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What it cost · CHÂTEAU-L'ÉVÊQUE, Périgord, September 23, 1600 AD

The shepherd boy his family sold two oxen for

St. Vincent de Paul was made a priest today at nineteen, and said his first Mass with nobody there but a server and a priest to guide him.

Edition of

Saint Vincent de Paul
A priest in a black cassock extends his hand toward a crowd of poor men and chained galley convicts gathered at his feet, while an angel beside him holds up a monstrance with the Eucharist, and the Virgin and Child look down from clouds above.
St. Vincent de Paul reaches out to a crowd of galley convicts, while an angel beside him holds up the Eucharist. Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ painted this in 1876. It is at the church of Sainte-Trinité in Paris.

CHÂTEAU-L'ÉVÊQUE, Périgord, September 23, 1600 AD — Bishop François de Bourdeille made Saint Vincent de Paul a priest today. He laid his hands on him in the church at Château-l’Évêque, a village just outside Périgueux. St. Vincent de Paul grew up on a small farm, keeping his family’s sheep out on the heath. The bishop held the service in the village and not in the city. Protestants had pulled down the cathedral of Saint-Étienne at Périgueux and the house the bishop lived in.

He was nineteen years old — or twenty-four, if he was born in 1576 AD and not in 1581 AD. And there was no school anywhere in France then for training priests: not one was working.

Two oxen for one journey

St. Vincent de Paul was born on a small farm at Pouy, in the Landes near the town of Dax. Another family at Pouy was just as poor as his own. They had sent a son into the Church, and he became prior of a convent nearby and could help the family he came from. So his father, Jean de Paul, decided that one of his own sons would be a priest too. He picked the boy who was out on the heath with the sheep.

The Franciscans at Dax kept a small school for boys. It cost sixty livres a year. They took him in when he was twelve, to begin learning Latin. Then, in 1596 AD, his parents sold two of their oxen to pay for his journey to Toulouse.

Jean de Paul had a wife and five children and very little to leave them. He made his will on February 7, 1598 AD, and in it he told the family to go on paying for his son’s studies whatever it cost them. He died later that year. His son would not take the money the will had set aside for him. He taught other people’s children instead, and lived on what his pupils paid him.

A church at the top of a hill

He did not say his first Mass at Château-l’Évêque. He went back to Buzet, about twelve miles from Toulouse. There he taught the sons of the well-off families of the district in the castle. Twenty minutes’ walk above the village, on top of a wooded hill, stood an old church of the Blessed Virgin. He had often gone up to it.

He said his first Mass up there. He let nobody in but a server and a priest to guide him through it. People said afterwards that he was shaking, and that he could not face saying it in front of anyone.

Years later he wrote to an old friend that he had become a priest without knowing what it was. If he had known then what he knew now, he wrote, he would rather have worked the ground as a labourer than been a priest. He had said so more than a hundred times to poor country people.

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

Junior Report. Written for readers ten to twelve, from the same sources and under the same rules as the rest of the paper. The words are shorter, hard terms are explained, and the question at the end is for the reader to think over.

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Image. Saint Vincent de Paul ramène des galériens à la foi, Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ, 1876, Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul, église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris — see the original.

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Sources for this story

Listed by paragraph.

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    • attested Mgr Émile Bougaud, trans. Joseph Brady C.M., History of St. Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission and of the Sisters of Charity, Volume 1, PRIMARY EDUCATION, p. 5 ¶20
    • attested Mgr Émile Bougaud, trans. Joseph Brady C.M., History of St. Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission and of the Sisters of Charity, Volume 1, PRIMARY EDUCATION, p. 5 ¶21
    • attested Henry Bedford, The Life of St. Vincent de Paul, ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. ¶16
    • attested Mgr Émile Bougaud, trans. Joseph Brady C.M., History of St. Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission and of the Sisters of Charity, Volume 1, PRIMARY EDUCATION, p. 5 ¶3
    • attested F. A. Forbes, Life of St. Vincent de Paul, Chapter 1 ¶6
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Also in the kids edition of Wednesday, 23 September 2026