Servant of the Poor

   Today is the feast day of St. Vincent de Paul.  Before I entered seminary at St. Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, PA, I never delved into the life of this famous saint.  There was an active chapter of the St. Vincent de Paul Society in my hometown of Green Bay; we occasionally dropped off bags of clothing when my mother went on a closet-cleaning binge, but the significance of the holy man who inspired Bl. Frederic Ozanam to found the societies was lost on me.  I did, at least, associate St. Vincent de Paul with the virtue of charity.

   When I first went to St. Vincent Seminary in the foothills of the Alleghenies, I wondered why the first Benedictine monastery in North America - including a basilica, parish, liberal arts college and seminary - would be named for a saint who had no discernible connections to the Benedictine order.  Of course, the reason was that the parish pre-dated the founding of the monastery by fifty-plus years, and had been served, among others, by a priest from Belgium.  (Side note: it's amazing how many Belgian priests were missionaries in the U.S. One runs across them everywhere.  That country must have been a veritable priest factory.)  The Benedictines made St. Vincent de Paul the patron for everything they built on the hilltop near Latrobe.  Since part of the original vision was to establish a seminary to train priests for what was then the American frontier, St. Vincent was an excellent patron for priestly formation.  I loved my time there, and as a diocesan priest felt like I received the full benefits of the Benedictine sense of stewardship along with the pastoral zeal and charity of St. Vincent de Paul.

   It's worth taking the time to learn more about St. Vincent de Paul and his example of holiness.  There are a number of great films of his life, excellent books and novels, and best of all, the countless men and women who have been inspired to serve the poor by his example and teaching.  We all need to be challenged to interact more with the poor.  There are people who are poor because of their own bad choices in life, there are people who are poor because they are oppressed, there are people who are poor because they are simply unlucky in life.  This doesn't even touch on the spiritual and moral poverty so rampant even in wealthy countries.  But does it matter why a person is poor?  We do what we can for them, and in so doing we fan that flame of charity in our heart.  Once you start serving your neighbor, especially in the poor among us, you simply can't stop, and you don't want to.  St. Vincent de Paul discovered this path of holiness in his own life, and invites us to walk it with him in the service of Jesus, who was the poorest of all.