When reading St Vincent’s letters and accounts of his life, sooner or later you come across a phrase that seems to sum up his entire experience: some young women, talking to him, say that they have ‘given themselves to God in the person of the poor’. It is a simple, almost spontaneous formula, but it encapsulates a precise vision: God is not loved ‘alongside’ the poor, as if they were one chapter among many; He is loved by passing through them, allowing oneself to be touched by their lives.
For Vincent, the poor are never an anonymous category. His letters are filled with faces: the sick with no one to visit them, families uprooted by war, peasants in remote villages who have never heard a catechesis, fragile girls who fall into the same mistakes, simple women who ask only to be able to serve the sick. In this interweaving of stories, he learns to recognise the passage of the Lord. The poor are not just people to be helped: they become a theological place, a concrete sacrament of Christ’s presence. Surrendering oneself to God in the person of the poor, then, means allowing oneself to be evangelised by them, by their questions, even by their wounds.
But St Vincent does not stop at emotion. For him, charity cannot be a generous but disordered impulse. In his instructions to the Confraternities of Charity, there is an almost “administrative” realism: the poor and sick of the parish must be known by name, registered, accompanied; the goods collected must be kept as “the goods of the poor”, not as the patrimony of a devout group; visits to the sick are organised in shifts, so that every day someone is at the door of those who are alone. This is not spiritual bureaucracy: it is the awareness that love, if it does not take shape, if it does not enter into structures and the use of goods, ends up leaving behind precisely the most fragile.
This practicality is a strong provocation for the Congregation of the Mission today. Evangelising the poor does not mean performing some symbolic gesture, but seriously questioning how communities are organised, the rhythm of life of the confreres, the management of works, the allocation of resources. In real choices – where we live, in what contexts we agree to work, what activities we prioritise, what space we give to direct presence among the poor – we can see whether they are truly at the centre or remain in the background as a spiritual theme.
Another feature that emerges from Vincent’s writings is his obstinacy in turning his gaze towards what he calls, in the language of his time, the “poor villages”: the poorest countryside, the least attractive areas, places far from the spotlight. He could have been content with works in the city, where there are contacts, resources, influential people; instead, he pushes his people to go to forgotten villages, mountain villages, lands marked by the passage of armies. It is easy to recognise our suburbs of today here: urban neighbourhoods marked by loneliness and violence, areas of continuous migration, abandoned villages, prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, reception centres where life flows hidden. The Vincentian charism, if it remains true to itself, cannot help but ask: where are the people in our territory that no one seeks out? Which poor people does ordinary pastoral care struggle to reach? That is where the Congregation is called to pitch its tent.
The letters also show us how vocations mature alongside the poor. Young women refuse prestigious positions with wealthy ladies because they feel ‘committed to the poor’; they prefer to remain in hospital wards or village homes, sharing the lives of their sisters. Similarly, many priests discover that their truest identity is not to be men of power or ecclesiastical careerists, but poor missionaries among the poor. This trait speaks powerfully to Vincentians today: chastity, poverty, obedience and stability are not just canonical formulas, but choices made so that the poor may have the Gospel, so that nothing, neither economic interests nor personal ambitions, may prevent them from being where the poor live. A Mission community is credible when the house where it lives, its lifestyle, its use of money, and the works it undertakes can be interpreted from the perspective of the poor and not from its own gain or prestige.
It is not surprising, then, that St Vincent often called his spiritual family ‘our poor little Company’. This is not false modesty: he is aware of limitations, tensions and sins, but he recognises in this smallness a grace, if it is accepted with humility. Only a Congregation that recognises itself as poor can truly serve the poor. For the present, this translates into very concrete choices: a sober lifestyle, close to the people; communities that avoid the superfluous and share; a management of goods that does not defend privileges but opens up spaces and resources for those in need; apostolic decisions that do not pursue success and numbers but are guided by the question: where is the Gospel least proclaimed and where are the poor most exposed?
Poverty, in this perspective, is neither a romantic ideal nor an edifying discourse. It is the concrete condition that makes us free to go where it costs most to go, to stay where others do not want to stay, to accept that much work will remain hidden and apparently fruitless. It is the narrow way of the Gospel, the one that lets the little ones and the least pass first, and challenges those who would like a comfortable and respectable Christianity.
In the end, the legacy handed down to us by Vincentian letters and documents can be condensed into a simple yet uncomfortable question: how, today, as individuals and as a community, are we truly “entrusted to God in the person of the poor”? The answer can never be definitive; it must be sought and renewed in popular missions, in the popular parishes entrusted to the Congregation, in educational and social works, in the most hidden presences alongside those who suffer. What cannot be missing is the thread that holds everything together: the conviction that God awaits us in the face of the poor, and that it is precisely there that the Vincentian vocation finds its meaning, its joy and its prophetic strength for the challenges of the Church and the world today.