Tim Williams

After a year of debate with the Saint-Simonians in the Conference of History, defending the Catholic faith, Frédéric Ozanam and his friends were confronted with this challenge: “Even you, who pride yourself on your Catholicity, what are you doing to show the vitality and efficacy, to prove the truth of your faith?” [Baunard, 64]

It was a challenge Frédéric took to heart; it affected him deeply. After all, he said to his friends, having spent an entire year in vigorous debate, proclaiming the truth, defending the church; for all the educated arguments, for all the passion, “have we made one single conquest for Jesus Christ?” [Ibid, 65]

The Society was not founded to answer a challenge to feed or clothe or go to the poor. That was the answer to the challenge. The challenge was to prove the truth of our faith. Ozanam, man of letters, academic, brilliant speaker and debater, realized that words alone were not enough to do this, that we must act.

Today, we continue the timeless tradition of the home visit, responding to calls for help from our neighbors in need. But is there even more we could do – not just to alleviate suffering, but to prove the truth of our faith?

In so many of our communities, we see the homeless – asleep on a bench, huddling in a doorway, zealously guarding their few possessions. Are they the ones, in need and forgotten, that our Rule directs us to “seek out and find”? [Rule, Part I, 1.5] Do we hold ourselves back at times because we fear our outreach will be unwelcome, since we know we cannot alleviate all of their needs?

We are created to live in community. The greatest need of all people is to be part of a community, and there is none greater than the community of Christian faith. Whatever material offering we may have for the homeless, there is nothing greater we can give than our hearts, our friendship, a simple smile, and a greeting. All people are buoyed by human connections, but especially those who are most often treated as invisible.

It is we who are first evangelized by our encounter with Christ in the person of the poor. And it is we who are challenged to imitate Christ in this encounter; to prove the truth of our faith, just as Frédéric and his friends were once challenged to do. It was not, and is not easy, but the best proof of our faith remains unchanged: “We must do what is most agreeable to God. Therefore, we must do what Our Lord Jesus Christ did when preaching the Gospel. Let us go to the poor.” [Baunard, 65]

Contemplate

Where can I go to “seek out and find” the poor??

Recommended Reading

Faces of Holiness

As a young man, Bl. Frédéric Ozanam considered himself, like his father, to be a monarchist, seeing government on earth as an expression of the divine principle of authority. He was inspired especially by the example of St. Louis, King of France, whose monarchy represented “the sacrifice of a single person for the good of all… which I revere with love.” [Letter 77, to Falconnet, 1834]

Following the restoration of the French monarchy in 1813, the Ozanam family returned to France from Italy, where Frédéric had been born. Yet the church, now restored to legality in France, had not fully regained the confidence and trust of the people. Indeed, as further revolutions continued to develop, social philosophies that rejected the church became more popular – not least the philosophy of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, whose “technocratic” vision relied on a belief not in spiritual power, but in industry and science.

It was a group of young Saint-Simonians who would challenge Frédéric and his Catholic friends to “show the good of the church” in 1833. In answer to the challenge, they would choose to serve the poor as Christ did – with love and friendship; “not only as an equal, but as a superior.” [O’Meara, 229]

This continuing work pointed Frédéric towards the best alternative to Saint-Simonianism and its more revolutionary successors. He saw how important it was “to make equality as operative as is possible among men; to make voluntary community replace imposition and brute force...” [Letter 136, to Lallier, 1836]

For Frédéric, liberty was much more than a political slogan, it was a gift from God. Indeed, as he wrote to a political ally who was an unbeliever, “I believe [our] cause to be more ancient and, therefore, more sacred” Liberty, equality, and fraternity, he explained, did not come from the revolution of 1789, but from Calvary. [Baunard, 301]

As our church teaches, “Man can turn to good only in freedom, which God has given to him as one of the highest signs of his image.” [CSDC, 135]

Because it was best able to preserve equality and liberty, Frédéric concluded that “democracy is the natural final stage of the development of political progress, and that God leads the world thither.” Therefore, he asked, “are not the men of the Church and the men of the people to be found side by side at the foot of the tree of liberty?” [Baunard, 281]

Liberty is both a gift from God, and a pathway to His truth, and so, as Frédéric said, “Christianity will be the soul of Liberty.” [Baunard, 290]

Contemplate

Do I celebrate liberty as a gift from God, for me and for all?

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Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam

Our Vincentian vocation, the Rule of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul reminds us, is “a vocation for every moment of our lives”. [Rule, Part I, 2.6] Our call to serve is more than a call to serve the neighbor, more than a call to attend meetings, but a call to live our faith fully in our family lives, our professional lives, and our participation in our communities.

This was the vocation modeled for us by our founder, Blessed Frédéric Ozanam. Throughout his life, Frédéric continued his own Home Visits as a member of the Society, but also became a widely known advocate for the poor, whose L’ere nouvelle newspaper influenced public discussions. He served in the National Guard in 1848 and ran for public office (unsuccessfully) that same year, all in addition to his professorship and his vocation as husband and father.

But for Frédéric, these roles were not separate from his Catholic faith; they were the full expression of a faithful life. His was a vision of “a community of faith and works erasing little by little the old divisions of political parties” through lives of witness by people in “science, the arts, and industry, into administration, the judiciary, the bar” – our whole lives. [Letter 290, to Amélie, 1841]

In this, he foresaw the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, recognizing that the same friendship that unites us as communities of faith in our Conferences, unites us also with the neighbors we serve, and with all the Conferences in our One Society. But it is not “exhausted in relationships between individuals but spreads into the network formed by these relationships, which is precisely the social and political community; it intervenes in this context seeking the greatest good for the community in its entirety.” [CSDC, 208]

Charity is love; the love of God for his own sake, and the love of our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God. [CCC, 1822] This is the love we mean we say we serve “for love alone” and it is the love we mean in our “vision of the civilization of love”. [Rule, Part I, 2.2 & 7.2]

Frédéric envisioned a “network of charity and social justice encircling the world” [Rule, Part I, 2.4] – a network formed by those resolved “to become better themselves in order to make others happier.” His vision calls us, each of us and all of us, to give ourselves fully to God and the neighbor.

“These,” he said, “Are ambitious dreams…” [Letter 290, to Amélie, 1841]

Contemplate

How can I personally live my faith more fully in every part of my life?

Recommended Reading

A New Century Dawns

Conference Meetings, the Rule tells us, “are held in a spirit of fraternity, simplicity, and Christian joy.” [Rule, Part I, 3.4] Like so much that we read in our Rule, this is less a set of instructions about exactly what we must do than it is a description of what a Vincentian, or Vincentian Conference looks like. So, does this describe my Conference? Would an outside observer describe our meetings that way?

Is our attitude towards one another that of family members, brothers and sisters, comfortable in each other’s presence, united in purpose and love? Do we think of our fellow Vincentians as burdens, or do we instead exemplify the old Boys Town motto, “he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother?”

Our first Rule said that ours would be a “model of Christian friendship” because of our brotherly (and now also sisterly) love. What would our visitor see in our Conference meetings that might cause him to describe us in this way?

Our spirit of simplicity, following the teaching of St. Vincent de Paul, “consists in doing everything for love of God” and always “saying things simply, without duplicity or subtlety, being straightforward, with no evasion or subterfuge.” [CCD XII:246] Do we say what we mean to one another? Do we welcome our fellow Vincentians’ honesty and frankness? Is the whole dialog of our meetings one of people unafraid to share and unafraid of disagreement? Do we disagree without being disagreeable?

Finally, are our meetings not only joyful, but held in a spirit of “Christian joy”? More importantly, what does that mean? Should our meetings always be filled with laughter and singing? It hardly seems as if they could be – and after all, as Pope Francis teaches in Evangelii Gaudium,” joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty.” But Christian joy, he continues, “adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.”

Fraternity, simplicity, and Christian joy, then, are not merely actions we take, but expressions of who we are as Vincentians, joined in our commitment to each other and to the neighbor, serving in the hope that that we may share the joy of God’s infinite love.

Contemplate

Do my Conference meetings fill me with Christian joy?

Recommended Reading

Turn Everything to Love

Saint Vincent de Paul famously said that it is our vocation to “set people’s hearts on fire, to do what the Son of God did. He came to set the world on fire in order to inflame it with His love.” [CCD XII:215] These are inspirational “marching orders”, but what, in a practical sense, do they mean? How do we go about lighting that fire?

As always, our patron teaches that we must focus first on the interior. If we wish to set the world on fire, in other words, we must do so using the fire within our own hearts. When we examine the fire in our hearts, we recognize very quickly that our love, our charity, must be truly all-consuming. This is the love, the charity, that sets the world on fire.

Vincent asks us to examine our charity by its effects. What are the things we do, the ways in which we behave that result from our charity? How will it be known to others (and to ourselves)?

The first thing animated by charity is to do to others as you would have them do to you. How simple that sounds! It is so obviously good as a sentiment that virtually everybody in our culture knows this teaching, from children to the aged, and to one extent or another we measure our acts of kindness by this measure. True charity in our hearts is more than a disposition to kindness. Instead, we cannot help but “to do for our neighbor the good that a person has the right to expect from a faithful friend.” [Ibid, 216]

Another effect of our charity is that we bear with one another. No one on earth is perfect; everybody has imperfections and faults. Vincent calls us to examine our own faults, our own failings, and our own weaknesses first. When we realize how much we need the forbearance of others, we will naturally be more willing to bear with the neighbor, who in no case is more in need of mercy and forbearance than we are. As our Rule says, because we are conscious of our own frailty and weakness, our hearts beat with the heartbeats of the poor, and so we do not judge them. [Rule, Part I, 1.9]

In charity, we need not learn to empathize, because we simply “can’t see someone suffering without suffering along with him, or see someone cry without crying as well. This is an act of love, causing people to enter one another’s hearts and to feel what they feel…” [CCD XII:221]

In charity, our love for the neighbor is for God’s sake, and our love for God is for the neighbor’s sake, for who loves another has fulfilled the law. Charity is the light within us, the source of the flame that lights the world on fire.

Contemplate

How often do I act in charity because I simply cannot act in any other way?

Recommended Reading

Mystic of Charity