parishioners also hastening to Vianey and paying more heed to his opinion than they did to those of their own priests, envy and jealousy reared their heads. They spoke of him as the ignorant priest, who had barely been able to acquire a little Latin and had nearly been expelled from the seminary. Above all, the enthusiasm with which people spoke of the curate of Ars caused the hatred harboured against him by the other clergymen to overflow. He was slandered most shamelessly. Priests forbade their parishioners to go to Ars for confession and threatened them, in case of disobedience, with exclusion from the sacraments and denial of absolution, even in the hour of death. Sunday after Sunday they inveighed against the curate of Ars from their pulpits. Speaking of this in later days, Vianey once said: “The Gospel was allowed to rest in the pulpit; instead, everyone was busy preaching sermons against the poor curate of Ars.” While some ridiculed his ignorance, others cast doubts on the life he was leading. He received countless anonymous letters in which he was accused of the greatest baseness in the vilest language. The clergy even tried to incite the public against him. Mornings, on opening his front door, he would find it covered with placards accusing him of having passed the night in the most shameful debauchery. Here, as well as in Blumhardt’s case, we find a repetition of what the Jewish priesthood did to Christ: “What are we to do? See how the multitudes run after him, this wine drinker who associates with sinners and whores.” The popular sayings about “clerical jealousy” and the fact that one clergyman is another clergyman’s Devil were again confirmed in the case of these two clergymen. Even if the attacks made on Blumhardt by his colleagues did not reach the level of meanness of those delivered against Vianey, he nevertheless had to endure much suffering and persecution at their hands. If such a life-and-death battle was waged against these two men despite their faithfulness to their religious creeds, imagine what would have happened had it been possible to prove that they held views in conflict with the teachings of their churches. God and His spirit world, in selecting and preparing their instruments, take into consideration the conditions of the times and the religious atmosphere that prevails in the circles in which these instruments are to work. Human opinions and errors are ignored by God’s spirit world, as long as they do not constitute a serious obstacle to the attainment of the goal it has set. Not a single one of Vianey’s erroneous religious beliefs was corrected by the good spirits that appeared to him, because these errors in no way interfered with the task he had to perform. Only when he, as a result of his mistaken views on physical penance, which he regarded as particularly pleasing to God, undertook to rack his body with penances, did the spirit world intervene and teach him. Such intervention was imperative, since a weakening of his physical strength would necessarily have resulted in a corresponding loss of effectiveness of his efforts. A commanding
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