Sometimes God entrusts our faithfulness to a discreet voice: someone who does not replace us, but helps us to see clearly. For Saint Vincent, that presence had a name: André Duval.

On 25 January, the feast of the conversion of St Paul, we celebrate 409 years since the intuition that was born in Folleville. In the silence of a confessional, Vincent de Paul encountered the Risen One: that is where our missionary “adventure” began. Today, in different cultures, our charism calls us to be communities that are a refuge and a fraternity “of dear friends,” capable of generating vocations.

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’.

When we think of Saint Vincent de Paul and the poor, we think of peasants in the French countryside or beggars in Paris. But if we look at his letters and documents, the picture broadens: we see lepers, blind beggars, galley slaves, prisoners, “disorderly” girls, women wounded in their souls. It is the world of those we would today call the “discarded”: people whom society prefers not to see.

To celebrate the World Day of the Poor and its Jubilee, the Congregation of the Mission organized the Holy Father’s lunch in the Vatican with people living in poverty.

The new Vincentian Lectionary gives voice to the Word of God in the liturgy of the Vincentian Family. A separate volume, edited by Fr. Giorgio Bontempi C.M., which renews the texts, structure and readings specific to St. Vincent, St. Louise and the Miraculous Medal. A visible sign of the Word that illuminates mission and charity.