What G.K. Chesterton Said about St. John Vianney - Uncommon Sense - The Official Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Lyssna här

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:

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

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Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

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