By M.C. Holbrook, Catholic Exchange - St. John Vianney was a simple parish priest who pastored a church in the tiny town of Ars, France. He was sent to Ars with just one mission: to bring love and religion to a town for which both were all but gone. It would have been an overwhelming, if not impossible task... Why the loss of religion in that town? For the same reason that religion had all but disappeared in almost all of France; the French Revolution had managed to strike down and nearly wipe out entirely the faith of the people, leaving untold numbers both uneducated as well as uninterested in all things religious. Many in Ars no longer even believed in God.