This first part recounts the conversion process of Saint Vincent de Paul, who, prior to 1617, did not show a full dedication to the poor despite his contact with charitable institutions. Vincent’s transformation occurs following the experiences at Folleville and Chatillon, where he adopts a mission of evangelization and service to the most marginalized. Over his lifetime, his work expands to include various types of poor people, from peasants to the mentally ill and refugees. His Christ-centered focus highlights the humanity of Christ, and his ecclesiological vision breaks with traditional clerical hierarchies, leading to a more missionary and outward-facing Church. By the time of his death in 1660, Saint Vincent’s spirituality is marked by community-oriented service, imitation of Christ, and a departure from the alliances between Church and political power.

The Past and Future of the Vincentian Spirit

I would like to say a word about the ambitious tone of the title and make clear the limitations of this presentation. Regarding the past, I am not in a position to know the entire background of what is called the “Vincentian spirit” (neither as in Saint Vincent’s grounding experience nor in its development to the present), nor can I describe it to its full depth. Regarding the future, I was convinced years ago by a sociological study I read that foretelling future events is practically senseless and really without meaning. Knowledge of the past is certainly possible, but it is nevertheless fragile and partial and strongly conditioned by the personal perspective of the author. So, I acknowledge from the beginning that my description of the history of the Vincentian spirit which is the object of this study will be by its nature highly selective and very much my own synthesis. What I say about the future is not intended to foretell anything. It is only to indicate some themes that seem essential so the Vincentian spirit might have a meaningful and intelligible future.

Let me make one last introductory comment. The term “spirit” or “spirituality,” applied to the personality of St. Vincent and his influence in history, appears to me to be a category invented for some other context and does not fit very well here. I prefer to use terms like the experience of Saint Vincent, or the Christian experience of Saint Vincent, or perhaps the Christian vision of Saint Vincent, whichever of these expressions better conveys the meaning in the context.

1. The Original Experience

Reliable information about the life of St. Vincent points to a clear personal concern for the poor before 1617, when he was 37 years of age. In addition to the data which Abelly gives us about his childhood (1. I, c.2), he had experience of a confraternity at the Hospital of Charity during his second stay in Rome (XIII b, 9), he used to visit the Hospital of Charity in Paris (Abelly, 1, III, c. XI, sec I), he made a donation of 15,000 livres in 1611 to the hospital, although it seems from all the information we have that Vincent was only an intermediary (XIII a, 20-22), and he taught catechism to the servants of the Gondi household and to the peasants on their estates (XIII, 31 ff). These are reliable facts, but nothing supports the picture of a person of deep faith who from his earliest days wanted to turn his life over to the poor (as Abelly would have us believe). Biographers in various periods of history commonly paint the same kind of picture of Christian children and devout and promising young priests.

Biographers differ about the process by which Vincent de Paul was converted from the thoughtless and self-centered years of his early priesthood, but practically all the biographers of St. Vincent as well as dedicated students of his spirituality agree on two points. First, there is the date. The year 1617 marks the decisive date for a radical change in the direction of his life, stemming from the experiences of Folleville and Chatillon. Secondly, the change of direction led to a complete dedication of his personhood and priesthood to the evangelization of the poor.

Who were those poor? First, they were poor peasants, a little later the galley slaves. But with the passing of the years, and in good part because of the influence of the Daughters of Charity and Ladies of Charity, all kinds of poor people were included: the mentally ill, sick people in public hospitals, abandoned children, slaves, immigrants from inside and outside the country, mercenaries, aging craftsmen and laborers without work or pensions, beggars, refugees and victims of wars, persecuted rural Catholics (from Ireland, Scotland and the British Isles) and natives of Madagascar. There were also other poor people in France at this time, people who were not rich in any way whatsoever nor who did not belong to what we call the middle class, neither high nor low, craftsmen for example, people whom St. Vincent never considered the object of his dedication and efforts nor did the men and women inspired by St. Vincent. The poverty of those helped by St. Vincent and his institutions, by contrast, had a common characteristic, a characteristic which today we would more appropriately call marginalization, an idea very close to what St. Louise meant by the expression: “the poor who lack everything.”

The conversion of St. Vincent de Paul to the evangelization of the poor was, of course, totally an experience of faith, which he personally lived from 1618 to 1625 by preaching missions on the de Gondi estates with the help of occasional companions. He soon discovered, however, through the suggestions and influence of Madame de Gondi, that a long-term work of evangelizing the poor could not be undertaken without stable organizations built on good foundations. This discovery was embodied in the founding of the Congregation of the Mission (1625-1626), the Daughters of Charity (1633), and the Ladies of Charity (1634), and other kinds of organizations more loosely structured, created for particular situations (Macon, organizations of help for the war in Lorraine, Picardy and Paris).

The transformation of the scope of Vincent’s work is very interesting. His vision, in the beginning centered on small towns near Paris and later extended throughout the kingdom of France, ended up by taking on international dimensions. The advice and influence of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith played an important role (III, 163-65). St. Vincent believed he was obligated to respond affirmatively to its requests, as was the case in all his works, because he was called “to respond to the will of God “(ibid). In addition, one of the reasons for sending his followers to the farthest frontiers of Europe was a fear that God would remove the faith from Europe “because of the fault of our corrupt practices” (III, 187-89). The new vision of a universal outreach was in perfect harmony with the original and central intuition of his spirituality. In effect, at that time, like today, the masses of the poor were rather outside than inside corrupt Europe.

The conversion of St. Vincent affected all the psychological and emotional dimensions of his personality. But it also profoundly affected his theology, his relation to God in theory and in practice. Before Vincent’s conversion to the poor, Berulle was his chief mentor in dismantling the God-centeredness of his youthful piety and his studies in Toulouse, in order to orient him toward a purely Christo-centric Christian vision (please forgive the redundancy, but it is useful here). This means that his vision of faith passed from being a theo-logy (which all religions have) to being a Christo-logy (which only Christianity has and this is what precisely distinguishes it from other religions).

In Vincent’s case his Christological vision was centered, however, not on the incarnate Word glorified at the right hand of the Father as it was with Berulle, but on Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary, evangelizer of the country people of Galilee who died on the cross. The resurrected and glorified Christ was also for him, without a doubt, the object of loving adoration and faith. But in order to dedicate himself to continuing the mission of Christ and in the footsteps of Christ, he could not have a better model than that of God becoming flesh and taking on historical existence, who became present in the world through his incarnation, and who ended his historical life on the cross. Vincent said, for example, “In order to be a true Daughter of Charity one needs to do what the Son of God did on earth” (IX, 14). And to the missionaries: “Our Company has always had as its end to do what our Lord came to do in the world” (XI, 323).

His ecclesiological vision also had to undergo radical revisions in light of the exigencies of his new vocation. The youthful Vincent had faithfully assimilated the ecclesiology that emerged from Trent. But this ecclesiology was focused, to a great extent in reaction to the Protestants on aspects of the internal constitution of the Church and overlooked its missionary dimension. But this is exactly the decisive dimension for Vincent who centers his personal experience of faith on the evangelization of the peasant population which, though baptized, was very poorly instructed in the faith, no less than to evangelize those who had not heard anyone speak of Christ.

In the dogmatic documents of Trent, the image of the priest was defined above all as a man of cult, a minister of the Eucharist. Although the documents about the reform of the life of the clergy indeed took into account the pastoral dimension of the Catholic priesthood, as a whole “…what emerged from the Council was an image of a priest as a man of the sacred, set apart, more concerned about people relating to God than about animating the common life of the Church.” In other words, it was a clearly theo-centric vision of the priesthood, clearly God-centered. This vision of the Church, a vision that lasted from Trent until Vatican II, was evidently a hierarchical-clerical vision, in which the lay people are little more than passive-receptive members of grace and the sacraments.

Nevertheless, to imitate Jesus Christ, to continue his mission in history, “to do what the Son of God did on earth” (to feed the hungry, to teach those who do not know, to cure the sick, to expel ‘demons’; in summary, to evangelize the poor in word and deed) and to bring to completion the best of that mission and that imitation – for all of this what is required is just baptism. St. Vincent said to the Daughters of Charity: “Anyone who would like to seed a resemblance of the life of Jesus Christ can see it in the life of a Daughter of Charity. What is it he came to do? He came to teach, to enlighten. That is what you do” (IX, 466). In summary: to prolong the mission of the Christ in history, it is not necessary to be a member of the clergy (on the other hand, being a member of the clergy does not have to be an obstacle to that same mission).

Neither is it necessary to be a religious. More than that, St. Vincent would have encountered (in fact did encounter) insuperable difficulties from the religious structures of his time in his efforts to bring to fruition his way of living out the faith, his spiritual way. All of his institutions without exception are secular, standing over against religious institutions. And nearly all of them are secular in contrast to the clerical state. The only exception in this second sense is the Congregation of the Mission, but only in part, because the Brothers are not clerics. However, also among the clerical members of the Congregation of the Mission the missionary dimension ought to dominate (that for which the Congregation of the Mission was created) over the clerical aspect. To be clerics in the full sense according to the mind of Trent, it was not necessary to found the Congregation of the Mission. For that purpose, the Oratory of Berulle had been founded some 15 years before.

It is not just on the theological level that the spirituality of St. Vincent presupposes new openings and perspectives beyond the design of the ecclesiology of the Council of Trent. This spirituality also presupposes new openings in the areas of sociology and history. All his activity implies a rupture on various levels of the alliance between the throne and the altar typical of the Old Regime. Let’s call to mind, for example, his attitude toward his own men not accepting ecclesiastical benefices or the intense discomfort which he felt before and during his participation in the Council of Conscience, the most explicit incarnation of the above mentioned alliance. For St. Vincent, as well as his disciple Bossuet, the Church ought to be, above all, not the Church of kings and rich people but the Church of the poor.

In summary: when St. Vincent died in 1660, he left to posterity an experience of faith, a rich and new spiritual way, built up progressively on the bases of the experiences of Folleville and Chatillon. Some of his most significant themes are as follows:

• On the personal level
  • abandonment of a self-centered vision of faith and life;
  • conversion-dedication to the poor, with a clear desire to encounter those marginalized by society and the Church in every part of the world;
  • working for the poor in organized institutions, in communities and in teams;
  • motivated and directed by a radical purpose: “to respond to the designs of God and to imitate the earthly life of Jesus Christ.”
• On the theological level
  • abandonment of a theo-centric vision in favor of a Christo-centric vision and even an anthropo-centric vision (in conformity with the very words of Christ: “. . . you did it unto me”; compare also I John 4:21: “Whoever does not love his brother whom he sees. . .”).
• On the ecclesiological level
  • from a vision of the Church as a society-community more or less subsisting in itself to a vision of the Church as clearly missionary and open to the world;
  • from a Church in which the clerical-religious element dominates to a Church with a more secular and lay character;
  • from a Church allied with the political and financial powers of this world to a Church fully turned toward the poor.

Jaime Corera C. M.
Source: Reavivemos el Espíritu Vicenciano: Semana de Estudios Vicencianos, XXII (CEME, Salamanca, 1995).

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