Monsieur Vincent 

In 1948, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film went to Monsieur Vincent, which tells the remarkable story of St. Vincent de Paul (1581-1660). He grew up in a peasant family, studied theology at a university where fistfights among students were common, and was ordained a priest at 19. Five years later he was kidnapped by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Tunisia. One of his masters, an accomplished physician, taught Vincent how to provide competent medical care. His next master was a French man and former priest who renounced Catholicism to gain freedom from slavery and who lived in the mountains with his three wives. His new slave’s fidelity soon moved the master to repentance, and they escaped together back to France in 1607. The wives were not invited to join them.  The film, however, does not include these events, for Vincent’s greatest adventures would take place only upon his return to France. 

Vincent was pious, brave, well-educated, and charming – characteristics that made a life of leisure and clerical privilege available to him. These things pleased him until he had a profound conversion while hearing the confession of a dying peasant. He feels compelled to begin his ministry to the poor in the village of Chatillon-les-Dombes, where the film picks up his story. Over the next two hours we see how he ends up with the poor in Paris. We meet the mostly well-meaning wealthy patrons who bring their own challenges to his ministry. We meet the beautifully simple people who become his fellow servants of the poor. And, most dramatically, we meet the poor themselves. In his review of the film, Steven Greydanus writes: “Monsieur Vincent celebrates the saint’s single-minded devotion to the poor without romanticizing the objects of his devotion and recipients of his charity. Vincent himself, though he urges his followers to regard the poor as their masters, admits frankly that they are ‘masters who are terribly insensitive and demanding… dirty and ugly… unjust and foul-mouthed.’ Yet he is adamant that, the harder they are to serve, ‘the more you will have to love them.’” 

The scenes that depict the desperate lives of the poor are the ones that leave us most disturbed and conflicted, because we see nothing loveable about them. There is a scene in which a woman with a heart for the poor is overwhelmed and frantically tries to run away from them. It is Vincent’s seemingly inexhaustible concern for those in need that moves her to return and devote her life to their care. She was St. Louise de Marillac, with whom Vincent would establish the Daughters of Charity and establish many great charitable institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes, and homes for foundlings. Graydanus observes that, while St. Francis inspired his followers to give up their possessions to live as beggars, St. Vincent inspired his followers to care for beggars, teaching them how to do it, especially how to love them. His feast day is Friday, 9/27. 

posted 9/23/24