SAINT VINCENT OF PAUL
Priest
(1576-1660)
St. Vincent was humble and full of the Holy Spirit. When adviser to the queen and oracle of the Church in France, he loved to recount how he guarded his father's pigs in his youth.
St. Vincent's trials began soon after his ordination. Scarcely made priest, he was captured by corsairs and carried into Barbary. St. Vincent then converted his renegade master and escaped with him to France.
Appointed chaplain-general of the galleys of France, St. Vincent's charity brought hope to prisons where despair gained a foothold. His charity embraced the poor, provinces desolated by civil war, and Christians enslaved by Mohammedans. St. Vincent did not see bodies, but souls. Poor and bedraggled people were, to him the image of Christ. "Turn the medal," he said, "and you will see Jesus Christ."
St. Vincent also enabled the wealthy to do works of mercy. When an orphanage was in danger of closing from lack of funds, he received aid from the ladies of the Association of Charity. One narrator paraphrases him saying, "Compassion and charity made you adopt these little ones as your children. You became their mothers according to grace, when their own mothers abandoned them. Cease to be their mothers, and you may become their judges..." The tears of the assembly were his only answer, and the work was continued.
The Society of St. Vincent, the Priests of the Mission, and twenty-five thousand Sisters of Charity still serve the afflicted to this day.