Thursday, 9/27/12
Over the years, each day when we read about the saint of the
day, it could strike us that although he or she was poor, their family had noble
blood. But not Vincent de Paul. No. He was one of seven kids in peasant family.
The Franciscans, who were poor themselves, gave him the basic schooling to
equip him to support himself teaching in a primary schools. And while he was
doing that, he took Theology classes. When he was just twenty an old bishop
ordained him a priest, but even after that he still had to tutor kids for a
living. Of those times, he later
wrote that when his father, a peasant, came to visit he was ashamed of people
seeking him.
When Vincent was twenty-four, chasing down an inheritance, he
set out on a coastal voyage to Marseilles, and he was captured by Turks. They
took him to North Africa where they auctioned him off as a slave. After two
years of being treated like an animal, he was traded to a kindly man who let
him escape back to France.
Walking to Avignon, he began a career of ingratiating himself
to important prelates who could help him. In the entourage of one of them he
moved to Rome, and in the entourage of another he arrived in Paris.
But there he came under the care of a saintly prelate. That
man, Cardinal Pierre Berulle, was to help in founding four great French
religious orders: the Oratorians, the Sulpicians, Salesians, and indirectly the
Vincentians.
Cardinal Berulle set Vincent up as permanent chaplain to France’s
leading family, the Gondi’s. With that, the peasant’s son was at last free from
bowing and scraping for a living.. Walking through the villages on the Gondi
estate, he became painfully aware of the desperate physical and religious
poverty of the peasants. At first, by himself he gave missions in village after village where the peasants
had been put adrift after their baptisms. In time other good-hearted priests
joined him, forming the nucleus of what would become the Vincentian Fathers.
Then, another door was opened to him. In the Seventeenth Century
all of France’s sailing ships were assisted by banks of convicts rowing below
deck. The head of the Gondi family held the royal appointment as commander of
all those galleys, so Vincent, as chaplain to the Gondi’s, felt a
responsibility to those rowers. With memories of his days and nights as a
Tunisian slave, he began using all of his connections to get hospitalization
and humane colnditions for those wretches.
A lady named Louise de Marillac had fallen into deep
depression at the death of her husband, but Vincent’s kindness in visiting the
dying man had turned her thoughts toward assisting the sick, and with his help
she founded the Daughters of Charity.
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