Feast day: September 27
St. Vincent de Paul
French peasant priest who organized charity at scale — founding the Vincentians and, with St. Louise de Marillac, the Daughters of Charity, the first uncloistered women's order serving the poor.
Vincent de Paul was born about 1581 to a peasant family in southern France and became a priest while still young, at first frankly hoping for a comfortable career. By tradition his early years included capture by Barbary pirates and a spell of slavery in North Africa before he made his way back to France. What transformed him was an encounter with the spiritual and material misery of the poor, both in the countryside and in the slums of Paris.
From that point his life became an explosion of organized charity. He founded the Congregation of the Mission — the Vincentians, or Lazarists — to preach to the neglected rural poor and to reform the training of priests. With St. Louise de Marillac he founded the Daughters of Charity, sisters who left the cloister to nurse the sick and feed the hungry in their homes, 'their convent the streets of the city.'
He seemed to be everywhere good was needed: organizing the Ladies of Charity among noblewomen, founding hospitals and homes for foundlings, ransoming captives, relieving whole provinces ravaged by war, and pleading the cause of the galley slaves, whose chains he is said once to have taken upon himself. He did it all with shrewd practicality and tender humility, insisting that the poor were our masters, to be served on our knees.
He died in Paris in 1660, having become the very face of Christian charity in his age. Canonized in 1737 and named patron of all charitable works, his name lives on in the worldwide Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in the next century by lay people who took him as their model.
He was enslaved in Tunis for two years as a young priest after pirates captured his ship — then spent the rest of his life freeing others from every kind of chain.
“It is only because of your love, only your love, that the poor will forgive you the bread you give them.”
— St. Vincent de Paul
Image: Simon François de Tours (1606-1671) (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/15434c.htm
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