Bishop gives the men he will ordain to St. Vincent de Paul

BEAUVAIS, France, September 1628 AD — Saint Vincent de Paul arrived in this cathedral city fifteen days before the ordination the Bishop of Beauvais will hold this month. He brought two doctors of theology and a written timetable, and he has spent the fortnight in the Bishop’s own house with the men who are about to be made priests. By the end of it nearly all of them had asked him to hear a general confession — a confession of a whole life at once, not only of the sins since the last one. So had M. Duchesne, one of the two doctors he brought with him.

Bishop Augustin Potier des Gesvres asked for the fortnight. He wants the men prepared before he ordains them, and he had reckoned that his own authority would not be enough to carry unwilling candidates through it. So he sent outside his own diocese, and gave the work to a priest of forty-seven who has spent the last ten years preaching missions in villages.

The trouble is older than the Bishop. The schools founded in the Middle Ages to educate the clergy of France were destroyed by degrees, first by the corruption of the fifteenth century and then by the Protestant wars of the sixteenth. After that men stopped testing their vocations or preparing for ordination at all, and to many the priesthood was a profession, taken because it looked easier and safer than the others. That filled the country towns and villages with ignorant and badly taught priests, some of them vicious, and the cities with younger sons of great families who had been forced into orders and were competing for high place.

Since the Council of Trent the French bishops had been trying to answer this by founding seminaries. Twenty were founded, and fewer than ten were still standing in 1625 AD, chiefly because of the wars of religion. The general assembly of the French clergy had already asked that no man be admitted to holy orders without some days of recollection and retreat first. Bishop Donnadieu, in another diocese, required his own candidates to make a general confession on the eve of the ordination. Bishop Donnadieu preached to those candidates for nearly three hours. That evening he sent men to the candidates’ lodgings to turn out the ones he judged unfit for ordination.

Bishop Potier went to St. Vincent de Paul and asked him for a remedy. St. Vincent de Paul told him to leave the priests alone and start with the candidates: “My lord, we must go straight to the root. It is impossible to reform ecclesiastics hardened in vice, for a bad priest is hardly ever converted. It is among the aspirants to the priesthood, and not among those already ordained, that we must work the reform of the clergy.”

About July the two men set out on a journey together and took up the same conversation on the road. The Bishop’s eyes closed and he seemed to fall asleep. Then he opened them and said he had not been asleep at all: “I was thinking seriously of the best way of preparing the young ecclesiastics for holy orders. For the present I cannot do better than bring them to my own house, and keep them some days, instructing them by means of regular conferences on the things they ought to know and the virtues they ought to practise.” St. Vincent de Paul answered louder than he usually allowed himself: “this thought is from God; behold an excellent way of restoring by degrees good order among the clergy.”

They talked on, and as they parted the Bishop gave him the work. St. Vincent de Paul was to write out the order of the exercises and the matter to be covered, and to come to Beauvais fifteen or twenty days before the next ordination. He took it as settled: “I will obey, my lord, feeling more assured, hearing it now from the mouth of the Bishop, that God demands this service of me, than if it were revealed by an angel.”

He drew up the programme through the summer in silence and prayer. It set conferences on the spiritual life beside plain instruction in the things a priest most needs to know. He brought it to Beauvais this month with two doctors of theology, M. Duchesne and M. Messier.

The Bishop presided at the opening. The two doctors did the preaching. St. Vincent de Paul gave the conferences and took the candidates through the Decalogue, commandment by commandment, and he made it so clear that nearly every man in the room came to him afterwards to confess the whole of his life.

Between the conferences St. Vincent de Paul wrote back to the priests of his congregation in Paris. He had left them to keep the house while he was away. “How is the Congregation going on? Is each one well disposed and contented? Are they observing the few rules, studying and discussing questions among themselves? Is there regular observance?” he asked, and told them to master the Small Becanus, a short compendium of theology by Father Becan of the Society of Jesus: “We cannot exaggerate the utility of that little book. It has pleased God to make use of me, miserable wretch though I am, for the conversion of three persons, since I left Paris.”

The ordination follows at the close of the fifteen days.