St. Vincent de Paul

Who Vincent de Paul Was

Vincent was the third of six children of a small farmer in the Landes, and he minded the family's pigs as a boy. His father saw that he was quick and sent him to study with the Franciscans at Dax, selling a pair of oxen to pay for it. He was ordained in 1600, at nineteen, which was below the canonical age even then and reflects the loose discipline of the French Church at the time.

His early ambitions were modest and worldly. He looked for a comfortable benefice that would let him support his family and live decently, and he said so in his own letters. He spent years in Rome and Paris pursuing appointments, served as chaplain to the former queen Marguerite de Valois, and held a parish at Clichy in 1612.

Two influences turned him. Pierre de Bérulle, one of the leaders of the French Catholic revival, took him in hand as a director, and placed him in 1613 as tutor and chaplain to the household of Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, general of the galleys of France, and his wife Françoise-Marguerite de Silly. That post gave him access to great wealth, to the Gondi estates full of neglected peasants, and to the prisons of the galley fleet. He used all three.

The Apostle of Charity

St. Vincent de Paul (1581 to 1660) is one of the great organisers of Christian charity. Born a peasant, he initially wanted a priesthood that would give him a comfortable living. What he became instead was a servant of the poor, and he spent the last forty years of his life at it.

He came to hold that the poor are our masters, a phrase he used repeatedly in his conferences to the Daughters of Charity, and he meant it as a rule of conduct: the poor set the schedule, they are to be served with the courtesy owed to a superior, and the servant's convenience comes second. He was known for his warmth, his humour, and his administrative capacity.

The theological basis is Christ's own. The Son of Man tells those at his right hand that whatever they did for the least of his brothers they did for him, and names the acts: food, drink, welcome, clothing, care in sickness, visiting in prison (Matthew 25:35 to 40). The Catechism lists those same acts as the corporal works of mercy and treats them as obligatory rather than optional (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2447). Vincent's whole life is an extended application of that passage.

The Captivity Story and What the Record Shows

The most colourful episode in the traditional life of Vincent de Paul is his capture at sea. In two letters written in 1607 and 1608 to a patron, he describes being seized by Barbary corsairs while sailing from Marseille to Narbonne in 1605, being sold as a slave at Tunis, passing through several masters, and finally escaping across the Mediterranean with a renegade Christian master whom he converted back.

The story rests entirely on those two letters. Vincent never told it again, and he later tried to have the letters destroyed. Since the nineteenth century historians have argued about them, some holding that the letters are genuine and the account true, others that the young Vincent invented an adventure to explain two missing years to a creditor, and others that the letters are not his at all. The debate has never been settled, and the Vincentian congregation itself has published work on both sides.

The honest statement is that the captivity is possible and unproven. It is also unnecessary to the rest of his life, which is documented in thousands of surviving letters and conferences. This page reports the dispute rather than choosing a side.

1617: The Two Events That Made Him

Vincent dated the beginning of his work to two things that happened within months of each other.

The confession at Gannes and the sermon at Folleville

Called to a dying peasant on the Gondi estates, Vincent heard a general confession from a man who had concealed serious sins for years from ordinary confessors. The man said publicly afterwards that he would have been lost without it. Madame de Gondi asked how many others were in the same condition, and on 25 January 1617 Vincent preached at Folleville on the need to make a general confession, and the response was so large that he had to call in help. The Congregation of the Mission dates its founding to that sermon.

Châtillon and the first Confraternity of Charity

Later the same year, serving briefly as parish priest at Châtillon-les-Dombes, Vincent announced from the pulpit that a family in the parish was sick and destitute. So many people went that afternoon that the family was overwhelmed with more food than it could use, and by the following week nobody went at all.

That was the observation that shaped everything he did afterwards. Generosity without organisation produces a flood and then a drought. He formed the women of the parish into a Confraternity of Charity with a written rule, a rota, elected officers, a common fund and accounts, and the sick were fed steadily instead of once. The model was copied across France.

Founding for the Poor

Vincent founded the Congregation of the Mission in 1625, with an endowment from the Gondi family, to preach missions to the rural poor and to train priests. He had seen that country people were badly served by the clergy of the day, so he worked to reform the priesthood itself. In 1632 the congregation was given the priory of Saint-Lazare in Paris, which became its headquarters and gave its members the name Lazarists.

With St. Louise de Marillac, he founded the Daughters of Charity in 1633, a community of women who were not cloistered nuns and who lived in the world to serve the sick and poor in hospitals, orphanages and on the streets. The formula he gave them is exact: they would have for a monastery the houses of the sick, for a cell a hired room, for a chapel the parish church, for a cloister the streets of the city, for enclosure obedience, for a grille the fear of God, and for a veil holy modesty.

The legal manoeuvre behind that formula matters. Church discipline since the Council of Trent required enclosure for women in religious orders, which is why Jane Frances de Chantal's Visitation had to give up its plan to visit the sick at home. Vincent and Louise avoided the problem by declining to make the Daughters a religious order at all. They took private vows renewed annually rather than solemn vows, and remained canonically laywomen. It is one of the most consequential pieces of institutional lateral thinking in the history of the Church, and every active congregation of religious women since owes something to it.

The Great Organizer

Vincent understood that disorganised charity does not last. Alongside direct relief he built the supply chains, the funding structures and the supervision that kept relief going after the first enthusiasm had passed. He established Confraternities of Charity in parish after parish, and in 1634 he organised the wealthy women of Paris into the Ladies of Charity, who raised very large sums and administered institutions.

His method is worth naming because it is imitable.

• Written rules. Every foundation had a rule setting out who did what, when, and with whose money.
• Named responsibility. Officers were elected, terms were fixed, and someone was accountable for each task.
• Accounts. Funds were held in common and reckoned publicly, which is why donors kept giving.
• Division of labour. He put the great ladies of Paris in charge of raising money and governing, and the Daughters of Charity, mostly country girls, in charge of the hands-on nursing, because each group could do what the other could not.
• Supervision and formation. He gave conferences to the sisters for decades, and hundreds of them were taken down and survive.

The Galleys, the Foundlings and the War Relief

The galley prisoners

Through the Gondi connection Vincent was appointed royal chaplain of the galleys in 1619. Convicts were held in appalling conditions in Paris and Marseille before being sent to the oars. He had them moved to better quarters, organised care and instruction, and sent priests among them. Later accounts that he took a prisoner's place at the oar are legendary and are not supported by the record.

The foundlings

Abandoned infants in Paris were being left at a hospice where almost none survived, and some were sold. Vincent put the Ladies of Charity and the Daughters of Charity to work on it from 1638, secured funding and premises, and when the money ran short he called the Ladies together and told them plainly that the children would live or die depending on what they decided that day. The work continued.

Relief for Lorraine and Picardy

During the wars of the 1630s and 1640s whole provinces were devastated by armies, famine and plague. Vincent organised systematic relief on a national scale, collecting money in Paris and sending missionaries with food, seed corn, tools and clothing into Lorraine, Champagne and Picardy, along with reports back to the donors describing what they had found. It is one of the earliest examples of organised large-scale disaster relief in Europe.

Reforming the Clergy

Vincent judged that missions to the poor would achieve nothing lasting if the parish clergy who remained behind were ignorant or negligent, and much of the French clergy at the time were both. From 1628 he ran retreats for men about to be ordained, at the request of the bishop of Beauvais, and the practice spread until most French dioceses required it.

In 1633 he began the Tuesday Conferences, a weekly meeting of priests in Paris for prayer, study and mutual accountability, which drew in many of the most capable clergy of the generation, several of whom became bishops. His congregation also took on seminaries, which the Council of Trent had mandated and which France had largely failed to build.

From 1643 he sat on the Council of Conscience under the regency of Anne of Austria, advising on the appointment of bishops. He used the position to block unsuitable candidates and made enemies doing it, and he was eventually removed from the council. He also opposed Jansenism, the rigorist movement then spreading among the French elite, on the ground that its doctrine of grace discouraged people from the sacraments.

Quotable Wisdom

"Go to the poor: you will find God."

"Charity is the cement which binds Communities to God and persons to one another."

"It is not enough to do good. It must be done well."

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul

The organisation most people associate with his name was founded long after his death. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul was started in Paris in 1833 by a group of young Catholic students led by Frédéric Ozanam, who was challenged in a debate to show what the Church actually did for the poor and decided to answer by doing something.

The society took Vincent as its patron and adopted his method: lay people, organised in local conferences, visiting the poor in their own homes. It now operates in a large number of countries, and its shops, food services and home visits are a familiar part of parish life. Frédéric Ozanam was beatified in 1997.

Feast Day, Relics and Patronage

Feast day

His memorial is 27 September, the day of his death in 1660.

Canonisation and patronage

He was beatified in 1729 and canonised by Clement XII in 1737. In 1885 Leo XIII named him patron of all charitable works and societies in the Church, which is a formal designation rather than a matter of custom. He is also invoked by hospital workers, by volunteers and by prisoners, and for lost articles in some local traditions.

Relics

His body rests in the chapel of the Congregation of the Mission on the rue de Sèvres in Paris, in a reliquary above the altar. His heart is venerated in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity on the rue du Bac.

Louise de Marillac

Saint Louise de Marillac, his collaborator of thirty years, died six months before him in 1660 and was canonised in 1934. John XXIII named her patroness of Christian social workers in 1960. Our page on St. Louise de Marillac covers her in her own right, and the Daughters of Charity are as much her work as his.

What to Take From St. Vincent de Paul

• Organise it or it will not last. The lesson of Châtillon is that one good afternoon feeds nobody next week. Rotas, rules and accounts are a form of charity.
• Do good well. His own line. Sloppy help wastes the money and insults the person receiving it.
• Go in person. His method was always to send someone into the house rather than to send money to an institution. Christ names visiting as one of the acts (Matthew 25:36).
• Put people where they are strong. He gave the fundraising to those who could raise money and the nursing to those who could nurse, and did not confuse the two.
• Begin now. Vincent spent his first seventeen years as a priest chasing a comfortable living and started the real work at thirty-six. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and the parish near you has a list of people who need visiting this week.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Vincent de Paul?

Vincent de Paul was a French priest, born to a peasant family at Pouy in Gascony in 1581 and ordained in 1600 at the age of nineteen. He founded the Congregation of the Mission in 1625 to preach to the rural poor and to train clergy, and with Saint Louise de Marillac he founded the Daughters of Charity in 1633. He organised confraternities of lay people, relief for war-devastated provinces, care for foundlings and for galley prisoners, and retreats and conferences that reshaped the French clergy. He died in Paris on 27 September 1660.

Was St. Vincent de Paul really captured by pirates and sold as a slave?

The story appears only in two letters written in 1607 and 1608, in which the young Vincent describes being seized by Barbary corsairs in 1605, sold at Tunis, and escaping with a master he converted. He never repeated the account and later tried to have the letters destroyed. Historians have argued since the nineteenth century about whether the letters are genuine and whether the events happened, and the question has never been settled. The rest of his life is documented in thousands of surviving letters and conferences.

What are the Vincentians and the Daughters of Charity?

The Congregation of the Mission, founded in 1625, is a society of priests and brothers devoted to preaching to the poor and to training clergy. They are called Vincentians, and Lazarists after their Paris headquarters at Saint-Lazare. The Daughters of Charity, founded in 1633 with Louise de Marillac, are a community of women serving the sick and poor directly. They took private annual vows rather than solemn vows and remained canonically laywomen, which allowed them to work outside an enclosure at a time when Church discipline required enclosure for women in religious orders.

What did St. Vincent de Paul mean by "the poor are our masters"?

He used the phrase as a rule of conduct in his conferences to the Daughters of Charity. It means that the poor set the schedule rather than the servant, that they are to be treated with the courtesy owed to a superior, and that the convenience of the person helping comes second. The basis is Christ's teaching that whatever is done for the least of his brothers is done for him (Matthew 25:35 to 40), and the Catechism lists those same acts as the corporal works of mercy (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2447).

Is the Society of St. Vincent de Paul the same thing he founded?

No. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul was founded in Paris in 1833 by a group of young Catholic students led by Frédéric Ozanam, one hundred and seventy-three years after Vincent's death. It took him as its patron and adopted his method of lay people visiting the poor in their own homes, organised in local conferences. It operates today in a large number of countries. Frédéric Ozanam was beatified in 1997.

When is St. Vincent de Paul's feast day and what is he the patron of?

His memorial is 27 September, the day of his death in 1660. He was canonised by Clement XII in 1737, and in 1885 Leo XIII named him patron of all charitable works and societies in the Church. His body rests in the chapel of the Congregation of the Mission on the rue de Sèvres in Paris, and his heart is venerated in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity on the rue du Bac.