Pierre Vigne

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Pierre Vigne (1876).

Pierre Vigne (born August 20, 1670 in Privas , † July 8, 1740 in Rencurel ) was a French Roman Catholic priest, people's missionary and founder of an order . He is venerated as a blessed in the Catholic Church .

life and work

Lazarist

Pierre Vigne (in German-speaking countries also Petrus or Pietro Vigne) grew up in Privas in a bourgeois Catholic family in a Huguenot -influenced environment. He attended the seminary in Viviers and was ordained a priest in 1694. From 1695 to 1700 he was chaplain in Saint-Agrève . In 1700, after the death of his parents, he joined the Lazarists in Lyon , made his profession two years later and was employed in the popular mission developed by the Lazarists. The missionaries stayed in a rural location for several weeks, preaching and teaching the catechism daily . From his location in Valfleury , Vigne preached 18 missions in the near and far area until 1706. From 1704 to 1706 he stayed with the Lazarists of Béziers , then for several months in Toulouse in the seminary of the Congregation of Saint Mary (also: Bonalists) founded by Raymond Bonal .

Royal People's Missionary

Vigne left the Lazarists, turned down the call to the parish of Privas and successfully applied for the position of a (paid) royal traveling preacher ( missionnaire itinérant ) in Paris in the winter of 1707/1708 . From 1708 to 1712 he evangelized without a permanent location in the area of ​​today's Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region .

Way of the Cross in Boucieu-le-Roi

In 1712 he felt in Boucieu-le-Roi a similar landscape to Jerusalem , which he only knew from literature, and had the idea of ​​a Way of the Cross in the style of the Italian Sacri Monti . With the help of the residents (including numerous neighboring towns), he built a way of the cross with 39 stations in nine months, which ended in a calvary . It was destroyed by the French Revolution but was restored in a simplified form and is intact today. As a kind of instructions for use for the pilgrims, he wrote a book of 800 pages entitled Meditations for (based on the model of Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure, 1588–1657, Le Livre des éluz. Jésus-Christ en croix , Paris 1643) every day of the month, taken from the most beautiful book that God has given us, namely the Passion and Death of Jesus on the Cross , which appeared in Lyon in 1713 (and was reissued in 1985). Through the Way of the Cross (French: calvaire , also called Grand voyage "Great Journey" by Vigne ) Boucieu became a place of pilgrimage and pilgrimage.

Foundation of a congregation of sisters

In 1715 Vigne bought a house in Boucieu and made it the starting point for the rest of his life for his further walks in the service of the popular mission. In the same year he gave his blessing to the community of pious women (the "Soeurs du Calvaire", later: Religieuses du Saint Sacrement , RSS, " Sisters of the Holy Sacrament ") , which had been forming since 1712/1713, and wrote them a rule of the order, which in 1737 in Lyon appeared in print. In 1718 they were already 12 and were thinking of the first branches. Their main activity was education. Today they are found in 40 houses in large parts of the world (but not in German-speaking countries).

20 years more popular mission and death

From 1720 to 1740 Vigne again spent the last 20 years of his life as a missionary traveling preacher. In 1724 in Valence he was accepted into the Congregation of Priests of the Blessed Sacrament founded by Christophe d'Authier de Sisgau and also gave his own Congregation of Sisters the corresponding new name, but did not renounce his freedom as an itinerant preacher, as he did in the course of his life Completed 120 people's missions (mainly in the winter, when farm work was stopped, and sometimes lasting more than seven weeks, always at the invitation of the local priest). The clergy valued his help, even more so the bishops, especially the Bishop of Gap, François Berger de Malissoles (1668–1738). When he died on one of his missions in the Vercors at the age of almost seventy , his body was brought to Boucieu and buried there with great sympathy from the people who venerated him as a saint.

beatification

In 1859, Mother Saint-Joseph Bouvaret, active superior of the Sisters of the Holy Sacrament, had a memorial plaque installed in the church of Boucieu. In 1867 she began an investigation as preparatory work for the proceedings, which then officially started in 1893 in the dioceses of Viviers and Valence . But the world wars intervened, and it was not until 1986 that a new postulator was appointed who managed to obtain a beatification, which took place on October 3, 2004 in Rome.

literature

  • Thérèse Ardouin: Un apôtre en Vivarais et Dauphiné au XVIIIe siècle . Visages du Vivarais, 1966.
  • Annie Gerest for the Congrégtion des Soeurs du Saint Sacrement: Pierre Vigne. In chemin avec les humbles . Nouvelle Cité, Bruyères-le-Châtel 2012.
  • Félix Vernet: La congrégation des religieuses du Très-Saint-Sacrement de Valence (1715-1940) . Imprimerie M. Lescuyer, Lyon, 1941.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Méditations pour chaque jour du mois, tirées du plus beau Livre, que Dieu nous ait donné, Qui est Jesus Souffrant, & Mourant sur une Croix.
personal data
SURNAME Vigne, Pierre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vigne, Pietro; Vigne, Petrus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French people's missionary and founder of the order
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1670
PLACE OF BIRTH Privas
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 1740
Place of death Rencurel