Vincent de Paul: The Trailblazer (review)

For more than three centuries, most biographies of Vincent de Paul have been distorted by tenacious hagiographic myths. Untangling the Vincent of myth from the Vincent of history, and understanding the Vincent of history within the context of his faith, life, and times in seventeenth-century France has been an elusive achievement.

Bernard Pujo has written a popular biography of Monsieur Vincent that presents him as a "Trailblazer." The work's greatest strengths emerge in the author's descriptions of the political realities of seventeenth-century France. For example, his explanations of the Fronde, and France's interminable continental warfare are particularly well done.

While the author gives wonderfully vivid accounts of Vincent's trailblazing, a realistic and convincing portrait of the trailblazer as a person, priest, reformer, founder, and servant of the poor is not achieved. This failure to come to grips with the complexities of the trailblazer's personal story weakens the story of his trailblazing.

The work's other faults are the result of a non-specialist writing in an area in which he is only marginally acquainted, while uncritically relying on a relatively small number of largely French sources.

Pujo correctly portrays the young Vincent de Paul as an ambitious, intelligent, talented, ecclesiastical climber of average faith and unremarkable piety hailing from a modest farming family with modest connections. Pujo's story of how this unremarkable Vincent de Paul became the great Monsieur Vincent is in the end an entirely unconvincing rehashing of the myths dating from the saint's first biographer, Louis Abelly. These myths have been largely discredited by contemporary Vincentian historians.

One example is the saint's famous "Tunisian Captivity" based on Vincent's autograph accounts of his capture by the Barbary pirates and his being held as a slave in North Africa for two years, before a miraculous escape in a skiff across the Mediterranean. Pujo comments, "At first, one may be tempted to call Vincent's story unlikely, but a more attentive re-reading gradually overcomes the reflex of incredulity. . . ."

However, a "reflex of incredulity" would have been an appropriate response if only in light of scholarship on Christian slavery in North Africa during this period. Indeed, Pujo's entire analysis of the traditional stories surrounding Vincent de Paul's conversion would have benefited from a "reflex of incredulity."

Also absent is a basic analysis of the spiritual and material conditions of the un-reformed French Church, or the dynamic and successful Tridentine reforms emerging from the fabled French school of spirituality and the Devots. If Vincent de Paul was a trailblazer, he was surely a Tridentine one, not only in terms of his charity but also in his theology, spirituality, priesthood, reform of the clergy, and systematic re-evangelization of the countryside.

Pujo does make excellent and moving use of Vincent's letters to illustrate the attractive personalism that characterized his relationships. The author also rightly acknowledges, if only in passing, the pioneering roles of Louise de Marillac, the Ladies of Charity, and the Daughters of Charity as indispensable collaborators in Vincent's trailblazing activities

Before a modern critical biography of Vincent de Paul can be written an author must have deep understanding of seventeenth-century France, especially from a religious perspective. Another indispensable element will be a non-hagiographic approach to Vincent de Paul's life story. Using both these approaches will finally produce a compelling portrait of this trailblazing saint.