St. Vincent de Paul, a farmer's son of nineteen, is ordained priest

CHÂTEAU-L'ÉVÊQUE, Périgord, September 23, 1600 AD — Bishop François de Bourdeille of Périgueux ordained Saint Vincent de Paul to the priesthood today, in the church at Château-l’Évêque, a village just outside Périgueux. The ordinations were held in the village rather than in the city because Protestants had pulled down the cathedral of Saint-Étienne there and the house the bishop lived in. The young man the bishop laid his hands on belonged to another diocese altogether. St. Vincent de Paul was born on a small farm at Pouy, in the Landes near Dax. The see of Dax was vacant, and vicars-general were running the diocese. He was nineteen — or twenty-four, by an older reckoning of the year he was born.

The priesthood was his father’s plan for him. A family at Pouy as poor as their own had sent a son into the Church, and he had risen to be prior of a convent nearby and was then able to help the family he came from. Jean de Paul decided that one of his sons would do the same, and he chose the boy who kept the family’s sheep out on the heath.

Sixty livres a year went to the Franciscans at Dax, who ran a small college for boys and took him in at twelve to begin on his Latin. In 1596 his parents sold two of their oxen to pay for his journey to the university of Toulouse. Jean de Paul had a wife and five children and little to leave them. In his will, made on February 7, 1598, he wrote that the family was to go on paying for St. Vincent de Paul’s studies whatever it cost. He died later that year. His son refused the provisions made for him and went on living off what his pupils paid.

Bishop Diharse of Tarbes had given him the tonsure and the four minor orders almost four years earlier, in the collegiate church at Bidache on December 20, 1596. The cathedral chapter at Dax gave its permission, that see being vacant then too. He was made subdeacon in the cathedral at Tarbes in 1598, and deacon there three months later.

France had no working seminary. Seven provincial councils through the 1580s had ordered them built, and nothing came of the decrees. So many attempts at founding them had failed that even the men pressing hardest for seminaries had given up believing it could be done. Above the level of a country parish the appointments lay with the crown and the nobles, who filled the richer benefices with their own sons and their dependents. Adrien Bourdoise, a priest of the same generation who spent his life trying to reform the French clergy, put it in a sentence: “The world is sick enough; but the clergy is not less so.”

He did not say his first Mass at Château-l’Évêque. He went back instead to Buzet, five leagues from Toulouse, where he kept a school in the castle for the sons of the gentry of the district. Twenty minutes’ walk above the village, on top of the wooded hill, stood an old church of the Blessed Virgin that he had often gone up to. He said his first Mass there, and would let nobody come but a server and a priest to direct him. Abelly, his first biographer, wrote of that Mass: “We have heard it said that he had such an idea of the greatness of this Divine action, that he trembled, and not having the courage to celebrate publicly, he preferred to say it in a retired chapel, assisted merely by the priest and server.”

At Dax, meanwhile, the vicars-general running the diocese named him at once to Tilh, a country parish in the Landes not far from the town. Monsieur de Commet, the Dax lawyer who had taken him in at sixteen as tutor to his children and kept him five years, had asked for the parish on his behalf. Another priest had applied for Tilh at Rome, and rather than fight him for it in the courts St. Vincent de Paul let the claim go and went back to Toulouse, to teach and to study.

Years afterwards Monsieur de Saint-Martin, a canon of the cathedral at Dax and an old friend, wrote to St. Vincent de Paul proposing that one of his nephews be brought up for the priesthood. St. Vincent de Paul wrote back: “I thank you for the care you take of my little nephew. I must tell you, though, that I never desired that he be a priest and still less did I have the thought of educating him for this object.” He had entered the priesthood without understanding what it was, he wrote in the same letter: “…the rashness to enter it, I had known what it was, as I do now, I had much rather have been a labourer and tilled the ground, than have engaged myself in so awful a profession; and this I have said more than a hundred times to poor country people…”