On September 27 the Church honors Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), the French priest who founded the Congregation of the Mission — the Vincentians, or Lazarists — in 1625, and, with St. Louise de Marillac, the Daughters of Charity in 1633. He is the patron of charities, hospitals, prisoners, and volunteers, and the founder of organized Catholic social service in the modern era.
Vincent was born on April 24, 1581, at Pouy in Gascony — a village now renamed Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in his honour — the son of peasant farmers. He was ordained at nineteen, below the Council of Trent minimum, and spent his early priesthood in parishes near Paris. According to two surviving letters of his own, he was captured at sea by Barbary pirates in 1605 and enslaved in Tunis for two years before escaping with his master, a renegade French Franciscan, and returning to France in 1607. Some biographers have questioned the narrative, but the letters are Vincent's own.
His conversion of heart came around 1617, when he heard the confession of a dying peasant in the Gondi household, where he served as chaplain and tutor. He began organising wealthy women into Confraternities of Charity to serve poor tenant families — the foundation that, with Louise de Marillac's help, became the Ladies of Charity and then the Daughters of Charity, a society of apostolic life for women that was a new thing in the Church: religious women who lived not in cloisters but in the world, serving the poor. In 1625 he founded the Congregation of the Mission for the evangelization of country villages; in 1622 he was appointed chaplain to the galley slaves of Paris.
Vincent died in Paris on September 27, 1660. He was beatified by Benedict XIII in 1729 and canonized by Clement XII on June 16, 1737. His relics are enshrined in the Chapel of St. Vincent de Paul at 95 Rue de Sèvres, the motherhouse of the Vincentians in Paris — his bones, encased in a waxen figure, displayed in a glass reliquary above the high altar. His incorrupt heart is venerated separately at the motherhouse of the Daughters of Charity. His birthplace at Pouy, near Dax in the Landes, is preserved as a shrine built around the family home, the "Ranquines."
The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1833 by Frédéric Ozanam and fellow students in Paris, is today present in 153 countries and is the principal lay Vincentian organisation. The feast was originally kept on July 19, because September 27 was then the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian; the 1969 calendar reform moved it to the date of his death.
