Feast day: April 5

St. Vincent Ferrer

Priest & Missionary · 1350–1419

Patron of Builders, construction workers

Dominican preacher who crisscrossed Europe for 20 years calling for repentance, drawing crowds of thousands in an age without microphones.

Vincent Ferrer was born at Valencia in Spain in 1350 and entered the Dominican Order as a young man, becoming a renowned theologian and preacher. He lived in the age of the Great Western Schism, when rival claimants in Rome and Avignon each claimed to be the true pope, dividing the loyalties of Christendom — and Vincent, for many years, supported and served the Avignon line.

From about 1399 he gave himself to a vast itinerant preaching mission that lasted twenty years and carried him across Spain, France, Italy, and beyond. Preaching penance and the approach of God's judgment, he drew enormous crowds, and his sermons — accompanied, his contemporaries said, by striking miracles and conversions — won back countless sinners and unbelievers to the Church.

The tragedy of his life was the schism itself. Long loyal to the Avignon claimant Benedict XIII, Vincent at last became convinced that Benedict's obstinacy was the chief obstacle to unity, and in 1416 publicly withdrew his obedience — a decisive act that helped clear the way for the schism's end at the Council of Constance.

He died at Vannes in Brittany in 1419, still preaching to the last, and was canonized in 1455. He is invoked as a patron of builders, by a play on his name and his preaching on the building up of the spiritual life.

Listeners of different languages reportedly understood his Valencian sermons — a gift of tongues on a continental tour.

“If you truly want to help the soul of your neighbor, you should approach God first with all your heart.”
— St. Vincent Ferrer

Image: Juan de Juanes (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/15437a.htm