St. Vincent de Paul

The Gascon priest who organized the Church's charity toward the poor and founded the Daughters of Charity

Vincent de Paul was born to a peasant farming family in Gascony and ordained a priest while still a very young man. A pivotal encounter with a dying peasant in 1617 turned his ministry toward the rural and urban poor, and over the following decades he founded the Congregation of the Mission for priests and, with Saint Louise de Marillac, the Daughters of Charity, the first women's religious community to serve the poor outside the cloister. He organized relief for war-torn provinces, foundlings, galley slaves, and the sick, and Paris still venerates him at the chapel of the community he founded.

Vincent de Paul was born around April 1581 at Pouy, a small village in Gascony in southwestern France, the third of six children of a peasant farming family. He studied with the Franciscans at Dax and later at the University of Toulouse, and was ordained a priest in 1600, still short of the usual canonical age, with a dispensation.

By his own account, in 1605 he was captured at sea by Barbary corsairs and enslaved for two years in Tunis before escaping to France; the episode rests on Vincent's own letters, and historians have long debated some of its details, though the Church has traditionally accepted the outline of his account.

In the years that followed, Vincent served as a chaplain in Paris, including to the household of Emmanuel de Gondi, General of the Galleys of France, a position that exposed him to the suffering of the rural poor on the Gondi estates and of the galley convicts under the family's authority. The turn that shaped the rest of his life came on January 25, 1617, at Folleville: called to hear the confession of a dying peasant, Vincent realized how spiritually neglected the rural poor of France had become, and the sermon he preached afterward on that neglect is remembered by the Vincentian family as the birth of his charism. Later that same year, at Châtillon-les-Dombes, he organized ordinary laypeople into the first Confraternity of Charity, a structured, practical way of caring for the sick poor that became the model for the charitable works he built afterward.

In 1625 Vincent founded the Congregation of the Mission, priests and brothers dedicated to preaching missions in rural parishes and to forming the clergy, based at the former leper hospital of Saint-Lazare in Paris, from which the community took its common name of Lazarists. In 1633, together with Louise de Marillac, he founded the Daughters of Charity, a new kind of religious community for women who took vows but lived and served among the poor in ordinary dress rather than behind convent walls, an arrangement so unusual for its time that Vincent described their convent as the streets of the city and their cloister as obedience.

Across the decades that followed, Vincent organized relief on a scale few of his contemporaries matched: for the provinces of Lorraine and Picardy devastated by the Thirty Years' War, for abandoned infants left in the streets of Paris, for galley convicts, for the ransom of Christians enslaved in North Africa, and for the ordinary sick poor of city and countryside alike. He also worked for years to reform the formation and discipline of the French clergy, organizing retreats for men preparing for ordination. He remained active in this work into old age, despite failing health, and died at Saint-Lazare in Paris on September 27, 1660, at the age of seventy-nine.

Pope Clement XII canonized Vincent de Paul in 1737, and in 1885 Pope Leo XIII declared him patron of all works of charity. The Congregation of the Mission and the Daughters of Charity he founded remain among the largest charitable religious families in the Catholic Church, and Paris still venerates him at the chapel of the Congregation's motherhouse, a short walk from the Daughters of Charity chapel where his heart is kept.

Vincent de Paul organized charity rather than simply performing it: the Congregation of the Mission, the Daughters of Charity, and the lay Confraternities of Charity he founded turned scattered almsgiving into a sustained, structured Catholic response to poverty that still operates in his name worldwide, including the lay Society of Saint Vincent de Paul founded in his honor in the nineteenth century. Catholics keep his feast on September 27.