Confessor Vincent of Paul

Vincent de Paul was born on 24 April 1581 in the village of Pouy in Gascony, in southwestern France, the third child of a peasant family headed by Jean de Paul and Bertrande de Moras. The family worked a modest holding at the farm of Ranquines. His father sent him to study with the Cordelier Franciscans at Dax and afterward to the University of Toulouse, where he completed studies in theology. He was ordained a priest on 23 September 1600. In later letters he related that in 1605, while traveling by sea, he was captured by Barbary corsairs, sold as a slave in Tunis, and escaped to France around 1607 after converting his last master. That captivity is known chiefly from his own correspondence; later biographers have both accepted it as substantially historical and treated it with caution as possibly embellished, and it remains part of the traditional life rather than an independently documented episode.

After returning to France he spent time in Rome and then settled in Paris, where he came under the spiritual influence of Pierre de Bérulle and served as chaplain to the former queen Margaret of Valois. He held the parish of Clichy and later entered the household of Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, general of the galleys, as tutor to the Gondi children and as chaplain both to the family and to convicts condemned to the galleys. A confession he heard at Folleville in January 1617, followed by a mission there, impressed on him the spiritual neglect of the rural poor. The same year, while at Châtillon-les-Dombes, he organized local women into a Confraternity of Charity to care in an ordered way for the sick and destitute of the parish. Similar confraternities multiplied, and he devoted himself increasingly to popular missions in the countryside and to the reform and education of the clergy.

In 1625, with the support of the Gondi family, he founded the Congregation of the Mission, a company of priests later called Vincentians or Lazarists, from their principal house of Saint-Lazare in Paris. Its members preached missions especially in rural districts and conducted seminaries for the formation of priests. In 1633, together with Louise de Marillac, he established the Daughters of Charity, women who took simple vows and lived not in cloister but in the world, nursing the sick in hospitals and in their homes, caring for foundlings, and serving the poor. He organized large-scale relief for provinces devastated by war, notably Lorraine and Champagne, and for sufferers during the Fronde in and around Paris. He founded hospitals, a hospice for foundlings, and works for the aged and for galley slaves. Under the regency of Anne of Austria he sat on the Council of Conscience, which advised on ecclesiastical appointments, and he used that position to promote worthy bishops and to oppose Jansenism, with whose leading figures he had earlier been on friendly terms.

Vincent died in Paris on 27 September 1660. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XIII in 1729 and canonized by Pope Clement XII on 16 June 1737. His feast in the General Roman Calendar is 27 September. Pope Leo XIII declared him patron of all charitable associations in 1885. His body is enshrined in the chapel of the Congregation of the Mission on the rue de Sèvres in Paris; his heart is kept at the chapel of the Daughters of Charity. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, founded in Paris in 1833 by Frédéric Ozanam and companions, took his name and carried his model of organized lay charity across the world.