Saint Vincent de Paul

Saint Vincent de Paul was a French priest who devoted his life to the poor. He founded the Congregation of the Mission and, together with Saint Louise de Marillac, the Daughters of Charity. The Church commemorates him on September 27, the anniversary of his death.

He was born on April 24, 1581, at Pouy in Gascony, near Dax, into a peasant family; earlier biographers gave the year as 1576. He studied at Dax with the Franciscans and then theology at Toulouse. He was ordained a priest in 1600, at the age of only nineteen. At that time he saw the priesthood mainly as a way to secure his future.

In two letters he described how in 1605, during a sea voyage, he was captured by pirates and spent two years as a slave in Tunis; some historians doubt this account. He later settled in Paris, where Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the French Oratory, became his spiritual director. In 1612 he took charge of the parish of Clichy near Paris, and in 1613 he became tutor to the children of Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, general of the royal galleys.

The turning point came in 1617. Near Folleville in Picardy he heard the confession of a dying peasant and saw how deprived the rural population was of pastoral care. On January 25 he preached a sermon on general confession at Folleville; so many people came that other priests had to be called in to help. He himself regarded it as the first sermon of the Mission. In the summer he took over the rural parish of Châtillon-les-Dombes, and in August he founded there the first Confraternity of Charity, in which women of the parish cared for the sick poor.

In 1625, thanks to an endowment from the Gondi family, the Congregation of the Mission came into being, a community of priests who preached missions among the poor rural population; in time they also took charge of seminaries. From the Paris priory of Saint-Lazare, their principal house, they were called Lazarists. On November 29, 1633, Vincent and Louise de Marillac began the Daughters of Charity, who did not live in an enclosure but served the sick and the poor in their homes and in hospitals.

Vincent organized retreats for candidates for the priesthood and weekly meetings of clergy known as the Tuesday Conferences. He cared for abandoned children and for the galley convicts, and in time of war he collected relief in Paris for devastated Lorraine. He sent missionaries to Ireland, Scotland, and Madagascar, and in 1651, at the request of Queen Marie Louise Gonzaga, to Poland as well. The bull of canonization says that he was commonly called the father of the poor.

He died in Paris on September 27, 1660. Pope Benedict XIII beatified him in 1729, and Clement XII canonized him in 1737. In 1885 Leo XIII declared him patron of all Catholic charitable associations. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, begun in 1833 by Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, bears his name.