Saint Vincent de Paul

Vincent was born in 1581 to a peasant family at Pouy in Gascony, in south-western France. His father sold a pair of oxen to pay for his schooling, and he was ordained a priest very young, in 1600. For some years, by his own later admission, he was mainly looking for a comfortable living.

In Paris he came under the influence of the holy priest Pierre de Bérulle, and he became tutor and chaplain to the powerful Gondi family. In 1617, on their estates, he heard the confession of a dying peasant and saw how badly the country people had been neglected. The same year, in a small parish at Châtillon, he found a whole family sick and starving, and organized the women of the parish to help them. From these two experiences came his life’s work.

He founded Confraternities of Charity, groups of lay people who served the poor in their homes. In 1625 he founded the Congregation of the Mission, priests who preached missions to the rural poor and trained the clergy. In 1633, with Saint Louise de Marillac, he founded the Daughters of Charity, women who lived without enclosure so that they could go out to the sick and the poor, with “the streets of the city for their cloister.” He cared for abandoned babies, convicts in the galleys, refugees from war and the victims of famine, and he persuaded the rich and powerful of Paris to pay for it.

“It is not enough to do good; it must be done well,” he said. He died in Paris on 27 September 1660, at seventy-nine. He was canonized in 1737. In 1833 Blessed Frédéric Ozanam named the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul after him.