When Saint Vincent de Paul speaks of himself, he never presents himself as a great founder or influential man in the Church of France. When praised, he responds with a precise memory: ‘I am the son of a poor farmer’ and adds that he has no greatness other than his miseries and sins. This is the way he sees himself in the light of the Gospel, especially in the light of Christmas: the Son of God, born poor in Bethlehem, makes it possible for Vincent to recognise himself as the son of a poor farmer without shame, but rather as a grace received.
Being ‘the son of a poor farmer’ is not, for him, a biographical detail to be hidden, but a key to understanding. He was born into a family that knew the toil of the fields, precariousness, dependence on the seasons and on masters. As a boy, he experienced what it meant to have little, to have to struggle to study, to rely on the generosity of others.
When, as a priest, he frequented noble salons, bishops and even the court, this memory did not fade: it remained like an open wound that kept him close to simple people. It was as if his personal Bethlehem – the village of Pouy, the stables, the poverty – remained ever present before his eyes. Every time life took him to high places, Vincent felt he had to remind himself where he came from: it was there that God had visited him, just as he had visited the world in the cave of Bethlehem.
This awareness preserves him from an ever-present risk, even at Christmas time: looking down on the poor, reducing the nativity scene to a sweet “atmosphere” with no consequences for life. For Vincent, there is no “them” and “us”, but different kinds of poor people.
There is the hungry farmer, the slave chained in the galleys, the sick person abandoned in the hospital; but there is also the priest full of inner misery, the “poor soul” tempted to flee from his vocation, the poor diocese devastated by war, the limited and fragile missionary. All, at different levels, are poor. Even he.
This is how Christmas appears to him: not a romantic gesture of a good God, but the revelation of a God who enters a world of poor people to make them one people, saved by the same grace. No one can stand at a distance, no one can feel ‘rich’ before the Child laid in a manger.
For this reason, in his letters, Vincent often uses tender language: he speaks of the “poor souls” who risk being lost without catechesis; he calls his confreres “poor priests of the Mission”, simple, inexperienced in the ways of the world; he defines the Congregation itself as “our poor Company”.
This is not self-pity: it is the way in which he places everyone – the poor on the streets and the poor in heart – under the same gaze of God. That God who at Christmas manifests himself as a fragile Child, in need of everything, wrapped in swaddling clothes. Tenderness towards the little ones and the wounded arises from here: those who contemplate the Child of Bethlehem cannot treat the “poor souls” they encounter with harshness.
He feels the same dust on himself as the poor he serves, and for this very reason he can approach them with respect and without paternalism. Before the crib, Vincent does not feel like a “benefactor of the poor”, but a brother among brothers.
His personal story becomes a criterion for interpreting the style of pastors. Vincent knows that the world observes the lives of priests and bishops. He will write that even non-believers recognise the “holy poverty of a bishop” who lives simply as more worthy than the pomp of those who flaunt their wealth.
It is a profoundly Christmas-like judgement: like the shepherds of Bethlehem, the bishop and the priest are credible if they bear the signs of a sober life, not if they imitate the Herods of their time. A poor bishop – in his own way, the son of that farmer from Pouy – is for him a transparent sign of Christ, the Shepherd who chooses the way of humility.
If the Church appears too distant in its way of living, the first to feel excluded will be the poor themselves. Then the nativity scene risks remaining a beautiful but distant scene, not an open door.
We can understand, then, why, alongside his concrete assistance to slaves, the sick, convicts, and abandoned children, St Vincent was so concerned about the poverty of the clergy and wounded dioceses. His letters speak of priests living in miserable conditions, poorly educated, abandoned; of dioceses devastated by war, poor in resources and often even in stable pastors.
For others, these might be simply “internal problems” of the Church; not for him. In his view, a clergy left in misery – material or spiritual – ends up neglecting the little ones above all. Christmas reminds him that God entrusts his Son to human hands: if those hands are tired, wounded, left alone, it will be the people who suffer first.
Caring for these “poor priests” and these “poor dioceses” thus becomes a concrete way of serving the people, especially the rural people who have no voice. It is like preparing, even today, a welcoming home for the Child who is coming, in the most hidden parishes.
The memory of being the son of a poor farmer also returns when Vincent has to discern which works to accept or reject. Faced with prestigious proposals from wealthy religious communities, his inner compass always brings him back to the “poor people of the countryside”: ignorant and exhausted farmers, those who do not count and do not make the news.
For him, they are the ‘Bethlehem’ of the Congregation: the peripheral place where God has already manifested himself, since the beginning of his vocation. Leaving them for more ‘honourable’ works would be almost a betrayal. The boy from the fields remains in the founding priest and reminds him that the Congregation was born for those whom no one seeks, for the ‘shepherds’ and their families, not for the courts of Herod.
This peasant root is reflected in the lifestyle he proposes to his followers: not a theatrical poverty, but a concrete sobriety. Simple houses, modest clothes, few pretensions. He does not do this out of ideology, but because he knows how much it hurts those who have little to see ministers of the Gospel living like lords.
Chosen poverty thus becomes an alliance with suffered poverty: missionaries are not called to imitate the material misery of the poor from the outside, but to renounce what separates them from them. It is the same logic as Christmas: God does not pretend to be poor, he does not disguise himself as a child; he truly enters into our fragility, sharing our concrete conditions, except for sin.
It is the farmer’s son who speaks when Vincent asks for sobriety: he knows how comforting it is to the heart to see that one’s priest, one’s superior, one’s bishop are not afraid to live close to the people, in their own streets and homes.
What does all this say to us today, and in particular to the Congregation of the Mission, at Christmas time? In a world where academic qualifications, skills and prestige count, remembering that we are “children of a poor farmer” means never losing touch with the fragile part of our history.
Everyone has their own “farmer” at their origins: a simple family, personal limitations, wounds, mistakes, moments of dependence. Hiding all this in order to appear strong and self-sufficient is not the Gospel, it is a mask. The nativity scene, on the other hand, unmasks all false greatness: there, at the centre, is a God who is not afraid to show his vulnerability.
Admitting one’s poverty opens up a new way of being with the poor: not as almighty saviours, but as brothers and sisters walking together. For the Congregation, this translates into a style that the Spirit continues to suggest: communities that choose decisively to live in poor neighbourhoods and forgotten suburbs, without fear of sharing the living conditions of the people; confreres who, in the concreteness of everyday life, let their sobriety speak more than words, with a simple and recognisable life; vigilant and fraternal care for the struggles of priests, brothers, and bishops who are most tried, in the awareness that the good of the people also passes through their wounds; and, finally, a gaze that does not forget the rural world, the ‘minor’ areas, the villages that do not make the news but are often our Bethlehems of today.
Within this journey, a spirituality also emerges that is born of one’s own recognised poverty: only those who know they are poor before God can proclaim to the poor a good news that is not fake.
Perhaps, looking at St Vincent in his truth as the “son of a poor farmer”, we too can learn to look at our lives with different eyes. What seems to us to be a limitation – humble origins, fragility, uncertain steps – can become the place where God teaches us compassion.
It is there that we learn not to judge, not to despise, not to humiliate anyone. It is there that we find the courage to say, like Vincent, without shame: ‘I am poor.’ When we say this before the nativity scene, it is not resignation: it is faith in a God who chose to become poor with us.
From that shared poverty, St Vincent left behind a history of charity and mission that continues today. Not because he was exceptional in himself, but because he allowed God’s grace to flow through the cracks in his life. The son of a poor farmer, he gave that farmer – and all the poor of the earth – a place of honour in the heart of the Church.
This, for him, is the true meaning of Christmas: God who is born lowly, so that no one, ever, should feel too lowly to be reached. And for us today, too, it means allowing ourselves to be reached where we are poorest, because it is precisely there that the Lord begins to rebuild our lives and our mission.
