St. Vincent de Paul
Born: April 24, 1581
Died: September 27, 1660
Feast Day: September 27
Patron of: Charitable societies
The movie Monsieur Vincent (1947), which chronicles the life of Saint Vincent de Paul, contains a gem of a scene. The black-robed Vincent sits amidst a dozen or so French society ladies, all done up in their curls and bows and ruffles. The women are discussing, at a high pitch, their new discovery of working with the poor of Paris. The chattering reaches a crescendo as the hostess invites the other ladies to inspect the new dress she had ordered especially for her visits to the poor. As the women flee the table to admire the gown, Vincent rolls his eyes gently and sneaks out of the room.
Although Vincent de Paul might have preferred to spend all his waking hours with the poor of France, he found that his hours with the wealthy paid off richly, too. Vincent had the rare gift of humanizing both the rich and the poor. He single-handedly triggered an outpouring of charity the like of which Europe had never seen.
Born in 1581 to a peasant family in France, Vincent spent his childhood herding pigs for his father. An unremarkable young man, his prime ambition in being ordained, he later wrote, was to secure a comfortable living for himself from the generous stipends he would receive.
Nearly twenty years went by before Vincent found a direction for his life. Happily, he had found a challenging spiritual director who started him on a course of prayer and self-denial and who placed him as a chaplain to the wealthy di Gondi household. Madame di Gondi tried Vincent's patience with her pious ways, but her concern for the poor led him to discover his life's vocation.
While attending to a dying peasant on one of the family's estates, he saw all the dirty details of a life of poverty, and it shocked him to his soul. From then on he became a tireless friend of the poor.
He organized parish Confraternities of Charity, in which parishioners themselves would search out and care for the needy of the area. While this may seem commonplace today, it was an innovation in seventeenth-century France.
When he faced the fact that his grand plans to care for the poor would take money- lots of it- Vincent turned to the rich women of France, who responded in droves to form the Ladies of Charity. These women bankrolled many of his projects and formed committees to care for the poor, prostitutes, and those in the squalid hospitals and prisons of Paris. Vincent began collecting abandoned infants from every corner of Paris: these children, usually born out of wedlock, faced either death or a future of being mutilated and trained to beg. Some of his sponsors balked at taking on these children, but Vincent's iron will and persuasive manner finally prevailed even here.
Vincent's work spawned two religious orders: the Vincentians, who worked with the rural poor; and the Sisters of Charity, who broke the mold of religious women by wearing secular clothes and spending their days not in a cloister but in slums, hospitals, and prisons.
Vincent died at 80 years old, and was canonized in 1737. He is the patron of all charitable organizations. Although he rubbed shoulders with the rich and was a confidant to the king and queen, Vincent kept his peasant ways to the end, calling himself simply, "Monsieur Vincent."
Originally published in Salt magazine, ©Claretian Publications.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
