St Vincent de Paul

Vincent de Paul was born in humble circumstances near Dax in Gascony, one of many children in a poor farming family. The early Vincent is described with unusual honesty: there was not yet much to suggest the greatness to come, and his own ambition at first was simply to become comfortably established. Ordained priest at the very young age of twenty, he held minor benefices according to the bad custom of the time and seemed headed for a respectable clerical life. The turning point came gradually. At Paris, when a friend falsely accused him of theft, Vincent bore the slander in silence for six months until the real thief confessed. He later used that experience to teach patience and humble resignation. More importantly, under the influence of Pierre de Berulle and through his connection with the Gondi family, he began to see the spiritual misery of the French countryside. In 1617, called to hear the confession of a dying peasant at Folleville, he discovered that the man’s earlier confessions had been sacrilegious through ignorance. That revelation opened both Vincent’s and Madame de Gondi’s eyes to the desperate need of neglected country people. From there the whole life widened.

Missions to the poor, service among galley-slaves, the foundation of the Congregation of the Mission, confraternities of charity, seminarian formation, retreats, the Ladies of Charity, hospitals, foundlings, and, with St Louise de Marillac, the Sisters of Charity, all grew from that same practical charity. Vincent is not left as a vague symbol of kindness. He organized, regulated, raised money, founded houses, sent missionaries abroad, and attacked both bodily misery and clerical slackness with the same concrete seriousness. He worked for those suffering in Lorraine, for Christian slaves in North Africa, for the poor in Poland, Ireland, Scotland, and beyond. He stood near the court without becoming worldly, and though the queen regent consulted him, he remained at heart the peasant priest who knew that humility had to be the foundation of everything. The inner struggle matters too. Vincent admitted that by temperament he was naturally inclined toward anger and roughness, but grace and steady self-mastery transformed him into a man of gentleness, tenderness, and astonishing usefulness. He fought the errors of Jansenism, promoted the doctrine of grace in its true Catholic form, and kept prayer at the center even while carrying outward works on a gigantic scale. He died in 1660, after a life that had become one of the great restorations of Christian charity in modern France.