July 19 + Saint Vincent de Paul

Vincent de Paul was a French Roman Catholic priest who dedicated himself to serving the poor and was renowned for his compassion, humility and generosity.

Born to a poor family in the southwest of France, Vincent showed his intellectual gifts from a young age, studying theology from around age 15. He received ordination as a priest in the year 1600, and worked as a tutor to students in Toulouse.

During a sea voyage in 1605, Vincent was seized by Turkish pirates and sold into slavery. His ordeal of captivity lasted for 2 years, during which time Vincent converted his owner to Christianity and escaped with him from Tunisia. Afterward, he spent time studying in Rome, and served as an educator and spiritual guide to members of an upper-class French family.

Moved with compassion for the poor, he began undertaking missions and founding institutions to help them both materially and spiritually. The one-time slave also ministered to convicts forced to serve in squalid conditions as rowers aboard galley ships.

Vincent established the Congregation of Priests of the Mission in 1625, as part of an effort to evangelize rural populations and foster vocations to remedy a priest shortage. Not long after this, he worked with the future St. Louise de Marillac to organize the Daughters of Charity, the first congregation of women religious whose consecrated life involved an extensive apostolate among the poor, the sick, and prisoners.

Though admired for his accomplishments during his lifetime, the priest maintained great personal humility, using his reputation and connections to help the poor and strengthen the Church. Vincent died on Sept. 27, 1660, only months after the death of St. Louise de Marillac in March of the same year.

His incorrupt heart can be found in the Convent of the Sisters of Charity and his bones have been embedded in a wax effigy of the Saint located at the Church of the Lazarist Mission. Both located in Paris, France.

The Church is for all God’s children, rich and poor, peasants and scholars, the sophisticated and the simple. But the greatest concern of the Church must be for those who need the most help — those made helpless by sickness, poverty, ignorance, or cruelty. Vincent de Paul is a particularly appropriate patron for all Christians today, when hunger has become starvation, and the high living of the rich stands in more and more glaring contrast to the physical and moral degradation in which many of God’s children are forced to live.