Vincent de Paul (more correctly Vincent Depaul) (1581–1660), founder of the Vincentian (or Lazarist) Congregation and of the Sisters of Charity, and one of the most influential saints of his time. Born of a Gascon peasant family at Ranquine (now called Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Landes), he was educated by the Franciscans at Dax, then at Toulouse University; he was ordained priest at the very early age of nineteen. It seems that the story of his enslavement at Marseilles, followed by two years in Tunisia with a subsequent escape to Avignon, is legendary. Early in life he was an ambitious court chaplain, drawing the revenues of a commendatory abbey until his conversion, occasioned by a false accusation of theft. In 1609 he was associated with Pierre (later cardinal) de Bérulle and became tutor to the children of the Gondi family and in 1617 parish priest of Châtillon-les-Dombes. Throughout his life he combined his apostolate among the rich and fashionable with utter devotion to the poor and oppressed. As chaplain to the Gondi family he was able to improve the lot of prisoners in the galleys and in 1622 gave missions to the convicts at Bordeaux. By now he had met and been deeply influenced by St. Francis of Sales.

In 1625 he founded a congregation of priests, who would live from a community fund, renounce all church preferment, and devote themselves to the faithful in smaller towns and villages. Its purpose was to re-establish a flexible apostolic life with simple and effective preaching among the diocesan clergy. In 1633 they were given the Paris priory church of Saint-Lazare (hence the name Lazarists). In the same year Vincent founded the Sisters of Charity, the first congregation of ‘unenclosed’ women to be entirely devoted to the poor and the sick. In this he fulfilled the original plan of Francis de Sales which had been transformed by the Roman Congregations into a more traditional type of religious life. In this venture Vincent was aided by Louise de Marillac, the first superior; it was an immense success, especially in providing nursing care for the poor.

Even in his lifetime Vincent became a legend. Clergy and laity, rich and poor, outcasts and convicts all experienced the charisma and selfless devotion of a man entirely consumed by the love of God and his neighbour. He saw Christ in all the poor and in the commitment and devotion of their carers. Rich women collected funds and helped practically in his innumerable good works. He provided abundant alms for war-victims in Lorraine, sent his missionaries to Poland, Ireland, and Scotland (including the Hebrides); from 1643 he was influential at court during the regency of Anne of Austria, who highly esteemed him and valued his advice, except when he tried to persuade her to dismiss Cardinal Mazarin. Amidst all this activity he was sensitive to the dangers of Jansenism, which he actively opposed. He died at the age of nearly eighty and was canonized by Clement XII in 1737. He was most appropriately named by Leo XIII patron of all charitable societies, one of which is the widespread lay confraternity called the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1833 by Frederick Ozanam. His congregations are widely diffused and highly esteemed through the English-speaking world, as elsewhere. His Rule was widely used by other foundresses. Feast: formerly 19 July; now 27 September, the day of his death.

Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.

• AA.SS. Sept. VII (1760), 374; earliest Life by L. Abelly, La vie du vénérable servant de Dieu, Vincent de Paul (1664); Letters ed. P. Coste (14 vols., 1920–5); Eng. tr. of selected letters by J. Leonard, St. Vincent de Paul and Mental Prayer (1925), and The Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul to the Sisters of Charity (4 vols., 1938–40). Other Lives by P. Coste, Le grand saint du Grand Siècle (3 vols., 1932; Eng. tr. 3 vols., 1934–5); by J. Calvet (1948, Eng. tr. 1952), L. von Matt (Bruges 1959, Eng. tr. 1960), M. Purcell (1963). See also Vincent de Paul: Actes du Colloque International (1983). J. E. Ryholt and F. Ryan, Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac: rules, conferences, writings (1995)

For more information on Saint Vincent de Paul, visit Britannica.com.

Vincent de Paul, Saint (1581-1660). Born the son of a ploughman in the then miserably poor region of the Landes, and a shepherd boy till the age of 15, he studied for the priesthood at Dax and Toulouse, was (according to some accounts) captured by Tunisian pirates, and in 1608 achieved his ambition of reaching Paris. There he was profoundly influenced by Bérulle, became chaplain to the Gondi family, and met François de Sales, Madame de Chantal, and Saint-Cyran. He founded first the Congregation of the Mission, based on the priory of Saint-Lazare and hence called Lazarists, to evangelize the countryside and provide a retreat for ordinands, and later (with Louise de Marillac) the now world-wide order of the Daughters of Charity. He was a major force in the religious life of the mid-17th c., assisting Louis XIII on his deathbed and, in the subsequent Regency, sitting as a member of the Council of Conscience which dealt with Church preferment. The writings attributed to him are largely notes by disciples published posthumously. He was canonized in 1737.

[Peter Bayley]

1580?–1660, French priest renowned for charitable work, b. Gascony. He was ordained in 1600. There are conflicting stories about his capture by pirates and enslavement in Tunis and his subsequent escape. In Rome he came to the attention of Pope Paul V, who sent him on a mission to the French court of Henry IV, where Vincent remained as chaplain to the queen. His activism, and the holiness of his life brought about the revival of French Catholicism. He inspired many of the court to an interest in the poor of Paris and was the founder of organized charity in France. In 1625 he founded an order of secular priests to work in rural areas; it became the Congregation of the Mission, called Lazarists or Vincentians. With these priests, St. Vincent conducted retreats, founded seminaries, and achieved widespread reform among the French clergy. For city work he founded the Sisters of Charity. St. Vincent's influence, through his spirit and through his institutions, is incalculable. He was canonized in 1737. Feast: Sept. 27.

Bibliography

See J. Leonard, ed., Letters of St. Vincent de Paul (1938); biographies by H. Daniel-Rops (1961) and M. Purcell (1963); P. Coste, The Life and Works of Saint Vincent de Paul (3 vol., tr. 1952).

French ecclesiastic who founded the Congregation of the Mission (1625) and the Daughters of Charity (1633).

Vincent de Paul (1581–1660), founder of the Congregation of the Mission and of the Daughters of Charity. Vincent de Paul was not only one of the main figures of the Catholic Reformation but also one of the most popular French saints of the seventeenth century. His reputation as philanthropist and pragmatic protector of the underprivileged, already secured during his life, somewhat overshadows the political, spiritual, and mystical aspects of his life, revealed in his extensive correspondence.

Born in 1581 in a modest peasant family of Pouy (Aquitaine), Vincent found in the church the most likely means of social promotion. Subsidized by the judge of his hamlet, Monsieur de Comet, he was sent to the Cordeliers' college of Dax (1595–1597). In 1600, he was ordained priest and in 1604, he vanished for two years. Many historians speculate on this disappearance. According to what Vincent de Paul himself wrote to his protector Comet, during a sea trip from Marseille to Toulouse, he was captured and sold as a slave in Tunis, where he stayed for two years. He managed to convert his slave master, a renegade, and to flee with him back to France. After traveling to Rome and Avignon, he finally settled in Paris in 1608, was made chaplain to the queen Marguerite de Valois (1610), and began to move in the dévot circles, becoming very close to Pierre de Bérulle and the Oratorians. In 1612, he became the parish priest of Clichy, following the post-Tridentine line: renovating the church, catechizing its people, erecting the Confrérie du Rosaire (brotherhood of the Rosary). A year later, he became chaplain to the family of Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, and his life changed.

In 1617, Vincent de Paul was shocked by the deep ignorance of the faith he found among the inhabitants of the hamlet of Folleville, on the domain of De Gondis's family. This awareness, described by many as a true conversion, seemed to dictate his calling. He decided to instruct the poor and become a missionary. Contrary to Pierre de Bérulle and François de Sales, whom he considered his most influential masters, Vincent de Paul was less speculative and more inclined toward action. He considered that true Christian perfection did not consist of mystical ecstasies but of charitable field enterprises. With De Gondi's financial help, Vincent de Paul founded the Congregation of the Mission. The so-called Lazarists (named after the priory of Saint-Lazare where the community settled in 1632; approved by pope Urban VIII in 1633) devoted themselves to the parish missions (described by Vincent de Paul in his letters as "the salvation of the poor people of the countryside") and to the training of the local priests, for it was seen "necessary to maintain the people and to keep the fruit of the missions made by good ecclesiastics, imitating in this the great conquerors, who leave garrisons in the places they take, by fear to lose what they have acquire with so much effort." To this end, the Tuesday Conferences were launched in 1631—a kind of continuing education for priests that allowed them to reflect, pray, and work in common and that gathered the elite of the Parisian clerics. The same ideal guided the opening of the Lazarist seminary for ordinands in 1642 in the College des Bons Enfants. The idea was less to give a high theological culture than to give a solid moral, spiritual, and pastoral education to the future priests who would be called, as Vincent de Paul wrote in his Colloquium to the Missionaries, "to preach simply and familiarly as did the apostles." The expansion of the Lazarists was remarkable, first in France (in 1660, 131 priests and 52 coadjutors lived in 25 residences and had organized some 840 missions in the countryside) then in the field of the foreign missions (Madagascar in 1648), for the Lazarists added to their former objectives the conversion of the "pagans."

From the beginning, each Lazarist mission concluded with the creation of Confréries de Charité (Brotherhoods of Charity), which gathered and organized local noblewomen to care for the poor. In 1633, Vincent de Paul and his closest collaborator, the widow Louise de Marillac (1591–1660), founded the Daughters of Charity in order to support the Brotherhoods of Charity and to achieve charitable work on a larger scale, combining spiritual salvation with material help in keeping with the recommendations of the Council of Trent. Noncloistered and dressed as peasant women, the "grey nuns" contributed to implement in France the basis of health and social service (there were sixty houses in 1659). Similarly, Vincent de Paul founded L'Oeuvre des Enfants Trouvés (Care of Foundlings), which aimed to rescue abandoned children, and he supported various charitable undertakings for the sick, the disabled, and beggars, activities that were centralized in the network of the general hospitals that developed in the 1650s.

Until his death in 1660, the influence of "the father of the poor" was considerable. He was associated with the main dévot circles, in the secret Compagnie du Saint Sacrement (Company of the Holy Sacrament), and in the Visitation Sainte Marie (where he replaced François de Sales as superior). Queen Anne of Austria chose him as her confessor and placed him in 1643 at the Council of Conscience initiated by Cardinal Richelieu, who, like King Louis XIII, had held him in great esteem. Since he avoided the various spiritual conflicts of his time, he managed to stay close to parties who were adversaries: the old families of the Catholic League such as the Marillacs, the abbot Saint-Cyran (1581–1643)—though he vigorously condemned his Jansenist ideas—and the Jesuits, with whom he never hesitated to collaborate and among whom he found inspiration.

Bibliography

Dodin, André. La légende et l'histoire: De monsieur Depaul à saint Vincent de Paul. Paris, 1985.

——. Vincent de Paul and Charity: A Contemporary Portrait of His Life and Apostolic Spirit. Translated by Jean Marie Smith and Dennis Saunders. New Rochelle, N.Y., 1993.

Dubois, Raymonde, and Luigi Mezzadri. "Evangelization and charité; Reformation and Counter-Reformation." History of European Ideas, 9, no. 4 (1988): 479–488.

Foucault, Michel.Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. Paris, 1961.

Gutton, Jean-Pierre. La société et les pauvres: L'exemple de la généralité de Lyon, 1534–1789. Paris, 1971.

Jones, Colin. The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France. London and New York, 1989.

Mezzadri, Luigi. Histoire de la Congrégation de la mission. Paris, 1994.

——. Vincent de Paul (1581–1660). Paris, 1985.

Miquel, Pierre. Vincent de Paul. Paris, 1996.

Salem-Carrière, Yves-Marie. Saint Vincent de Paul et la politique. Bouère, France, 1992.

—DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES