At dawn on 4 June 1962, in Puerto Cabello naval base, Venezuela, navy chaplain Fr Luis Padillo was saying Mass. Outside, the military base and adjoining town was awakening to another uneventful day in a county that never goes to war. But suddenly everything was to change.

Not far away Hector Rondon Lovera, a staff photographer with the local newspaper, checked in for work. As he pondered yet another morning snapping school graduations and a car crash or two, followed by a drink in the corner bar to kill the hot afternoon, excited chatter erupted in the next-door office. There were reports of something big going on up at the base. In a moment Lovera was on the street and heading straight into a war zone.

Just as Fr Luis Padillo finished his dawn Mass, a group of communist naval officers fired the first shots of an anti-government insurrection. Failing to rouse the sleepy naval base to their cause, they withdrew into the surrounding town and were soon reinforced by hundreds of communist guerrillas and sympathetic army units. Fierce fighting erupted as pro-government forces tried to dislodge them.

One thought took hold of Fr Padillo as he listened to the deafening crash of explosions and gunfire: people are dying out there! He grabbed his stole and ran off into the mayhem.

One of the most extraordinary photographs of conflict ever taken of is the one Lovera took of Fr Padillo caught in the crossfire while he assists a dying solider. We see him, alert, determined, in his cassock, supporting in his arms a man who wanted to kneel to receive the Last Rites. Bullets ripped up the street around them while Lovera desperately urged Fr Padillo to run for his life. He said it was incredible he himself was not killed while he lay flat on the ground taking pictures. And he cannot explain how Fr Padillo did not die immediately. Even as he watched bullets continued to rip through body of the poor soldier.

The photograph won many awards. And while Lovera became famous, Fr Padillo faded back into the obscurity of his simple life of a navy chaplain. But his moment of heroism would never have happened if he has not already laid his life down in holocaust on the altar of his vocation. Danger does not make heroes; it brings out their heroism.

So we might ask if it is necessary to brave bombs and bullets in order to be a hero? Or live in a communist country sharing the dangers and sufferings of the underground Church? No it is not; for there is yet another kind of heroism. It is less dramatic, less palpable, but just as real.

It is the heroism of the parish priest who expends his whole life in the confessional freeing souls from the chains of sin, and who time and again renounces his rest to go out in the night to the deathbed of a parishioner.

This was the life of Saint John Vianney, the Curate of Ars, who is our final example of a hero priest. He presents a different but equally heroic type of personal holocaust. He is probably the most famous priest of all time and was chosen by Pope Benedict XVI as patron saint of the Year of the Priest.