St. Vincent de Paul
Yes, the thrift store is named after him. The story behind that starts with him being embarrassed.
Vincent grew up on a small farm in France, herding pigs. He was smart, and becoming a priest was a way up in the world, so he took it. Once, while he was away at school, his father came to visit in his worn farm clothes, and Vincent was too embarrassed to come out and see him. He carried that memory for the rest of his life.
Somewhere in his thirties, it turned. He met families who had nothing, and he stopped climbing. He spent the next fifty years organizing Paris to care for its poor: food for hungry families, priests for forgotten villages, visits to prisoners chained in the war galleys, homes for babies left on church steps.
With a widow named Louise de Marillac he started the Daughters of Charity, sisters who lived out in the streets where the need was instead of behind convent walls. He liked to say the poor are our masters. The boy who once hid from his own father spent his whole life making sure nobody else went unseen.
St. Vincent de Paul facts for kids
- The St. Vincent de Paul thrift stores are named in his honor. The Society behind them started in 1833, 173 years after he died, when a college student decided to live like him.
- The Daughters of Charity grew into one of the largest communities of religious sisters in the world
- He talked the wealthiest women in Paris into funding and running some of the first organized charity drives anywhere
- One legend says pirates captured him as a young man. Historians still argue about it. He never brought it up after his early letters.
Feast day: September 27 · Patron of charities and volunteers
St. Vincent, teach me to see the people nobody looks at.