On a gray and misty late afternoon in February 1818, a thirty-one-year-old priest reached the outskirts of a backwater village north of Lyons, France. Immediately, he knelt down on the roadside and prayed. Fr. Jean-Marie Baptiste Vianney, just beginning his first assignment as pastor, was already interceding for a mission that he knew to be beyond his ability. “There is not much love for God in that parish,” the vicar general had told him about the little town of Ars. “You will bring some into it.”