Pope approves St. Vincent de Paul's plan: vows, but no religious order

ROME, September 22, 1655 AD — Pope Alexander VII today issued a brief approving vows for the priests of the Congregation of the Mission, the company of missioners Saint Vincent de Paul founded to preach to the poor of the French countryside. After two years of trial each man will vow poverty, chastity and obedience. Even so, the brief says, the Congregation is not to be counted among the religious orders: sed sit de corpore cleri saecularis (but let it be of the body of the secular clergy).

The dispute was over priests who would take vows without belonging to a religious order. Solemn vows are the kind that make a man a member of a religious order; simple vows bind him too, but leave him a secular priest. St. Vincent wanted his priests bound to the missions for life by simple vows, not solemn ones. The theologians agreed that simple vows would not make them an order. The older members of the College of Cardinals saw only an innovation in such a company of priests, and refused to approve it.

St. Vincent wanted vows so that his men would stay in the Congregation for life instead of joining and leaving. He used to say that people entered and left some of the communities around him as if they were guests at an inn. In the words of the vow, each of his men promises to give his whole life in the Congregation to the salvation of pauperum rusticanorum (the poor country people). To those who told him no more missioners were needed, St. Vincent answered: “Alas! the country is large, and there are thousands perishing. All the secular and religious bodies are not enough to meet this misfortune.”

Under simple vows, St. Vincent’s priests wear the ordinary cassock of a parish priest. They are not bound to chant the Divine Office, the Church’s daily round of psalms and prayers, and they keep no penances beyond the fasts the Church sets for everyone. A missioner keeps ownership of whatever property he has, but may not use it without his superior’s permission. Only the Pope can release a missioner from his vows. The one exception is a man the Superior General, the head of the Congregation, dismisses from it: he is released with his dismissal. The local bishop commands the missioners in one matter only, the missions they preach in his diocese.

The question has been open for more than twenty years. A bull of Pope Urban VIII erected the Congregation in January 1632 AD, but it left the form of the company unsettled. St. Vincent sent Father François du Coudray, one of his first companions, to Rome, and Father du Coudray met resistance there. St. Vincent wrote back to him: “I am greatly astonished at what you tell me, but I fear only my own sins, for sooner or later our plan will succeed.”

In 1642 AD and again in 1651 AD, St. Vincent called together the priests who had been longest with him. The first meeting chose a vow to stay in the Congregation for life. The second added poverty, chastity and obedience, with no intention of founding a religious order.

St. Vincent then sent Father Jolly to Rome, and Father Jolly found help there from Cardinal de Retz. The cardinal had escaped from prison at Nantes in 1654 AD and fled to Rome. St. Vincent had taught him as a boy in the Gondi household, and Cardinal de Retz had stayed devoted to his old tutor. The cardinal took up the matter and put it to Pope Alexander VII. Pope Alexander VII then called the case before his own tribunal and had a commission of cardinals examine it closely before he issued the brief.

Three years later, on May 17, 1658 AD, St. Vincent would hand his priests their rules at Saint-Lazare, his house in Paris. Speaking to them on the vow of poverty that year, he would say: “Poverty is the bond of religious orders. We are not, it is true, religious; we are not worthy to be such, though we live in common.”