These brief lines are intended to help us discover Saint Vincent as a saint not only of charity, of the poor, of seminaries, of missions, as co-founder of the Daughters of Charity but also as a man of the Word of God. To develop the topic in a reductive way would require a lot of space, especially because of the great legacy left by Saint Vincent in his writings. The intent above all is to stimulate the reader to learn from St. Vincent the love of and the taste for the Word of God. Indeed, given that these pages are not intended as investigations or analyzes of the bible. The intent is, above all, that those who, in some way, nourish themselves with the spirituality of Saint Vincent also nourish themselves from the example of the Saint. That is, that they learn to, or continually increase their capacity to, cultivate the art of the Word of God at every level, even as lectio divina, so that it becomes the root and constitutive foundation of one’s spiritual structure to bring to the poor “an announcement of salvation”. “The Son of God – wrote Saint Vincent – is the icon on which we must form our life.” In this, he, in his way of reading and meditating on Scripture, is essentially placed in the train of the Fathers of the Church.
More specifically, almost all of Saint Vincent’s writings are intended as a small commentary on some points of his masterful work the “Common Rules of the Congregation of the Mission”, a booklet that the saint distributed to his Missionaries in 1658, after the community and St. Vincent had experienced these rules by practical observance for some decades.
This wonderful little book, now necessarily updated and aligned according to the Second Vatican Council and the competent authorities of the Congregation, always remains a fundamental code of spirituality, even for many other people given to God, especially for those whose charisma is expressed in giving oneself to God, above all, in the care, service and evangelization of the poor. Also because “you always have the poor with you” (Jn 12: 8). However, we do not intend to offer only reflections on some point of this code of spirituality, because an ample comment would require a different kind of commitment. What we intend to do is to roam about in the thought of Saint Vincent to discover his attachment to the Word of God. And since many in the Church of Pope Francis see Christ in the poor and the poor in Christ, we think they might find, in the teaching of Saint Vincent, an excellent support for their path of proclaiming the Gospel and serving the poor.
Benedict XVI, in the audience of 24 October 2007, speaking of St. Ambrose, said that the holy bishop had begun the practice of lectio divina in the West, stating that: “The method of lectio came to guide all the preaching and writings of Ambrose, which spring precisely from the prayerful listening of the Word of God”. Here is a key to understanding the relationship between St. Vincent and the Sacred Scriptures. As in St. Ambrose, the Word of God guided the whole of St. Vincent’s life, his preaching and his works, which always began from “a prayerful listening” to the Word of God. Pope Benedict also says, in the same audience, referring to a word of St. Augustine who warns the preacher: “So that he does not become … a vain preacher of the Word on the outside, he who does not listen to it from within”. Saint Vincent undoubtedly learned this “listening from within”, this assiduity in reading the Holy Scriptures in a prayerful attitude, so as to welcome the Word of God into his own spirit. In this way he fits perfectly, with due proportions, in the company of Augustine and Ambrose as a man of the Word of God.
Saint Vincent ordered the Missionaries to read every day a chapter of the New Testament, possibly kneeling, invoking God before and after reading. He gave the Missionaries the rule of doing an hour of mental prayer every day, precisely to cultivate “the attraction of uniting to Our Lord”, to his examples and to His feelings. This was the secret to listening to the “word of God” in one’s interior, before proclaiming it outside.
He warned the community not to place any other book or object on top of the text of the Scriptures, out of respect for the Word of God. He did not want Scripture to be quoted as a game, or for humor. His every thought and teaching was based on the example of Our Lord because he “listened to the Word of God from within”.
Finally, the purpose of this small book is not to present a small manual to organize useful and advantageous projects for the poor, or find new ways and new means to meet their multiple and never-exhausted needs. There are already a great number of people, many of them sincerely zealous, who are positively launched into this existential periphery. Here we want to emphasize only that those who intend to work in these peripheries must follow that great program presented by Pope Francis in Aparecida (29-30 July 2017 in the program and Homily in the Shrine) which is summarized in two words: “Christ and the poor”. And it is said that to those who asked him three times in a row, what the program of this unforgettable meeting should be, he replied every time in the same way: “Christ and the poor”. It is not enough to serve the poor, to spend time and means for them, to organize projects for them if we do not begin and end with the mystery and love of Jesus preached by the Church. This mystery becomes for everyone, and for the poor in particular, the center of attraction and the fountain of love in a new life. In the same vein, it is not enough to preach Christ with great zeal and doctrinal richness, if we do not go to meet our poor brothers and sisters like the Good Samaritan.
Fr. Italo Zedde, CM
Province of Italy
