He was of the illustrious family of the lords of Asti in Piemont and born near that city. From his cradle he considered, that man’s happiness is only to be found in loving God; and to please him in all his actions was his only and his most ardent desire. He made his studies in the monastery of St. Perpetuus in the diocess of Asti. Bosch proves that he never was canon of Asti, but enjoyed some years a canonry at Sienna, as he himself informs us. In the Roman council in 1079, he defended the doctrine of the Catholic Church concerning the blessed eucharist against Berengarius; and pope Gregory VII. nominated him bishop of Segni in the ecclesiastical state in 1081. Bruno, who had been compelled to submit, after a long and strenuous resistance, served his flock, and on many important occasions the universal Church, with unwearied zeal. Gregory VII. who died in 1085, Victor III. formerly abbot of mount Cassino, who died in 1087, and Urban II. who had been scholar to St. Bruno (afterward institutor of the Carthusians) at Rheims, then a monk at Cluni, and afterward bishop of Ostia, had the greatest esteem for our saint. He attended Urban II. into France in 1095, and assisted at the council of Tours in 1096. After his return into Italy he continued to labor for the sanctification of his soul and that of his flock, till not being able any longer to resist his inclination for solitude and retirement, he withdrew to mount Cassino, and put on the monastic habit. The people of Segni demanded him back; but Oderisus, abbot of mount Cassino, and several Cardinals, whose mediation the saint employed, prevailed upon the pope to allow his retreat. The abbot Oderisus was succeeded by Otho in 1105, and this latter dying in 1107, the monks chose bishop Bruno abbot.He was often employed by the pope in important commissions, and by his writings labored to support ecclesiastical discipline[214] and to extirpate simony. This vice he looked upon as the source of all the disorders which excited the tears of all zealous pastors in the Church, by filling the sanctuary with hirelings, whose worldly spirit raises an insuperable opposition to that of the gospel. What would this saint have said had he seen the collation of benefices, and the frequent translations of bishops in some parts, which serve to feed and inflame avarice and ambition in those in whom, above all others, a perfect disengagement from earthly things and crucifixion of the passions ought to lay a foundation of the gospel temper and spirit? Paschal II. formerly a monk of Cluni, succeeded Urban II. in the pontificate in 1099. By his order St. Bruno having been abbot of mount Cassino about four years, returned to his bishopric, having resigned his abbacy, and left his abbatial crosier on the altar. He continued faithfully to discharge the episcopal functions to his death, which happened at Segni on the 31st of August in 1125. He was canonized by Lucius III. in 1183, and his feast is kept in Italy on the 18th of July. See his anonymous authentic life, and Leo of Ostia and Peter the deacon in their chronicle of mount Cassino, with the notes of Solier the Bollandist, t. 4, Julij, p. 471. Also Dom. Maur Marchesi, dean of mount Cassino, in his apparatus (prefixed to the works of this saint) printed at Venice in 1651; Mabillon, Annal. Bened. l. 70, Ceillier, t. 21, p. 101.
JULY XIX.
ST. VINCENT OF PAUL, C.
FOUNDER OF THE LAZARITES, OR FATHERS OF THE MISSION.
From his edifying life written by Abelly, bishop of Rodez, and again by the celebrated continuator of Tournely’s Theological Lectures, Dr. Peter Collet, in two volumes, quarto, Nancy, 1748. See also Perrault, Hommes Illustr. Helyot, Hist. des Ord. Relig. t. 8, p. 64, and the bull of his canonization published by Clement XII. in 1737, apud Bened. XIV. de canoniz., t. 4, Append. p. 363.
A. D. 1660.
Even in the most degenerate ages, when the true maxims of the gospel seem almost obliterated among the generality of those who profess it, God fails not, for the glory of his holy name, to raise to himself faithful ministers to revive the same in the hearts of many. Having, by the perfect crucifixion of the old man in their hearts, and the gift of prayer, prepared them to become vessels of his grace, he replenishes them with the spirit of his apostles that they may be qualified to conduct others in the paths of heroic virtue, in which the Holy Ghost was himself their interior Master. One of these instruments of the divine mercy was St. Vincent of Paul. He was a native of Poul, a village near Acqs in Gascony, not far from the Pyrenæan mountains. His parents, William of Paul and Bertranda of Morass, occupied a very small farm of which they were the proprietors, and upon the produce of which they brought up a family of four sons and two daughters. The children were brought up in innocence, and inured from their infancy to the most laborious part of country labor. But Vincent, the third son, gave extraordinary proofs of his wit and capacity, and from his infancy showed a seriousness and an affection for holy prayer far beyond his age. He spent great part of his time in that exercise when he was employed in the fields to keep the cattle. That he might give to Christ in the persons of the poor all that was in his power, he deprived himself of his own little conveniences and necessaries for that purpose in whatever it was possible for him to retrench from his own use. This early fervent consecration of himself to God, and these little sacrifices which may be compared to the widow’s two mites in the gospel, were indications of the sincere ardor with which he began to seek God from the first opening of his reason to know and love him; and were doubtless a means to draw down upon him from the author of these graces other greater blessings. His father was determined by the strong inclinations of the child to learning and piety, and the quickness of his parts, to procure him a school education. He placed him first under the care of the Cordeliers or Franciscan friars at Acqs, paying for his board and lodging the small pension of sixty French livres, that is, not six pounds English, a year.
Vincent had been four years at the schools when Mr. Commet, a gentleman of that town, being much taken with his virtue and prudence, chose him sub-preceptor to his children, and enabled him to continue his studies without being any longer a burden to his parents. At twenty years of age, in 1596, he was qualified to go to the university of Toulouse, where he spent seven years in the study of divinity, and commenced bachelor in that faculty. In that city he was promoted to the holy orders of subdeacon and deacon in 1598, and of priesthood in 1600, having received the tonsure and minor orders a few days before he left Acqs. He seemed already endowed with all those virtues which make up the character of a worthy and zealous minister of the altar; yet he knew not the full extent of heroic entire self-denial, by which a man becomes dead and crucified to all inordinate self-will; upon which perfect self-denial are engrafted the total sacrifice of the heart to God, perfect humility, and that purity and ardor of divine charity which constitute the saint. Vincent was a good proficient in theology and other sciences of the schools, and had diligently applied himself to the study of the maxims of Christian virtue in the gospel, in the lives of the saints, and in the doctrine of the greatest masters of a spiritual life. But there remained a new science for him to learn, which was to cost him much more than bare study and labor. This consists in perfect experimental and feeling sentiments of humility, patience, meekness, and charity; which science is only to be learned by the good use of severe interior and exterior trials. This is the mystery of the cross, unknown to those whom the Holy Ghost has not led into this important secret of his conduct in preparing souls for the great works of his grace. The prosperity of the wicked will appear at the last day to have often been the most dreadful judgment, and a state in which they were goaded on in the pursuit of their evil courses; whilst, on the contrary, it will then be manifested to all men that the afflictions of the saints have been the greatest effects of divine mercy. Thus, by a chain of temporal disasters, did God lay in the soul of Vincent the solid foundation of that high virtue to which by his grace he afterward raised him.
The saint went to Marseilles in 1605, to receive a legacy of five hundred crowns which had been left him by a friend who died in that city. Intending to return to Toulouse, he set out in a felucca or large boat from Marseilles to Narbonne, but was met in the way by three brigantines of African pirates. The infidels seeing the Christians refuse to strike their flag, charged them with great fury, and on the first onset killed three of their men, and wounded every one of the rest; Vincent received a shot of an arrow. The Christians were soon obliged to surrender. The first thing the Mahometans did was to cut the captain in pieces because he had not struck at the first summons, and in combat had killed one of their men and four or five slaves. The rest they put in chains; and continued seven or eight days longer on that coast, committing several other piracies, but sparing the lives of those that made no resistance. When they had got a sufficient booty they sailed for Barbary. Upon landing they drew up an act of their seizure, in which they falsely declared that Vincent and his companions had been taken on board of a Spanish vessel, that the French consul might not challenge them. Then they gave to every slave a pair of loose breeches, a linen jerkin, and a bonnet. In this garb they were led five or six times through the city of Tunis to be shown; after which they were brought back to their vessel, where the merchants came to see them, as men do at the sale of a horse or an ox. They examined who could eat well, felt their sides, looked at their teeth to see who were of scorbutic habits of body, consequently unlikely for very long life; they probed their wounds, and made them walk and run in all paces, lift up burdens, and wrestle, to judge of their strength. Vincent was bought by a fisherman, who, finding that he could not bear the sea, soon sold him again to an old physician, a great chemist and extractor of essences, who had spent fifty years in search of the pretended philosopher’s stone. He was humane, and loved Vincent exceedingly; but gave him long lectures on his alchemy, and on the Mahometan law, to which he used his utmost efforts to bring him over; promising, on that condition, to leave him all his riches, and to communicate to him, what he valued much more than his estate, all the secrets of his pretended science. Vincent feared the danger of his soul much more than all the hardships of his slavery, and most earnestly implored the divine assistance against it, recommending himself particularly to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, to which he ever after attributed his victory over this temptation. He lived with this old man from September 1605 to August 1606, when, by this physician’s death, he fell to the share of a nephew of his master, a true man-hater. By resignation to the divine will, and confidence in providence, he enjoyed a sweet repose in his own heart under all accidents, hardships, and dangers; and by assiduous devout meditation on the sufferings of Christ, learned to bear all his afflictions with comfort and joy, uniting himself in spirit with his Divine Redeemer, and studying to copy in himself his lessons of perfect meekness, patience, silence, and charity. This new master sold him in a short time to a renegado Christian who came from Nice in Savoy. This man sent him to his temat or farm situate on a hot desert mountain. This apostate had three wives, of which one, who was a Turkish woman, went often to the field where Vincent was digging, and out of curiosity would ask him to sing the praises of God. He used to sing to her, with tears in his eyes, the psalm Upon the rivers of Babylon, &c. the Salve Regina, and such like prayers. She was so much taken with our holy faith, and doubtless with the saintly deportment of the holy slave, that she never ceased repeating to her husband, that he had basely abandoned the only true religion, till like another Caiphas or ass of Balaam, without opening her own eyes to the faith, she made him enter into himself. Sincerely repenting of his apostasy, he agrees with Vincent to make their escape together. They crossed the Mediterranean sea in a small light boat which the least squall of wind would overset; and they landed safe at Aigues-Mortes, near Marseilles, on the 28th of June, 1607, and thence proceeded to Avignon. The apostate made his abjuration in the hands of the vice-legate, and the year following went with Vincent to Rome, and there entered himself a penitent in the austere convent of the Fate-Ben-Fratelli, who served the hospitals according to the rule of St. John of God.