St. Vincent de Paul

Summary

Catholic Saints — Augustine Institute
Episode: St. Vincent de Paul
Date: September 27, 2025
Host: Mary McGeehan
Guest: Dr. Chris Bloom (Provost, Augustine Institute Graduate School)

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Overview

This episode explores the life, spirituality, and enduring legacy of St. Vincent de Paul, offering inspiration for Catholics seeking to embody mercy and humility in their own lives. Dr. Chris Bloom shares detailed insights into St. Vincent's personal transformation from ambitious priest to renowned apostle of charity, founder, and ecclesiastical leader. The conversation delves into the historical context of St. Vincent’s times, his pivotal role in seminary formation, and the active expressions of charity that shape his modern legacy.

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Biographical Sketch: The Early Life of St. Vincent de Paul

[00:35 - 03:43]

• Birth and Background: Born around 1580 in southwestern France, from a humble shepherd’s family.
• Ordination and Early Ambition: Ordained before age 20; spent his early priesthood pursuing advancement and comfort.
  • "He was very charming…a bit of a careerist for the next decade." — Dr. Bloom [01:07]
• Turning Point: Captured by pirates at 25, enslaved for two years in North Africa. After escape, returned to France.

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Personal Transformation and Spiritual Awakening

[03:43 - 09:51]

• Ecclesiastical Careerism: St. Vincent initially sought comfortable benefices within the Church, reflecting the church culture’s wealth and patronage system of the time.
  • "We don't experience the Church today as a setting to make your career…but in Catholic Europe in the 17th century…" — Dr. Bloom [07:27]
• Influence of Cardinal Berulle: Inspired by Berulle, a mystic who emphasized a “personal relationship with Christ.”
  • "He insisted…the Christian needed to have a personal relationship with Christ." — Dr. Bloom [09:10]
• Moment of Conversion (1617): While in rural ministry, a man’s confession of a long-unconfessed mortal sin awoke St. Vincent to the spiritual deprivation among the country poor.
  • "He realized what this man has carried, thousands are carrying… The poor in the countryside are dying spiritually for lack of priests." — Dr. Bloom [11:18]

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Founding Congregations and Lasting Initiatives

[09:51 - 13:50]

• Congregation of the Mission: Established to evangelize and catechize rural populations, address the lack of zealous and educated priests.
• Daughters of Charity: Founded with Louise de Marillac to institutionalize charitable service, particularly corporal works of mercy, at a time when active female congregations were rare.
  • "Vincent de Paul is a trailblazer in that regard." — Dr. Bloom [19:50]
• Training Church Leaders: Dr. Bloom highlights that St. Vincent’s influence helped form at least 20 bishops, demonstrating his impact on the French Church’s hierarchy.

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Reformer of the French Church: Responding to the Times

[14:17 - 17:56]

• Context: Post-Council of Trent era. France suffered religious wars, lacked seminaries despite Trent’s mandate.
• Seminary Foundations: Instrumental in founding ~12 seminaries and training priests in zeal, humility, and hard work.
  • "Vincent de Paul ends up being the man who is maybe the most energetic doer of what the Council of Trent had asked for." — Dr. Bloom [16:00]
• Core Virtues: Humility, poverty, hard work, interiority, and service to the poor.
  • "Prayer, humility, hard work, service to the poor." — Dr. Bloom [17:11]

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The Meaning of Charity and Spiritual Legacy

[17:56 - 20:58]

• Charity as Lived by St. Vincent: Primarily spiritual works, but fostered corporal works through laywomen’s confraternities and the Daughters of Charity.
  • "He called…these were called the Ladies of Charity…he met a woman named Louise de Marillac…they founded the Daughters of Charity." — Dr. Bloom [19:01, 19:50]
• Legacy: The ethos of practical, organized charity inspires modern organizations like the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, established in his honor during the 19th century.
  • "That was not his personal emphasis. It was more spiritual works of mercy for him." — Dr. Bloom [20:23]

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Personal and Modern Connections

[21:15 - 21:39]

• Dr. Bloom shares a personal story: His adopted child arrived on St. Vincent’s feast day, September 27, deepening his family’s devotion.

• Reflection on St. Vincent as a “public” saint:

  • "His life was not his own. He was out there doing whatever duty required, he was doing it…a man who's regular in virtue, devoted to duty, courteous, you know, every virtue." — Dr. Bloom [22:24]

• Parallels drawn to St. John Paul II and Mother Teresa:

  • "There's lots of different models of sanctity…in the case of John Paul II and Vincent de Paul, it's really the whole life that presents itself as a marvel." — Dr. Bloom [23:39]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Ambition and Conversion:
  • "He was a bit of a careerist for the next decade…" — Dr. Bloom [01:57]
• On Formation and Priesthood:
  • "The poor in the countryside are dying spiritually for lack of priests." — Dr. Bloom [11:18]
• On Holiness and Daily Life:
  • "If we continue to work hard and push towards the finish line, maybe by the time we're in our late 70s, we'll have some virtue." — Dr. Bloom [24:32]
• On Charity:
  • "If you need to leave prayer to go serve the poor, you can offer that act as prayer to God." — Mary McGeehan [24:32, referencing St. Vincent]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Biographical Overview: [01:07 – 03:43]
• Saint’s Conversion Experience: [09:51 – 11:18]
• Founding the Vincentians & Daughters of Charity: [11:18 – 13:50, 19:01 – 20:58]
• Discussion of Seminary Formation and Legacy: [14:17 – 17:56]
• Dr. Bloom’s Personal Reflection: [21:15 – 21:39]
• Comparisons to Modern Saints: [22:12 – 24:32]
• Closing Reflections on Sanctity: [23:39 – 24:32]

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Conclusion

St. Vincent de Paul’s legacy is marked by a radical conversion from clerical careerism to passionate, humble service of the poor and institutional reform of the French Church. His model — grounded in prayer, humility, and tireless acts of mercy — paved the way for modern approaches to charity and priestly formation. His life reminds listeners that sanctity is possible in the daily grind and public labor of Church service.
St. Vincent de Paul, pray for us.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.

[Mary McGeehan]

Hello. Welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary McGeehan and I am joined with Dr. Chris Bloom, the provost of the graduate school here at the Augustine Institute. Thank you for joining.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Oh, Mary, great to be here. Great to be with all of our forum viewers.

[Listener or Guest]

Thank you.

[Mary McGeehan]

Thank you. Pleasure to have you. And the episode today is on the life of St. Vincent de Paul. So the series Catholic Saints is to learn a little bit about their life biographical sketch, legacy that they left to the church to really look to them as sources of inspiration for our own lives today and the Catholic pilgrimage that we are walking. So to begin, St. Vincent de Paul, can you give a brief biographical sketch? Where is he from? When did he live? Do we know anything about his family to start?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yeah. So born about 1580, plus or minus a year or two, died in 1660. He was from southwestern France. So for the marshy plains south of the city of Bordeaux, it's a territory for shepherds. And he came from a shepherd's family. It's not clear how poor he was exactly, but certainly not a wealthy family. And as a young man, he seems to have been bitten with a certain amount of ambition. So he was very charming. And he somehow managed to have his first benefice in the church. We'll come back to that word and talk about that a little bit. By the time he was 18, he was ordained a priest before his 20th birthday.

[Mary McGeehan]

Oh, that is young.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yeah. And then he was a bit of a careerist for the next decade. So it's a very curious story, the decade of his 20s, but we'll skip over that for the moment and just say that when he did settle down in Paris after or right around his 30th birthday, he grew into being a very zealous and devoted and serious minded priest. In his 40s, he founded a couple of religious orders. A religious order for men called the Congregation of the Mission, a religious order for women called the Daughters of Charity. And as he went through the autumn of his life in his 60s and 70s, he was a leader in the Church of France, directing seminaries. He served on the Council of the King that chose bishops for France. He was a spiritual director of renown for, for priests often. And he had a kind of training, a kind of informal training ground for priest leaders that he held and from that informal circle based in Paris. And it lasted over quite some period of time, 20 of his directees went on to become bishops.

[Mary McGeehan]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yeah. Really?

[Mary McGeehan]

20.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

20. 20. Yeah. So it's quite an astonishing life. He's a founder and an ecclesiastical statesman, while also an apostle to the poor and a man of a rich interior life. So there's a sketch.

[Mary McGeehan]

Thank you. Thank you. That makes sense. He is a saint. That's a wonderful combination. What do we know then about his spirituality? What is the essence of the congregation he started or. Yeah. What are some of his main pillars he wrought to these communities and formation of the men he discipled?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yeah, let's take it. Let's take a closer look at his story then. So as a young man, he was privileged to have an inheritance from an extended family member, an uncle or something like this, but he had to go off and sort of seek it. So he. He went off to contend for it. He was about 25 years old at the time and decided to take a boat back to the region of France where he was from. Got captured by a Turkish pirate ship and enslaved in North Africa for two years. Really curious.

[Listener or Guest]

Yeah.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Extraordinary. And while he was there, from his first owner, he learned alchemy, you know, whether we think there is such a thing as alchemy to be learned. In any event, he learned some tricks, you know, with chemicals, we would say. And then his second owner turned out to have been a French Catholic man who had. Was an apostate from the Catholic faith and decided to make himself something of a Muslim in North Africa, it seems, so that he could enjoy having multiple wives. So it was a really curious fellow.

[Mary McGeehan]

Interesting.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

And visited Paul, who was a priest. Okay. Converted this man, or at least got him to recognize that he was living in sin and that he needed to come back to his faith. So this man came back to France with Vincent de Paul and left behind his disordered life and so forth. At which point you might think, wow, okay, so this young man is doing these sort of extraordinary things on mission and so forth. He's really got his act together as a young priest. Well, not exactly. He then goes off, he impresses some high ranking cleric because of his supposed skills at alchemy, ends up in Rome for a year, just kind of hanging around and living the high life and making connections, and then from there follows those connections back to Paris. He's in his late 20s at this point, and he's basically on the make, you know, and this is an odd thing for us, right? We don't experience the church today as a setting to make your career, like as a place to get rich or become famous or something like this. But in Catholic Europe in the 17th century, for practical purposes, everybody's Catholic, and there's the accumulated wealth of 6, 7, 8 centuries of pious bequests. So Charlemagne gives this piece of land to this bishop, and then Charlemagne's grandson gives this piece of land to another. And all of a sudden the Church has got all this money and so. And the way the Church did her business at this time all over Europe was that clerical jobs had income that in one way or another came from land, from the agricultural produce of the land. And that income was the benefits. The benefit, we would say in English.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

But the beneficium that. That supported the cleric in his life. So he didn't have a salary, per se.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

The bishop didn't give him a salary. And the difference between this priest and another priest was that one of them might have a beneficium, a benefice that was incredibly cushy, lots of income, and others might be dirt poor. And so the kind of navigating the clerical life for an ambitious young man who wasn't particularly pious had to do with trading in one benefits for another and making friends and influences people until the point in which you've got a comfortable life yourself. This is what he was doing.

[Mary McGeehan]

Interesting.

[Listener or Guest]

Yeah.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Not very edifying.

[Mary McGeehan]

No, because you mentioned he was a charmer. You can see how that at this point stage of his life.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yes, exactly. He was a real charmer. He was. He had a great sense of humor. He was extremely energetic. He was sort of rakishly handsome, you know. And what this landed him in was a situation in which he was the personal sort of chaplain, if you will, for the wife of one of the richest men in France.

[Listener or Guest]

Okay.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Plum job, you know, this was the point in his life. He's in his early 30s when he's actually starting to take his priesthood more seriously. He's met an older priest, a cardinal, in fact, a man named Berul, impossible to pronounce. Cardinal De Berul, who is basically a mystic. And he insisted, to use our manner of speaking today, he insisted that the Christian needed to have a personal relationship with Christ.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

So to meet Christ in the Scriptures, to measure one's own life against the Lord and so forth.

[Mary McGeehan]

And this came from the cardinal.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

This came from this cardinal, this mystical fellow, Berulle, who had this influence on Venice, De Paul, around his 30th birthday, around that time, 1609-1610-1611-1612, he becomes the chaplain of this family, and he's taking that Work seriously. And the family owns all kinds of estates around France. And he had an extraordinary experience in 1617 at the age of 37.

[Listener or Guest]

That.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Did lead to the abrupt change of life that you've been waiting for. Like, where's the saint?

[Mary McGeehan]

When does he become holy?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

What's going on here?

[Listener or Guest]

You know?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

And so he's out at some village that belongs to this very wealthy family in some sense, right? The people are not. They're not slaves or anything, but the produce of their agricultural work is owed to the owners of the land. So it's their village, you could say. And he's there getting to know these people and spending 10 days or so with them. And a man presents himself for the sacrament of penance for confession and confesses some really terrible sin. Okay, we don't know what it was, but it was a serious mortal sin. And Vincent de Paul was really kind of taken aback that this man could have. Because it was a sin he had committed 20 years prior or something like this, right? That this man could have been living in a state of mortal sin for half of his adult life and not going to confession, even though he was deeply contrite and troubled by this and so forth. And so he dug a little deeper, and he found out that it had to do with the formation of the priests in that region, that the man didn't trust any of the priests for one reason or another.

[Listener or Guest]

Right?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Oftentimes the priests were relatives. In other cases, the priests were living with concubines. In some cases, they were poorly educated, and it was apparent to the faithful and so forth. So for whatever reason, and what Vincent de Paul did was encourage this man to tell the story outside the seal of confession, which he did then to the patroness, Madame de Gondi. So now that this man's story is public, as it were, now it can be related. And Vincent de Paul, this became like a seed stuck between tooth and gum for him. He realized what this man has carried. Thousands are carrying. You know, the poor in the countryside are dying spiritually for lack of priests. So the result of this is he ends up founding a congregation to go out from the cities, Paris in particular, to the villages, to places where the local presbyterate is either not zealous or not well educated or both. And to bring the light of the gospel to these places, which the congregation did to great acclaim over the next half century, and they're still Vincentians today, as they're called.

[Mary McGeehan]

And the heart of it, if I am hearing it correctly, was there was a grace in A confession where he felt the weight of the man's mortal sin having been unrepented.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Exactly.

[Mary McGeehan]

And the alarming, I guess, need to increase the formation of the priest to the poor and to everyone, particularly the poor, that he was working with.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

That's exactly it.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

To evangelize, to bring good news to the poor.

[Mary McGeehan]

Yes.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

This is what the vision was. And then as his life went on, it became much more complicated because he was a man of great energy, great resources, really broad shoulders. And so people just kept asking to do things. So at a certain point, he just ends up something of this ecclesiastical statesman type, where he's forming other priests to go out and do the kind of work that he himself had been doing as a younger man.

[Mary McGeehan]

Okay, thank you. That is very helpful. The context, what would you say? Often, though, God the Father sends saints to be this antidotal medicine of a particular time and balm for a culture. What would you summarize? St. Vincent de Paul's medicinal spiritual balm was to this region in France, and consequently the fruit of the congregation he started.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yeah. And to the whole kingdom, really, because Paris was the principal city there. So we're in the century following the Council of Trent. Council of Trent closes in 1563, which is pretty much the same year that France is plunged into about 30 years of religious war between the Calvinists and the Catholics. It's not a constant war, it's episodic. Nevertheless, France arrives at the end of that period of strife, 1598, with a lot of, you know, having experienced a lot of suffering, a lot of dislocation and so on, and not having at all implemented the Council of Trent. Okay, so if we. If we pop down at France in. Let's just take the year 1612, when Vincent de Paul became the chaplain to the Gondi family, there's maybe two seminaries in all of France.

[Listener or Guest]

Okay.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yeah. So now, you know, that's okay. I mean, for most of the history of the Church, bishops trained their own men from the priesthood and would send them off to the great European universities like the University of Paris and so forth, where there were little colleges where they could live in priestly life and so forth. So it's not as though there weren't ways for priests to get educated. But when we think of priestly education as involving this intense period of being set aside from the world and under close spiritual direction and so forth, that's all a product of the Council of Trent. And that Council of Trent called for seminaries to be created in its last sessions in 1563. And you fast forward 50 years to 1613 in France, and the work has not been done.

[Listener or Guest]

Okay?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

So Vincent de Paul ends up being the man who is maybe the most energetic doer of what the Council of Trent had asked for. So he's involved in the founding of about 12 different seminaries, okay. Training men to staff those seminaries. And as I mentioned, he's involved in this sort of personal training of priests that leads to men of significant zeal becoming bishops in their own right. And I think this is maybe the most remarkable thing about him. You know, you ask about his spiritual life. It's very simple, right? Humility, a poverty of life.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

So hard work, no frills, living, you know, do the work of evangelization and catechesis. And. Did I say humility? I said humility, Right. And then he was famous for having said, we must become interior men.

[Listener or Guest]

Right?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

So this was, you know, prayer, humility, hard work, service to the poor. There we go. Right. Very simple. Right out of the heart of the gospel kind of spirituality. And I think the amazing thing about him is that whether he was in his 40s or whether he was in his 70s, somehow the imprint of this zeal is placed on other men. So he's a leader of men in a very effective way. Men come in contact with him and they're changed, and it's really quite something.

[Mary McGeehan]

Sounds like he was a witness to the Gospel in a way that potentially wasn't being manifested as commonly, but had a ripple effect of re. Just manifesting that simplicity and outreach to the poor. And I did not know that he was one of the first to really plant the seeds of, you know, the seminaries and formation that we see today in the life of the church. I. I know he is known as the patron of all acts of charity.

[Listener or Guest]

Yeah.

[Mary McGeehan]

How would you explain what St. Vincent de Paul interpreted the word charity to mean in light of what you're. You're saying?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Yeah. So, no, that's good.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

I mean, as far as his personal works, they were mostly spiritual works of charity. But what he did for the rural poor by himself and with the priests of the Congregation of the Mission, he then sort of, as it were, backed up by creating confraternities of women who did corporal works of mercy in the spot.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

So he called. These were called the Ladies of Charity. And then after that work had been going on for half decade or so, he met a woman named Louise de Marillac, who is a pious widow who was interested in assisting him in his mission. And eventually in the 1630s, the two of them founded a religious order of women called the Daughters of Charity. That in the first place was meant to sort of assist the work of these layers, women's confraternities that were actually doing the door to door work of the charity and so forth. This is a time in the history of the church where an active congregation of women was new.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

And it was a, you know, Francis de Sales had tried to create a congregation like this and Rome had said no, they weren't ready for women to be out there, as it were, on the streets doing acts of charity. And so Vincent de Paul is a trailblazer in that regard. And it's from that foundation that his reputation comes that we're familiar with, from our societies of Saint Vincent de Paul and parishes and so forth. We're thinking of giving winter coats to the poor and this sort of thing. That was not his personal emphasis. It was more spiritual works of mercy for him. What happens in 19th century Paris is a young man named Frederic Ozenham, who was a single celibate professor of literature at the Sorbonne, creates a little lay confraternity in a parish in Paris called the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in his honor. And it's from that foundation in the mid 19th century that we have our parish based societies of St. Vincent de.

[Mary McGeehan]

Paul today, which is remarkable. They're still going strong and beating so many even today. That stemmed from the ethos and fruit of the life of St. Vincent de Paul. I'm also curious, do you have any personal devotion to the saint?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Well, I do. September 27th is the day that he died and went to heaven. Feast of St. Vincent de Paul. And it turns out that that was the day in 1999 that my wife Kathleen and I brought home for adoption our eldest child. So we, you know, are grateful to Vincent de Paul for his intercession and giving us John on that, on that day.

[Mary McGeehan]

Beautiful. Beautiful. The feast, like Dr. Bloom mentioned, of St. Vincent de Paul is September 27th. And are there any other little nuggets about St. Vincent de Paul that you think maybe are lesser known about him that are working well?

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

You know, I think I'll just give you a closing thought. How's that? You know, I think that he's, he has something in common with John Paul ii. Okay, John Paul ii, as I'm sure you all know, was a bishop then, archbishop, cardinal and pope, but that whole time a bishop.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

For 50 years. Okay, so he lived to be what, 84? From his early 30s until he died, his life was entirely public.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

His life was not his own.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

He was out there doing whatever as first auxiliary bishop and then later Pope, you know, whatever duty required, he was doing it. And the extraordinary thing about John Paul, as we know, is that that whole long period of time completely open to view is totally unbesmirched.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

I mean, it's just this amazing life of a man who's regular in virtue, devoted to duty, courteous, you know, every virtue.

[Mary McGeehan]

Integrity.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

Right, exactly. And Vincent de Paul's like that.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

So he was a rakish, kind of odd clerical careerist in his 20s, you know, as a priest. As a priest, yeah. By the grace of God and the help of a wise older priest. Right. Gets a hold of himself in his 30s and then very quickly is in the public eye for the whole rest of his life.

[Listener or Guest]

Right.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

The king is consulting with him, bishops are consulting with him, et cetera. In that whole long period of time, he's known for just doing his duty, working hard, pushing forward, always being helpful. And he continued to be charming, but now.

[Mary McGeehan]

Charming for the good.

[Dr. Chris Bloom]

He's charming for the good, exactly. So that's a wonderful thing. There's lots of different models of sanctity, Right. And there's martyrs whose very bright candle is snuffed out while they're still very young. And then there's saints who. Who do some. One extraordinary thing that brings them to our attention, or something like this. In the case of John Paul II and Vincent de Paul, it's really the whole life that presents itself as a kind of marvel, if you will. And for those of us who are in the middle marches of life and still thinking about what it's going to take to make us saints, there's something inspiring about that, that if we continue to work hard and push towards the finish line, maybe by the time we're in our late 70s, we'll have some.

[Mary McGeehan]

Virtue that is a beautiful reflection. Obedience to the daily grind, the daily invitations the Lord places before us. And that is interesting you mentioned St. John Paul II in connection to St. Vincent de Paul, because as I was understanding more about his spirituality and his ethos, it was Mother Teresa who was also coming to mind, who had such a devotion to serving the poor and has such a spirituality of, as we serve the poor, we serve the body of Christ. And I think St. Vincent de Paul also had foundations in that spirituality as well. In acts of charity, if you need to leave prayer to go serve the poor, you can offer that act as prayer to God is something he had mentioned in one of his writings. So similar spiritual friends there as well. Well, thank you. This was very interesting to learn about the life of St. Vincent de Paul. Thank you for all that historical knowledge as well, and we hope you enjoyed and learned a few things on this episode and St. Vincent de Paul. Pray for us.

[Podcast Host]

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[Listener or Guest]

Sat.