The bishop shut his eyes — but he wasn't asleep

The bishop who wasn’t asleep

BEAUVAIS, France, September 1628 AD — About July, in 1628 AD, Saint Vincent de Paul set out on a journey with the Bishop of Beauvais. On the road the Bishop’s eyes closed, and he seemed to fall asleep. Then he opened them and said he hadn’t been asleep at all.

He had been thinking hard, the Bishop said, about the best way to get young men ready to become priests. For now, he said, the best thing he could do was bring them to his own house. He would keep the young men there some days and teach them the things they ought to know and the good habits they ought to practise.

St. Vincent de Paul answered louder than he usually let himself speak: “this thought is from God”. As the two men parted, the Bishop gave St. Vincent de Paul the job. He was to write out the plan for the days and what would be covered. He was also to come to Beauvais fifteen or twenty days before the next ordination.

Twenty schools, fewer than ten left

France had schools, started long before in the Middle Ages, to teach the men who would be priests. They were destroyed bit by bit. First came the corruption of the 1400s AD, and then the wars over religion in the 1500s AD.

After that, men stopped getting ready for ordination at all. To a lot of them, being a priest was simply a job, picked because it looked easier and safer than other jobs. Country towns and villages filled up with priests who had been badly taught and knew very little.

The bishops of France had been trying to fix this by starting seminaries. A seminary is a school for the men who will be priests. Twenty were started. Fewer than ten were still standing in 1625 AD, mostly because of the wars over religion.

Fifteen days in the Bishop’s house

Bishop Augustin Potier des Gesvres wanted his men prepared before he made them priests. He had worked out that being their bishop would not be enough to carry men through it who didn’t want to go. So he gave the work to St. Vincent de Paul. St. Vincent de Paul was a priest of forty-seven, and he had spent the last ten years preaching in villages.

St. Vincent de Paul drew up the programme through the summer, quietly and in prayer. It put talks about the spiritual life beside plain lessons in the things a priest most needs to know. He arrived at Beauvais this month, fifteen days before the ordination. He brought a written plan for the days and two doctors of theology, M. Duchesne and M. Messier.

Nearly every man in the room

The Bishop was there for the opening. The two doctors did the preaching. St. Vincent de Paul gave the talks. He took the young men through the commandments, one commandment at a time.

He made it so clear that nearly every man in the room came to him afterwards. They 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 did M. Duchesne, one of the two doctors he had brought with him.

Between the talks, St. Vincent de Paul wrote back to his own priests in Paris. He had left them to keep the house while he was away. He asked how they were getting on and whether each one was happy. He asked too whether they were keeping the few rules and studying.

The ordination comes at the end of the fifteen days.