With gratitude and a renewed commitment to follow Christ, evangelizer of the poor, the Congregation of the Mission celebrates the Jubilee of the 400th anniversary of its foundation. Every Jubilee is an event of great spiritual, ecclesial and social relevance; it is a time that allows us to rediscover and celebrate all the power and gentleness of the Father’s merciful love so that we too can be his witnesses. This Jubilee, a time of grace, forgiveness and hope, allows us to be reborn in the love of Christ, intensifying our prayer of thanksgiving, conversion and commitment to the abundance of divine grace poured into our life and work; it is a propitious time to open our eyes and hearts more and more to the drama of the suffering of the poor, abandoned and excluded, and to strengthen us as signs and instruments of proclamation and witness of the Good News announced by Christ to the poor.

This Jubilee invites us to clothe ourselves with the Spirit of Christ, to return more and more to Jesus and to center our lives on him.

Jesus is the Incarnate Word, he is the “Divine Poor”, he is God present in the world to share the lot of the lowly and to announce the Kingdom to them. Jesus Christ is the center of our life and mission and the reason for our passion for the poor. St. Vincent said: “Our Lord is our Father, our Mother and our all”. “I ask our Lord to be the life of your life and the only claim of your heart”. Our task is to give ourselves to Christ, the ultimate expression of the merciful love of God the Father, so that He, through us, can continue that same mission. This is the time to return more and more to Christ, to deepen our personal encounter with Him and to center our lives on Him. In our world, where there is a danger of, in the words of Pope Francis, “being Christian without Jesus,” this Jubilee is an inspiration and an invitation to: rekindle our relationship with Christ; allow ourselves to be seduced by his person and converted to him; strengthen our identity as missionary disciples of Jesus; and discover compassion as the way God wants to reign in the world.

This Jubilee invites us to unleash the power of the Gospel and recover its original freshness.

St. Vincent always acted in tune with the Word of God, he always understood and lived in the light of the reality of the poor and of the Church. The centrality of the Word in St. Vincent de Paul is a call to us to seek to “recover the original freshness of the Gospel”, to center our life in the person of Christ and in the essentials of his message, because only He can renew our life, our community and take us out of selfish and outdated schemes. It is time to go to the “heart of the Gospel”, freeing it from so many secondary doctrines and religious schemes that take away “the perfume of the Gospel” and challenge us to overcome distorted forms of Christianity, from which an authentic practice of Christian life cannot spring.

This Jubilee invites us to deepen and embrace the mysticism of Christ’s missionary charity.

“Only a heart inflamed by the love of God is capable of infecting others.” This profound conviction made St. Vincent a person of deep and authentic faith and prayer, committed, realistic and attentive to concrete problems, with a profound “unity between action and contemplation”. Intimacy with Christ passes through a passion for Christ in the poor. It is a spiritual passion that is expressed in the commitment of an affective and effective love, which leads to “loving God with the strength of one’s arms and the sweat of one’s brow” and makes action and prayer go hand in hand. It is a passion clothed in the sentiments and attitudes of Christ, a mysticism of mission and charity, where in Christ the poor are our inheritance and the recipients of evangelization, where we are called to be prophets of Christ’s preferential love for the poor…. On a personal and community level, this missionary mysticism proposes that we go out to meet the needy and promote a witness of faith with the “odor of the poor”. In the present socio-cultural context, which emphasizes individualism and consumerism and generates a decrease in missionary fervor, it is time, individually and collectively, to get out of the “comfort zone”, of self-complacency, of stagnation, of avoiding distorted ways of living the faith, such as spiritual worldliness, unhealthy spiritualities oriented only to well-being and personal prosperity, and certain lifestyles far from God and the poor…. We are called to welcome the innovative capacity of St. Vincent’s charitable and missionary experience, his creativity and his holiness. We are challenged, according to the calls of Pope Francis, “not to abandon our missionary zeal”, “our evangelizing joy”, “the Gospel”, and “never to leave the poor alone”.

This Jubilee invites us to a deep awareness of missionary love for the Church and to be a missionary, prophetic and poor Church for the poor.

The Vincentian vocation was born from a “restless pastoral conscience” in the face of concrete situations of tired and dejected people, like sheep without a shepherd. In his encounter and dialogue with the poor and their reality, Vincent saw in the cry of the poor the call of Christ and deepened his understanding of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, the work of the Father, guided by the Holy Spirit and the continuation of Christ’s mission. The mission of the Church is to evangelize, especially the poor, who are “the most precious members of the body of Christ”. Continuing the mystery of Christ, the Church must prolong her poverty, her predilection for the little ones and her identification with them. This closeness and commitment to the poor will be for St. Vincent the sign of belonging to the true Church and the criterion for discerning the Church’s fidelity to her mission. This ecclesial dimension present in the Vincentian charism calls us today to embrace and intensely assume the calls and dreams of Pope Francis, who desires a Church “going forth, prophetic, synodal and in missionary conversion”. The Church must be “a Mother with open arms”, “all merciful”, to be in solidarity with and serve the poor and the suffering, to commit herself to justice and to joyfully announce the Good News in dialogue and encounter with all people.

This Jubilee invites us to an integral commitment to the poor and to an integral and transforming action of mission and charity.

St. Vincent did not limit himself to preaching or to simple social assistance. He knew how to combine proclamation with charity, preaching with promotion, dimensions of the same missionary action that seeks the salvation of the whole person and of all peoples. Mission and charity are two sides of the same service, which carries the Word that liberates and saves and seeks to build fraternity and transform the causes that generate poverty and injustice. St. Vincent said: “There can be no charity if it is not accompanied by justice”. He challenges us to return to Jesus and his liberating mission, to recover the historical and social dimension of the Kingdom of God, embracing the humanizing and compassionate project of the Father, a project of fraternal life and the construction of a world of justice and dignity for all, beginning with the poor and excluded. This is the challenge for all of us today: to assume an integral and liberating missionary and charitable action and a way of acting within a critical, prophetic and transforming dynamic, with adequate and coherent strategies.

This Jubilee invites us to renew the communitarian and synodal experience of walking together in mutual help, participation and collaboration in favor of the poor.

The work undertaken by St. Vincent was marked by a deep ecclesial sense and a spirit of dialogue and collaboration. Vincent brought together rich and poor, clergy and laity, men and women. He highly valued the laity, especially women whom he mobilized and formed for collaborative work. St. Vincent’s experience is today a great invitation to work together against poverty and its causes. Collaboration helps to promote the sharing of gifts in solidarity, opens up prospects for revitalization and encourages new and creative joint actions and projects. Collaboration is an expression and a requirement of the Vincentian virtue of zeal and flows  from attitudes of humility and responsibility. In the experience of St. Vincent, master of collaboration, we need each other. Collaboration requires an attitude of reciprocity, interdependence and openness to working together with others. Collaboration strengthens the mission, broadens its horizon and does not allow us to fall into the danger of closing ourselves up in our own difficulties, needs and interests. Awareness of the common mission and its challenges, ever more disturbing and common, should lead us to overcome ideological, cultural and group barriers and interests and to promote mutual help, all for the benefit of the poor. “We are in the same boat and heading for the same port” (Evangelii Gaudium, 99).

This Jubilee invites the Congregation of the Mission to a missionary and vocational revitalization.

Present and active in a Church inserted in a globalized, pluralistic, secularized and constantly changing world, with multiple pastoral calls, the Congregation of the Mission must work on its priorities and concerns, not in the search for prominence or projection in the social and ecclesial environment, nor in survival, but in embracing and cultivating its missionary ideal, with renewed ardor, fidelity to the charism, spirit of faith, firm purpose of conversion and missionary creativity. It is called to ask forgiveness for its sins, errors and misunderstandings throughout its history; it is challenged to renew itself and develop its vocational vitality, revitalizing its present reality in the face of the new calls of the poor. It is called to missionary creativity, committing itself to live and promote: a continuous search for missionary reconfiguration in the present social and ecclesial scenario; a witnessing life, in openness and commitment to the diversity of services to the poor and to formation; a journey in a prophetic and synodal perspective, together with the poor, the Vincentian Family and other ecclesial and social forces, without pretensions of protagonism and exclusivity; and a mission assumed and renewed in the spirit of the five virtues. In this decidedly missionary and communitarian spirit, all possible efforts and initiatives to promote, revitalize and energize the mission, formation, vocation promotion, spiritual and community life… should be thought out, planned and put into practice. In this demanding endeavor of faith and hope, of hard work and total trust in God and docility to his Spirit, we need to walk together, always forward, supported and encouraged by the wise words of St. Vincent: “Let God govern our little boat; if it is useful to him, he will prevent it from sinking”.

Pope Francis asks us: “Are we open to God’s surprises or do we fearfully close ourselves off to the newness of the Holy Spirit? Are we determined to travel the new paths that God’s newness presents to us, or are we entrenched in outdated structures that have lost their capacity to respond?” God continues to surprise us today and invites us to travel new paths. It is up to us to embrace and take up again the witness of St. Vincent in a renewed way so that, with generosity, courage and hope, we can continue steadfastly on our missionary journey, building another 400 years in creative fidelity to the charismatic legacy left by St. Vincent.

Fr. Eli Chaves dos Santos, CM
Source: Informativo São Vicente, Vol. LXI, nº 329, 2024,
Brazilian Province of the Congregation of the Mission.