Life of St. Vincent de Paul

In due time the rumor of the good work that was being done reached the ears of Louis XIII, who promptly made Vincent de Paul Almoner to the King's ships, with the honors and privileges of a naval officer and a salary of six hundred livres. This enabled Vincent to carry his mission farther afield, and he determined to visit all the convict prisons in the seaport towns, taking Marseilles as his first station.

Here, where the conditions were perhaps even worse than in Paris, Vincent met them in the same spirit and conquered by the same means. The fact that he had once been a slave himself gave him an insight into the sufferings of the galley slaves and a wonderful influence over them. Accustomed as they were to be looked upon as brutes, it was a new experience to be treated as if it were a privilege to be in their company. This strange new friend who went about among them, kissing their chains, sympathizing with their sufferings and attending to their lowest needs seemed to them like an Angel from Heaven; even the most hardened could not resist such treatment.

In the meantime, through the generosity of Vincent's friends, hospitals were being built and men and women were offering themselves to help in any capacity in this work of charity. Many of these earnest Christians gave their very lives for the galley slaves; for fevers, plague and contagious diseases of every kind raged in the filthy convict prisons, and many priests and lay helpers died of the infection. Yet other devoted workers were always found to take their place, and the work which Vincent had inaugurated thrived and prospered.

Chapter 5 MISSION WORK

THE incident which had given rise to Vincent's first mission at Folleville had never been forgotten by Madame de Gondi. It seemed to her that there was need to multiply such missions among the country poor, and no sooner had Vincent returned to her house than she offered him a large sum of money to endow a band of priests who would devote their lives to evangelizing the peasantry on her estates.

Vincent was delighted, but considering himself unfit to undertake the management of such an enterprise, he proposed that it should be put into the hands of the Jesuits or the Oratorians.

Madame de Gondi, although convinced in her own mind that Vincent, and Vincent alone, was the man to carry out the enterprise, obediently suggested it to one religious Order after another. In every case some obstacle intervened, until the Countess was more than ever persuaded that her first instinct had been right. Knowing Vincent's loyalty to Holy Church and his obedience to authority, she determined to have recourse to her brother-in-law, the Archbishop of Paris. An old house called the Collège des Bons Enfants was at that moment vacant. She asked it of the Archbishop, whom she had interested in her scheme, and who proposed to Vincent to undertake the foundation. There was no longer room for hesitation; the will of God seemed plain; indeed, Vincent's love of the poor had been for some time struggling with his humility.

The new Congregation was to consist of a few good priests who, renouncing all thought of honor and worldly advancement, were to devote their lives to preaching in the villages and small towns of France. Their traveling expenses were to be paid from a common fund. They were to spend themselves in the service of their neighbor, instructing, catechizing and exhorting; and they were to take nothing in return for their labors. Nine months of the year were to be given to this kind of work; the other three to prayer and preparation.

In March, 1625, the foundation was made, and Vincent de Paul was named the first superior. It was stipulated, however, that he should remain, as he had already promised, in the house of the founders, a condition which seemed likely to doom the enterprise to failure. Vincent could hardly fail to realize how necessary it was that the superior of a new Congregation should be in residence in his own house, but he confided the little company to God and awaited the development of events.

The solution was altogether unexpected. Two months after the signing of the contract of foundation, Madame de Gondi was taken suddenly ill, and she died a few days later. Her broken-hearted husband not only consented to Vincent's residence in the Collège des Bons Enfants, but shortly afterwards, leaving that world where he had shone so brilliantly, he himself became a postulant at the Oratory.

The beginnings of the new Congregation were humble enough. Its members were three in number: Vincent, his friend M. Portail, and a poor priest who had lately joined them. Before setting out on their mission journeys they used to give the key of the house to a neighbor; but as there was nothing in it to steal, there was little cause for anxiety. In the course of their travels other priests, realizing the greatness of the work, asked to be enrolled in the little company. Its growth, nevertheless, was slow; ten years after the foundation the Congregation only numbered thirty-three members; but Vincent had no desire that it should be otherwise. In 1652 it was recognized by Pope Urban VIII under the name of the Congregation of the Mission.

Vincent lavished the greatest care on the training of his priests. They were to be simple and frank in their relations with the poor, modest in manner, friendly and easy of access.

"Our sermons must go straight to the point," he would say, "so that the humblest of our hearers may understand; our language must be clear and unaffected." The love of virtue and the hatred of evil were the points to be insisted on; the people were to be shown where virtue lay and how to attain it. For "fine sermons" Vincent had the greatest contempt; he would use his merry wit to make fun of the pompous preachers whose only thought was to impress their audience with an idea of their own eloquence.

"Of what good is a display of rhetoric?" he would ask; "who is the better for it? It serves no purpose but self-advertisement."

The Mission Priests did good wherever they went; everybody wanted them, and it was hard to satisfy the appeals for missions which came from all over the country. In due time the Congregation outgrew the Collège des Bons Enfants, and was transferred to a large Augustinian priory which had originally been a leper hospital, and still bore the name of St. Lazare.

Up to this time the Mission Priests had contented themselves with ministering to the peasantry, but in the course of their travels it had become painfully apparent that the clergy themselves were in urgent need of some awakening force. Those of good family led, for the most part, worldly and frivolous lives, while the humbler sort were as ignorant as the peasants among whom they lived. The religious wars had led to laxity and carelessness; drunkenness and vice were fearfully prevalent.

To Vincent, with his high ideals of the priesthood, this was a terrible revelation. The old custom of giving a retreat to priests who were about to be ordained had fallen into disuse. With the assistance of some of the French bishops he determined to revive it, and retreats of ten or fourteen days were organized at St. Lazare for candidates to the priesthood. Here, in an atmosphere of prayer and recollection, those who were about to be ordained had every opportunity of realizing the greatness of the step that they were taking and of making resolutions for their future lives.

The Mission Priests were to help in this work more by example than by precept; they were to preach by humility and simplicity. "It is not by knowledge that you will do them good," Vincent often repeated, "or by the fine things you say, for they are more learned than you – they have read or heard it all before. It is by what they see of your lives that you will help them; if you yourselves are striving for perfection, God will use you to lead these gentlemen in the right way."

The blessing of God seemed, indeed, to rest upon the ordination retreats; nearly all who made them carried away something of Vincent's noble ideal of the priestly life. Many to whom they had been the turning point of a lifetime, felt the need of further help and instruction from the man who had awakened all that was noblest in their natures.

To meet this necessity Vincent inaugurated a kind of guild for young priests who desire to live worthy of their vocation. Weekly gatherings were held at St. Lazare under the name of "Tuesday Conferences," where difficulties were discussed, debates held and counsels given. It was not easy to belong to the "Conferences." Members were pledged to offer their lives completely to God and to renounce all self-interest. Nevertheless, they increased rapidly in number, and the Conferences were attended by all the most influential priests in Paris.

But Vincent's zeal was boundless, and one good work grew out of another. The retreats for ordination candidates having been so successful, he conceived the idea of giving retreats on the same lines for the laity. The work thrived beyond all expectation. All were admitted without exception: noblemen and beggars, young men and old, the learned and the ignorant, priests and laymen. St. Lazare at such times, Vincent once said, was like Noah's ark: every kind of creature was to be found in it.

The only difficulty was the expense entailed, for many of the retreatants could pay nothing toward their board and lodging, and Vincent would refuse nobody. Here, as in so many other cases, it was the Congregation of the Ladies of Charity, founded by Vincent in Paris, that came nobly to his rescue. There was Madame de Maignelais, sister of M. de Gondi, who, left a widow at the age of twenty, devoted herself and her enormous fortune to alms and good works. There was the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, niece of the great Richelieu; Madame de Miramion, beautiful and pious; Madame Goussault, the first President of the Dames de Charité; and many others, whose purses were always at Vincent's disposal.

The Congregation of the Mission Priests was to inaugurate another good work for which there was an urgent necessity in the world of Vincent's day. While yet at the Collège des Bons Enfants, he had realized how great was the need of a special training for young men destined for the priesthood and had founded a small seminary. After the move to St. Lazare the undertaking had grown and prospered. A college of the same kind had been lately founded by M. Olier, the zealous curé of St. Sulpice; and these two institutions, the first of the famous seminaries which were later to spread all over France, were powerful for the reform of the clergy. One hundred and fifty years later the Mission Priests of St. Lazare alone were at the head of sixty such seminaries.

So the work of the Congregation increased and multiplied until it seemed almost too much for human capacity. But Vincent knew wherein lay the strength of the Mission Priests. "How may we hope to do our work?" he would ask. "How can we lead souls to God? How can we stem the tide of wickedness among the people? Let us realize that this is not man's work at all, it is God's. Human energy will only hinder it unless directed by God. The most important point of all is that we should be in touch with Our Lord in prayer."

Dearest to his heart of all his undertakings was the first and chief work of the Congregation – the holding of missions for the poor. By twos and threes he would send out his sons to their labors, bidding them travel to their destination in the cheapest possible way. They were to accept neither free quarters nor gifts of any kind. All their thoughts and prayers were to be concentrated on their work: they were to live for their mission. Two sermons were to be preached daily – simple instructions on the great truths – and those who had not yet made their First Communion were to be catechized. The mission lasted ten or fourteen days, during which the Mission Priests were to have as much personal contact with the people as possible, visiting the sick and the infirm, reconciling enemies and showing themselves as the friends of all.

It was no easy task to be a good Mission Priest. It meant self-mastery, self-renunciation, self-forgetfulness total and complete. It meant the laying aside of much that lies very close to a man's heart. "Unless the Congregation of the Mission is humble," said Vincent, "and realizes that it can accomplish nothing of any value, but that it is more apt to mar than to make, it will never be of much effect; but when it has this spirit it will be fit for the purposes of God."

Yet, in spite of all that such a vocation meant of self-renunciation, year after year the Mission Priests increased in number. "This work is not human, it is from God," was Vincent's answer to those who marvelled at the power of the company for good.

Chapter 6 THE GREY SISTERS

ALTHOUGH many of the great ladies of Paris had enrolled themselves among the Ladies of Charity and were ready to help Vincent to the utmost of their ability, much of the work to be done in that great town was hardly within their scope. The care of the sick in the hospitals alone demanded ceaseless labor and an amount of time which few wives and mothers could give. There was a gap which needed filling, as Vincent could not but see, and he took immediate steps to fill it.

The instrument he required lay close to his hand in the person of Louise le Gras, a widow lady who had devoted her life to the service of the poor. She had gathered in her house a few young working women from the country to help her in her labors; these were the people needed to step in where the Ladies of Charity fell short. A larger house was taken on the outskirts of Paris; good country girls who were ready to give their services without payment were encouraged to devote themselves to the work, and Louise le Gras, with all the enthusiasm of her unselfish nature, set to work to train the little company to efficiency.

Of one thing this holy woman was absolutely convinced – unless the motive with which the work was undertaken was supernatural, neither perseverance nor success could be expected. "It is of little use for us to run about the streets with bowls of soup," she would say, "if we do not make the love of God the object of our effort. If we let go of the thought that the poor are His members, our love for them will soon grow cold." To pray, to labor and to obey was to be the whole duty of the members of the little sisterhood. The strength of their influence was to be the fact that it was Christ to whom they ministered in the person of His poor.

To many of these girls, rough and ignorant as they were for the most part, life in a great town was full of dangers. Such work as theirs could only be adequately done by women whose lives were consecrated to God, who were prepared to spend themselves without stint or measure in His service. "If you aspire to perfection, you must learn to die to self" was the teaching of their foundress.

Louise le Gras was a soul of prayer, and she knew that more was needed than fervent philanthropy and a heart full of pity to give the Sisters courage for the lives they had undertaken to lead. Uncloistered nuns were at that time a thing unheard of, and in the first days of the little company the Sisters were often greeted with insults when they appeared in the streets. In Vincent's own words, they were "a community who had no monastery but the houses of the sick, no cells but a lodging of the poorest room, no cloisters but the streets, no grille but the fear of God, and no veil but their own modesty."

Their life was hard. They rose at four, their food was of the plainest description, they spent their days in an unhealthy atmosphere and were habitually overworked. The life of a true Sister of Charity needed to be rooted and nourished in the love of God, and no one realized it more completely than Vincent himself. In his weekly conferences, when they met together at St. Lazare, he would set before them the ideals of their vocation, bidding them above all things to be humble and simple.

"You see, my sisters," he would say to them, "you are only rough country girls, brought up like myself to keep the flocks." He understood their temptations and knew their weaknesses, but the standard was never to be lowered.

"The Daughters of Charity must go wherever they are needed," he said, "but this obligation exposes them to many temptations, and therefore they have special need of strictness." They were never to pay a visit unless it was part of their work; they were never to receive one; they were not to stand talking in the street unless it was absolutely necessary; they were never to go out without leave.

"What?" Vincent makes them say in one of his conferences, "do you ask me to be my own enemy, to be forever denying myself, to do everything I have no wish to do, to destroy self altogether?"

"Yes, my sisters," he answers; "and unless you do so, you will be slipping back in the way of righteousness." Their lives were of necessity full of temptations, and only in this spirit could they resist them.

Life in the streets of a great city was full of interest to these country girls, and it required a superhuman self-control to go about with downcast eyes, noticing nothing. At the weekly conference one of the Sisters acknowledged that if she passed a troop of mountebanks or a peepshow, the desire to look was so strong upon her that she could only resist it by pressing her crucifix to her heart and repeating, "O Jesus, Thou art worth it all."

One day Vincent appeared among them in great joy. He had just met a gentleman in the street, who had said to him, "Monsieur, today I saw two of your daughters carrying food to the sick, and so great was the modesty of one of them that she never even raised her eyes."

It was many years before he would allow the Sisters, however great their desire, to bind themselves by vows to the service of Christ in His poor. When at last the permission was given, the formula of the vows, which were taken for one year only, ran thus:

"I the undersigned, in the Presence of God, renew the promises of my Baptism, and make the vow of poverty, of chastity, and of obedience to the Venerable Superior General of the Priests of the Mission in the Company of the Sisters of Charity, that I may bind myself all this year to the service, bodily and spiritual, of the poor and sick our masters. And this by the aid of God, which I ask through His Son Jesus Christ Crucified, and through the prayers of the Holy Virgin."

Although vows taken thus annually did not imply a lifelong dedication, the Sisters of Charity who returned to the world were few. Many heroic women spent their lives, unknown and unnoticed, in the daily drudgery of nursing the sick or trying to maintain order in country hospitals.

"The saintliness of a Daughter of Charity," said Vincent, "rests on faithful adherence to the Rule; on faithful service to the nameless poor; in love and charity and pity; in faithful obedience to the doctor's orders.. It keeps us humble to be quite ordinary."

"For the greater honor of Our Lord, their Master and Patron," runs a certain passage in their Rule, "the Sisters of Charity shall have in everything they do a definite intention to please Him, and shall try to conform their life to His, especially in His poverty, His humility, His gentleness, His simplicity and austerity." Therein was to lie their strength and the secret of their courage; before them stood their crucified Lord, bidding them suffer and be strong.

The "Grey Sisters," as they were called by the poor, not only nursed in the hospitals of Paris, but went far and wide on their errands of mercy. Scarcely a day passed without an appeal. After the siege of Arras in 1656, Louise le Gras was implored to send help to those of the inhabitants who had survived the horrors of the war. Only two Sisters could be spared to meet the requirements of eight parishes; dirt, disease and famine reigned supreme; yet one of them, writing to her Superior to tell her that the other had been obliged to stop working from sheer exhaustion, says: "I have never heard a word of complaint from her lips or seen anything in her face but perfect content."

A little later the Sisters were sent for to nurse the wounded soldiers in the hospitals of Calais. "My dear daughters," said Vincent, as he bade them farewell, "be sure that, wherever you go, God will take care of you."

Only four could be spared, and the soldiers were dying in scores of an infectious disease. It was at the risk of their lives that the Sisters went among them, and two out of the four caught the infection and died. When the news reached Paris, there were numbers eager to take their place, and the four who were chosen set off rejoicing.

The hospitals all over the country were in need of reform, and in Paris every new scheme for the relief of the poor called for the Sisters' assistance. In the hospital at Marseilles they were tending the convicts; when the home for the aged poor was instituted, it was under their government; the Foundling Hospital was in their hands. Wherever there was need for zeal and self-denial, there these devoted women were to be found, ready to lay down their lives in the service of their neighbor. They had renounced what pleasures the world might hold for them for a life of toil and discomfort; their sacrifice was hidden; they lived and died unnoticed.

"We have no knowledge of our way except that we follow Jesus," writes the Mother and Foundress of the company, "always working and always suffering. He could never have led us unless His own resolve had taken Him as far as death on the Cross."