Saint Vincent de Paul, Priest

Collect

Merciful God, whose servant Vincent de Paul, by his ministry of preaching and pastoral care, brought your love to the sick and the poor: give to all your people a heart of compassion that by word and action they may serve you    in serving others in their need; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Isaiah 58:6–11a (NRSVCE)

6 Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? 8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. 9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, 10 if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. 11 The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

Psalm 15 (NRSVCE)

A Psalm of David. 1 O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? 2 Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; 3 who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; 4 in whose eyes the wicked are despised, but who honor those who fear the Lord; who stand by their oath even to their hurt; 5 who do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent. Those who do these things shall never be moved.

1 Corinthians 1:25–31 (NRSVCE)

25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. 26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29 so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 30 He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Matthew 25:34–40 (NRSVCE)

34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ 40 And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

Gathered information from Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology; Karl Rahner’s Sacramentum Mundi: The Encylcopedia of Theology; St Letters collected in the Classics of Western Spirituality series; The Oxford Dictionary of the Catholic Church; and our own Anglican Exciting Holiness.

Born in 1581 to a peasant family in Gascony, he was first a shepherd and later went to school to study theology with the Franciscans in Toulouse and was ordained at the age of nineteen. According to his own accout, he was captured by Turkish pirates in 1605 and was sold as a slave at Tunisia, but escaped in 1607 with his master whom he had converted and returned Avingnon. He was something of a token priest until his conversion in 1609, when he resolved to devote himself and all he owned to works of charity. He founded communities for men, the ‘Lazarists’ or ‘Vincentian Fathers’, in 1625. and, with Louise de Marillac, in 1633, he helped to begin the Sisters of Charity, the first community of women not to be enclosed and which was devoted to caring for the poor and sick. He was a court chaplain at Paris while carrying out his life’s work of active charity for all sorts of deprived people, for example abandoned orphans, sick children, prostitutes, the destitute, the blind and the insane. Vincent worked for the relief of galley slaves, victims of war, convicts and many other groups of needy people. In 1643 the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, appointed him a member of Louis XIV’s Council of Conscience whilst the King was still a minor; during the Wars of the Fronde he organized relief work among the suffering populations. He became a legend in his own lifetime and died in Paris on this day in the year 1660. He was canonized in 1737 and is the patron of organizations devoted to charitable works.

A bit of context of Seventeenth-century France. France at the time was a society haunted by the inescapable reality of poverty and the desperate daily struggle for survival of the incalculable legions of the poor. Their presence and suffering was on an unprecedented scale. One could neither escape nor ignore the poor because they were everywhere. Whether in the streets of the city or in the fields of the countryside, one could not escape seeing their hunger and pain, their dirt and rags. Neither could one escape their insistent pleas for bread, alms, medicine, work, or shelter. One could do little to escape the poor, and even less to help them.

The traditional ecclesiastical sources of charity dealt ineffectively with this new wave of poverty then submerging France. For its part, the state was about to embark on a campaign that treated the poor as a threat and dealt with them accordingly. The poor and their poverty posed a challenge that urgently demanded a Christian response and they received one from the Catholic reform, which proclaimed as one of its central tenets the “Eminent Dignity of the Poor in the Church.”

One of the most important insights and preoccupations of the Catholic reform movement in France was that its mission of bringing about lasting spiritual and moral reconquest of the kingdom would remain incomplete and ineffective without a corresponding commitment to the renewal of Christian charity. The thought of thousands of men, women, and children abandoned to the hopelessness of poverty was more than the spiritually minded could bear. Out of their sense of personal responsibility came the development of a widespread and multifaceted charitable effort to serve the poor.

However, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, despite the Church’s official status, its great wealth and power, its remaining at least the nominal religion of most of the French people, and the readiness and the early efforts of elite groups of clergy and laity to pursue its renewal and reform, the Catholic Church in France was anything but strong. The structural weaknesses and moral abuses that had long plagued the French Church were arguably the inevitable result of a long-term spiritual decline. They could be reversed only by a corresponding long-term spiritual renewal.

Although the Pope, through the Counter-Reformations with the Catholic Church, had promulgated the decrees of the reforming Council of Trent in 1564, they had never been “received” officially into France and legally remained a dead letter in France until 1615. Yet elsewhere in what remained of Catholic Europe, in areas of Germany, Italy, and Spain, the doctrinal clarifications, moral reformation, and spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church as legislated and inspired by the decrees and spirit of the Council of Trent had already progressed substantially. The time was overdue for a Spiritual renewal and reform to spread to the Church in France. There was a desperate need in the Church in France for a desire and will to develop for the adoption of the wider reform movement and to make it their own.

Alongside this state of dire poverty and Church corruption, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France witnessed a flowering of one of the most remarkable periods of mystical life and spiritual creativity in the history of the Church. Beginning in Paris, among a so-called devout milieu of what was at first a small group of bishops, priests, nobility, religious, and laity, the formative influences of many old and new Catholic spiritual traditions came to bear on a constellation of personalities extraordinarily well prepared and predisposed to receive, integrate, and act on them. The confluence of these various spiritual influences in the luminous souls of those such as Pierre Cotton, Barbe Acarie, Benet of Canfield, Francis de Sales, Pierre de Bérulle, Saint-Cyran, Angélique Arnauld, Jean Jacques Olier, Charles de Condren, Jean Eudes, Jane Frances de Chantal, Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, and many others not unexpectedly resulted in their developing a charismatic variety of distinctive new spiritual insights, emphases, and perspectives. Catholics can be charismatic!

For St Vincent de Paul, his inspiration came from sources such as St Frances de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God, Teresa of Avila’s writings, as well as the Rule of Perfection by Canfield, and his spirituality found expression in, not systematic treatises, but almost 30,000 letters, 10% of which survive. Here is an extract of one of his letters to Lousis de Marillac, with whom he founded the society of the Daughters of Charity, where he assures her of God’s love for her in spite of her her interior trials and temptations:

“… the secret of your heart, which I truly wish may belong entirely to Our Lord. I beg the Blessed Virgin to take it from you so as to carry it off to heaven to place it in her own and in that of her dear Son. Do not think that all is lost because of the little rebellions you experience interiorly. It has just rained very hard and it is thundering dreadfully. Is the weather less beautiful for that? Let the tears of sadness drown your heart and let the demons thunder and growl as much as they please. Be assured, my dear daughter, that you are no less dear to Our Lord for all that. Therefore, live contentedly in his love and be assured that I shall be mindful of you tomorrow at the sacrifice which, unworthy as I am, I shall offer to the supreme Sacrificer.”

We’ve received something of the life of Saint Vincent de Paul. His love for the poor, for spiritual renewal and mysticism, and his pastoal heart. What does his life say to us? What does it say about the current housing crisis in the UK and the hopelessness of the young? Are we fortunate? What does that mean for us? What does it say about the need for spiritual appropriation of the best in Catholic tradition and the need for renewal in the Church? What does St Vincent’s pastoal heart say to our inner struggles?

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

Post Communion

Merciful God, who gave such grace to your servant Vincent de Paul that he served you with singleness of heart and loved you above all things: help us, whose communion with you    has been renewed in this sacrament, to forsake all that holds us back from following Christ and to grow into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence 1. The Priestly Office and Holiness

History would, all by itself, have shattered them with its summary method and its narrow and harsh realism. But our Catholic tradition bears them along, without wounding them, in its universal rhythm. Saint Benedict with his crow, Saint Francis with his lute and his Provençal verses, Joan with her sword, Vincent de Paul with his shabby cassock, and our last arrival—so odd, so secretive, at once tortured by entrepreneurs and simoniacs and yet always with her mysterious smile: Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Do we really wish that all of these would have been placed, during their lifetime, in golden shrines and decked out with bombastic epithets, then to be lauded with genuflections and incense? Such niceties are only good for cathedral canons!