Deborah Gyapong of Canadian Catholic News writes…
Jean-Noel Cormier got his first glimpse of poverty—and a desire to help—in his childhood in Bouctouche, New Brunswick.
“It was a small village,” he said. “We were not that rich. But we had kids poorer than us,” said the national president-elect of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (SSVP).
He remembers going to encourage some of the poorer kids to go to school. They drank water from mason jars, he said, too poor to afford drinking glasses. “It kind of stayed with me,” Cormier said.
There was one family with 21 children in the house and only ten pairs of boots. The first ten out the door “went out okay,” the rest had to make do, he said. He recalled how poor families “went to the basement of the church to get clothing and food.”
When he was eight, Cormier and his family moved to Montreal where, in Quebec, he encountered La Guignolée, a tradition carried out in December where people go door to door to collect non-perishable food and money for the poor. It is then, at the age of about 12 or 13 that he first heard of the SSVP, and participated in their charitable work.
Though he drifted away in his later teens and early adulthood, his work with Canada Post took him and his family to Toronto where they became involved in the French-language parish Sacré Coeur that had an active SSVP and a Development and Peace group.
The SSVP made up Christmas hampers for the poor. He realized he had “kind of forgotten about it.” But becoming reacquainted rekindled his interest.
When he moved back to Ottawa in 2000, a friend asked him if he wanted to join the Knights of Columbus. He answered he would prefer to join the SSVP. The friend said he had a brother who was a member. The brother called and Cormier has been active ever since.
He started out doing what those in the Ottawa Central Council (which covers the Ottawa and the Pembroke dioceses) do—volunteering to be on call for two weeks at a time, available to help any family in need. If a family calls, the SSVP will provide non-perishable food items and purchase fresh meat and produce that members—always in pairs—will deliver on a confidential basis.
The personal visits to peoples’ homes are a “trademark” of the SSVP, Cormier said. Visiting someone’s home gives an entirely different picture than one would get “if you are sitting in an office with a form to fill out, ticking off the numbers.” Members are careful “not to judge,” he said.
He recalled hearing of how two female SSVP volunteers had visited a home for 45 minutes, and after they left they sat in their car wondering what it was the woman needed. “She didn’t tell us what she needed; she needed to talk,” he said. “That’s one of the services you can do by home visits.”
As Cormier prepares to take the helm of the SSVP, which has more than 8,300 volunteers across Canada serving some 450,000 poor people each year, he hopes to encourage more SSVP projects in schools so that a new generation of young people will catch the call to service the way he did as a young person, even if that call lies dormant for a while.
While the work SSVP does with the poor is always confidential regarding those they help, Cormier realizes name recognition is important as charities seek volunteers and donations.
The SSVP also has a chance to increase its exposure and renew its inspiration through the charism of its founder, Blessed Frederic Ozanam, during the celebration this year of the 200th anniversary of his birth, something that is already happening to the national president-elect.
Cormier is steeping himself in Ozanam’s life, working through reading a thick volume of his letters, written in old French. In a training session in Paris for SSVP work in Madagascar on behalf of the French SSVP, Cormier was able visit the churches where St. Vincent de Paul and Ozanam were buried as well as the place where the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul served the poor.
It was a sister from that religious order that guided Ozanam and his friends who formed the SSVP in 1833 on how they, as a lay society, could best help the poor.
Ozanam, a doctor’s son from a devout Catholic family, found himself in Paris after the French Revolution, when there were social forces trying to push Catholics out of running schools and out of the public square. Ozanam became convinced the Christian faith offered the best solutions to the problems he saw.
Cormier sees parallels to today’s world. He points out this is the era “Les Misérables” portrays, where the plight of the poor was terrible.
In travels to Haiti, Bolivia and Madagascar, Cormier has seen firsthand how desperate the plight of so many poor, including seeing people scavenging for food in garbage dumps that in some countries might only have attracted dogs. “Even in Canada you see situations that are totally unacceptable in a country like ours,” he said.
The SSVP is committed to systemic change, he said, oriented to give people the tools to rise out of poverty and stay out. In Canada, the poor people today are very different from 20 years ago, he said. “We need to change and adapt to be able to help them.”
Sometimes, volunteers will drive up to a beautiful house with two new cars in the driveway. Inside they will discover both parents have lost their jobs and they cannot make their payments or have enough to buy food, he said. They see more single-parent families struggling to meet their expenses. Cormier is also concerned about many old people who are too proud to ask for help.
Tags: Canada, SVDP
