Once upon a time, there was a country priest. He has no name in the books, but we can imagine him: a cold rectory, a few worn-out books, some bread on the table, poor people knocking on the door. It is men like him that St Vincent de Paul thinks of when he speaks of the ‘miserable situation’ in which many clergymen of his time live.

At first glance, some might say, ‘These are internal problems within the Church, issues of salaries and living conditions.’ For Vincent, however, this is not the case. When he looks at these ‘poor priests,’ his heart immediately goes further: he knows that a priest left in poverty, without training, isolated, will almost inevitably end up neglecting those who are even poorer than he is. For Saint Vincent, the poverty of the clergy is a wound that affects the people, especially the simplest people, those in the countryside, who have no other priest but him.

For this reason, in his letters we see bishops writing to him with concern: they describe priests who struggle to survive, who struggle to make ends meet, who live in parishes devastated by war, in dioceses where churches have been looted, villages burned, and the countryside stripped bare. Seeing all this, one bishop approached the king to combine some revenues and found a seminary entrusted to the priests of the Mission. This was not a luxury: it was an act of justice towards the priests and, through them, towards the “poor people” they served.

St Vincent reads these facts with a clear eye: caring for the poverty of the clergy, supporting them materially and spiritually, is an indirect but real way of serving the poor. A priest who lives with dignity, who has the opportunity to pray, study, rest, who is accompanied by brothers and superiors, becomes a greater gift to his people. On the contrary, a priest who is exhausted and left alone risks becoming hard, indifferent, perhaps even cynical. Behind his fatigue, Vincent sees the greatest risk: that the poor will be left without a shepherd, or that their shepherd will only be half present, ‘emptied’ by fatigue and abandonment.

This view extends from individuals to entire dioceses. There is, for example, a diocese that Vincent refers to as a “poor diocese”: the land has been repeatedly ravaged by war, the countryside has been burned, the people have fled, and the Church’s possessions have been plundered. Added to all this is a new suffering: the bishop, much loved by the people, is transferred to another see. The diocese, already poor economically, now experiences an even more painful poverty: the lack of stability, the absence of a nearby guide, the sense of always being a ‘land of passage’.

St Vincent does not spiritualise this poverty. He does not say, ‘It’s okay, it’s God’s will, just resign yourself to it.’ On the contrary, he feels the pain of that people, he takes it into his prayers, he speaks of it with respect. But it is precisely within this suffering that he recognises a possibility: that of living a diocesan poverty that is not only a lack, but also an appeal. A diocese poor in goods and tried by history can become a privileged place for the Gospel, if those who lead it choose to truly share the destiny of its people.

Here another decisive feature of Vincentian thought comes into play: the ‘holy poverty of a bishop’. In one of his most lucid reflections, Vincent observes that even the world – not only believers – recognises the greatness of a bishop who lives in simplicity, close to his people, compared to one who flaunts luxury and power. A poor bishop, who lives in a modest house, who allows himself to be found, who does not surround himself with barriers, becomes a concrete sign of Christ the Shepherd. A rich bishop, on the other hand, risks alienating precisely those he should attract: the poor, the distant, those who already find it difficult to trust the Church.

This insight is still enormously powerful today. In a world that views all forms of power with suspicion, the simplicity of the pastors’ lives becomes a language, a form of preaching. It is not a question of making a spectacle of poverty, but of living a lifestyle that says, without the need for many words: ‘I am no different from you, I share your fragility, your precariousness. We are in the same boat’. For the poor, seeing a priest or bishop who lives soberly, who does not flaunt privileges, who knows their streets by name, is not an aesthetic detail: it is a way to believe that the Gospel is not a fairy tale for the rich.

In this context, the way St Vincent speaks of his priests and of himself is striking. When he has to defend a confrere involved in legal matters beyond his control, he calls him a ‘poor priest of the Mission’: not to belittle him, but to remind us that he is a simple man, without legal expertise, who has obeyed the bishop and the king in good conscience. He defends him precisely in his smallness. Similarly, when he asks for prayers, he speaks of his ‘poor prayers’, his “misery”, the ‘poor Company’ that is the Congregation of the Mission.

Behind these words there is no taste for self-denigration, but the awareness that we are all poor before God. Vincent does not place himself in a position superior to the poor: he feels himself to be needy, a beggar for light, fragile. His inner poverty does not paralyse him; on the contrary, it enables him to approach the poor “outside” with respect, without judgement, as someone who knows what it means to knock on the door of mercy.

Here, then, is a very beautiful intertwining: the poor of the Church – bishops, priests, wounded dioceses – and the poor of the world are not separate realities. When a priest recognises his own poverty and lives it in truth, he does not detach himself from the poor, but draws closer to them. When a bishop accepts being poor, not just saying words about poverty, he becomes a brother to his faithful. When a diocese experiences fragility first-hand, it can better understand the wounds of the territory it inhabits: wars, migrations, economic crises, loneliness.

For the Congregation of the Mission, all this is more than a historical memory: it is a criterion for discernment. If it was truly born to evangelise the poor, it cannot forget the poverty of the clergy and local Churches. The formation of priests, the spiritual accompaniment of pastors, and closeness to the poorest dioceses are not ‘secondary tasks’ but concrete ways of serving the people of God, starting with the least among us. A priest who is supported, a bishop who is helped to live his vocation in simplicity, a poor diocese that is accompanied with respect are like springs that feed rivers of grace for the poor.

Perhaps, in the light of St Vincent, we should dare to offer simple and courageous prayers: to ask for poor and free pastors, to ask that priests not be crushed by burdens, to ask that our dioceses, even when they are wounded, do not lose the desire to be a home for the little ones. And at the same time, to look within ourselves and recognise our personal poverty, the one we do not always admit: the difficulty of loving, the fear of losing security, the need to be approved.

St Vincent teaches us that this poverty is not a shame to be hidden, but the point from which God begins again. It is when we recognise ourselves as “poor priests”, “poor prayers”, “poor communities” that we can make room for grace. And then poverty – of the clergy, of the dioceses, of individuals – ceases to be only a lack and becomes availability: a void that the Lord can fill, a wound through which the Gospel can become credible, especially in the eyes of the poor.

Ultimately, St Vincent’s lesson could be summed up as follows: a Church that is not afraid of its own poverty, and that tenderly cares for the poverty of its priests and dioceses, becomes a Church that is closer to the poor of all kinds. And precisely for this reason, paradoxically, it becomes richer in the only treasure that matters: the living presence of Christ, who continues to choose the little ones to reach the heart of the world.