There was a man, according to the letters of St. Vincent, who no longer wanted to hear about the Church. An elderly man, marked by long resistance, he lived in error and refused any dialogue. The missionaries had approached him several times: nothing. He closed himself off, rejected them, perhaps harshly, perhaps with that bitter sarcasm that comes from wounds.
Vincent does not describe him with contempt. He calls him with three surprising words: ‘that poor misguided man’. He does not say ‘the rebel’, ‘the bad man’, ‘the enemy of the Church’, but “poor” and ‘misguided’. Poor, because he was deprived of the light of faith. Misguided, because he had taken a path of distance, but he remained a man sought by God. It was a poverty different from that of the farmer or the sick, yet, in Vincent’s eyes, no less real: spiritual poverty, poverty of truth, poverty of trust.
When every argument seems useless, the missionaries choose a path that today might make the most astute smile: they turn to the Virgin Mary, recite the litanies with simplicity, and entrust that ‘poor misguided man’ to God’s mercy. And what no reasoning had been able to achieve happens: the man returns, asks to confess, abandons his error, and receives communion. It is not magic; it is the fruit of a mysterious intertwining of prayer, patience and delicacy.
This little story says a lot about the way St Vincent looks at those who are far from the faith. The heretic is not an “enemy to be defeated”, but a poor person to be mourned, to be carried in prayer, to be waited for. His refusal to dialogue is a wound, not a source of pride. And the answer is not harshness, but humble perseverance: seeking him out when possible, and when it is no longer possible, continuing to be close to him with prayer and offered suffering.
If we shift our gaze from that man’s face to the panorama of our world, we encounter other forms of “heresy”, perhaps less obvious but equally dramatic. It is no longer just a matter of individuals rejecting the faith, but of collective logics rejecting the Gospel of peace. There are governments, powers, systems that choose the path of war as a normal, almost inevitable tool; that reject any serious attempt at dialogue; that invest enormous resources in weapons and almost nothing in paths of reconciliation.
Here too, instinctively, we would be inclined to speak of “bad guys”, “monsters”, “enemies”. The temptation is to use the same weapon: excommunications from a distance, harsh judgements, condemnations that leave only bitterness behind. St Vincent’s gaze, however, provokes us to take a different step: to dare to call even these people “poor misguided souls”. Not to justify the evil of war – which remains evil and produces an endless chain of suffering – but to recognise that behind every choice of violence there is profound misery: fear, idolatry of power, inability to trust, spiritual blindness. It is a collective form of poverty, a heresy of history that rejects the God of peace.
Vincenzo already knew, in his time, the dramatic link between war and poverty. His letters speak of devastated villages, burned countryside, fleeing populations, and stripped-bare dioceses. When he writes to his people, he does not limit himself to describing the misery of the people; he notes that war and poverty in the country also become an obstacle to the mission: it is difficult to travel, to maintain homes, there are no resources for catechesis, and the missionaries themselves fall ill or have to stop working.
In short, war generates a double poverty: the immediate poverty of families who lose everything, and the indirect poverty of a Church that struggles to proclaim the Gospel in the most wounded places. It is as if the voice of the good news were being drowned out by the noise of weapons and the cry of hunger. The ‘lost poor’ of whom Vincent spoke – far from the faith, lacking Christian education – become even more difficult to reach when the territory is torn apart by conflict.
If we think of our own day, the scene is repeated with perhaps even more dramatic accents. Entire regions of the world are ravaged by declared or creeping wars; entire populations are fleeing; the poor are increasing and barriers are multiplying. Christian communities, often small and fragile, try to resist, but the mission becomes difficult: there is a lack of resources, a lack of people, a lack of freedom. Even today, war is a form of poverty that generates other forms of poverty and becomes, as in St Vincent’s time, a real obstacle to the proclamation of the Gospel.
Yet, it is precisely here that the Vincentian charism can offer a key. Faced with the “heretics” of yesterday and today – the individual who rejects faith, the government that rejects dialogue and chooses war – the first step is not hatred, but the recognition of spiritual poverty. It is the ability to say, as St Vincent did: ‘This man, this people, this system is poor. He is misguided, but he remains sought after by God.” This does not mean closing our eyes to responsibility; it means refusing to turn the other into an irredeemable enemy.
The second step is what the letters so often describe: pray, persevere, keep the door of dialogue open. The old heretic converts after the missionaries have chosen the path of litanies and supplication. No one can guarantee that this will always happen, but the Gospel asks that there always be at least someone who, when faced with rejection, does not respond with equal and opposite rejection, but with greater generosity. In our time, this may mean, for the Congregation of the Mission and the Vincentian Family, continuing to work for peace, educating in discernment, accompanying the victims of conflict, but also interceding for those responsible, so that their spiritual poverty does not destroy them and does not destroy the peoples entrusted to their decisions.
The third step is to remain close to the first victims of these ‘heresies of power’: the poor. When governments choose conflict, it is always the little ones who pay the highest price: uprooted families, unemployed workers, young people without a future, landless peasants, the sick without care, children without schooling. Here the Vincentian charism finds its most typical path: to be with those who are affected, to invent forms of closeness, to keep hope alive, even when history seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
After all, the story of “that poor man who went astray” and the story of today’s wars pose the same question: how do we look at those who do not accept dialogue? As an enemy to be eliminated or as a poor person to be brought before God? St Vincent has no doubts: he chooses the second path. And precisely for this reason, without ceasing to denounce evil and injustice, he remains a man of mercy and patience to the end.
For those who look to him today, it is not a question of imitating gestures of the past, but of adopting a perspective: one that recognises spiritual poverty within history, that does not resign itself to the rejection of dialogue, that does not cease to pray and serve. It is a demanding perspective, certainly. But it is also the only one that allows us to hope that, like that old heretic, even the “poor misguided governments” of our time may one day discover the path of peace and dialogue, finally opening up a space of new life for the poor of the world.
