Despite the distance of two centuries between them, there are — in the biographies of Vincent de Paul and Frederic Ozanam— some curious points of coincidence […]. Although both were born far from Paris (Ozanam in Italy), they were inhabitants of that city most of their adult lives; both students and graduates in the university of the Sorbona. However, on this superficial level, the differences between them are more striking than coincidences, especially as regards the origin (bourgeois for Ozanam, purely peasant for Vincent), as well as for the profession (intellectual-writer-teacher for the first).

Precisely the difference of social origin could have been the cause, or at least the occasion, of a later divergence of roads that would have made impossible any parallelism between their lives. For while the desire to overcome the poverty of his origin was about to disorient Vincent’s life through the barren paths of ambition until around the age of thirty-six, Ozanam gave “thanks to God for having made me born in a position between scarcity and abundance … God knows what dangers the sloth of a wealthy condition would have had for me” (Lettres, I 239).

There are among their lives much less superficial and more significant similarities. The dedication of their lives to the redemption of the poor was born in both as a solution to a crisis of faith […].

There is even a very curious coincidence that, although at first glance anecdotal, turned out to be in the lives of both a fact of decisive consequences. The young agnostic and saint-simonian, Jean Broet, acted, without knowing it, in rigorous parallelism in the life of Ozanam with the so called “heretic of Marchais” in the life of Saint Vincent. Both raised the same objection to Frederic and Vincent: how can the Catholic Church be the true church of Jesus Christ if it forgets the poor? It is true that the objection was raised to Ozanam before he had thought of working for the poor, while Vincent heard it when he had spent about three years of dedication to rural missions […]. The same for Vincent as for Ozanam, active charity for the poor will be, from that moment, as well as the guiding principle of their lives, the best proof of the truthfulness of their faith and the truthfulness of their Church.

Author: Jaime Corera: “Servir a los pobres es ir a Dios” [To serve the poor is to go to God], Madrid: La Milagrosa, 1999, pp. 281-283.

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