We are so excited to celebrate Vinny Fest 2023! Vinny Fest is a DePaul tradition to honor and celebrate St. Vincent de Paul’s legacy with fun, games, photos with Vincent, t-shirts, free food, and more! This year we are excited to also celebrate with the Loop Mini Vinny Fest on Tuesday, September 26 from 2-4PM in the DePaul Center Concourse. We can’t wait to celebrate with you on Friday, September 29 from 2-4PM on the LPC Quad! See the Vinny Fest Promo Video Below:
Vincent was a trailblazer, a true change agent of his day. He was a man who saw hope and possibility despite the challenges of his time. He felt a keen dissatisfaction in the gap between the way the world should be and the way the world was. Throughout his 79 years, Vincent sought to close that divide, asking “what must be done” and acting on the answers he found. Four hundred years later, DePaul University continues to carry forward his legacy by educating the next generation of trailblazers.
During Vincentian Heritage Week the Division of Mission and Ministry will host the key events below.
Join Catholic Campus Ministry and St. Vincent de Paul Parish for a (free) BBQ on the Parish Lawn (on Webster Ave.) to celebrate the Feast Day, directly following 5pm mass. Whether you go to Mass weekly, occasionally, or have never been to a Catholic Mass, you are welcome here! Come celebrate!
Walk ins are welcome, you may RSVP if you would like here.
Join Office of Student Involvement and Mission and Ministry for Loop Mini Vinny Fest! Celebrate our namesake’s Feast Day and DePaul University with fun, games, photos, caricatures and more! This is a DePaul tradition you don’t want to miss!
For those wishing to attend mass celebrating St. Vincent de Paul’s Feast Day, mass will be held in the Miraculous Medal Chapel (Lewis Center – First Floor) with light refreshments after mass. All are welcome!
Celebrate our namesake’s Feast Day with a celebratory mass at 12:00pm in the St. Louise de Marillac Chapel. Join us afterwards for lunch across the hall in Catholic Campus Ministry (Student Center – Suite 104). Everyone is welcome!
Walk ins are welcome, you may RSVP if you would like here.
Join the DePaul community at our annual St. Vincent de Paul Heritage Luncheon as we look at the timely issue of migration. How is migration presenting urgent needs in our city, how is and can DePaul University respond to these needs and what does our Vincentian mission call us to do? Presenting will be leaders from the DePaul community including Fr. Memo Campuzano, CM, Vice President of Mission and Ministry as well as Sioban Albiol and Shailja Sharma, directors of the DePaul Migration Collaborative. We will also hear from those working directly with new arrivals and from someone who has recently migrated to Chicago to learn about their firsthand experience.
This luncheon will take place at The DePaul Club on the 11th floor of The DePaul Center at the Loop Campus beginning at Noon. We will also be hosting the conversation via Zoom, for those who cannot be with us in person. We hope you will join us!
Come celebrate our shared Vincentian heritage with delicious food and great community at our annual St. Vincent de Paul Prayer Breakfast! This year, we will welcome as our keynote speaker, Dr. Sulin Ba, the Dean of the Driehaus College of Business who will share how she integrates the mission into her professional and personal life. This will be a great chance to meet Dr. Ba and join together in community, gathered together for the sake of a mission. All are welcome!
Join us for Vinny Fest 2023, a DePaul tradition to honor and celebrate St. Vincent de Paul’s legacy with fun, games, photos with Vincent, free food, and more! Vinny Fest features student organizations, offices, and departments as they host engaging activities to celebrate our mission in action as a DePaul community. Follow @mmatmdepaul to stay up to date.
DePaul University continues its support of Vincentian scholarship with a new revision of our four volumes of additional, mainly unpublished texts by and about Saint Vincent de Paul. This revision includes multiple new documents added across all four volumes along with corrections and updates to the existing texts. The translator and editor is John E. Rybolt, C.M. The books supplement the fourteen volumes of Correspondence, Conferences, and Documents, published by Pierre Coste, C.M., over a century ago.
These fully searchable, free to download pdf e-Books total more than 4,500 pages of letters, conferences, and documents in their original languages of French, Latin, and Italian, followed by an English translation.
These texts represent an open-ended collection, allowing for additional texts to be added as they come to light, as well as corrections and updates. We welcome suggestions and input from the reading public.
Click through to access each new volume of the collection:
Correspondence: CCD Additional Texts
Conferences: CCD Additional Texts
Documents, part one: CCD Additional Texts
Documents, part two: CCD Additional Texts
It is hoped that these new texts will further our understanding and appreciation of the great saint of charity, Vincent de Paul.
The DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute is pleased to announce the publication of our newest peer-reviewed e-book edition of Vincentian Heritage (Volume 36, Number 1).
Of note, this edition features articles on the lives of François Lallier and Emmanuel Bailly, co-founders with Frédéric Ozanam of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. It also includes a fascinating translation of the newly discovered “Rule for the Hospital of Nom de Jésus,” offering commentary on its historical context and on the caregiving provided there by the Daughters of Charity. Finally, the book concludes with a lavishly illustrated art and architectural study of the history of the Chapelle des Lazaristes, the Congregation of the Mission’s motherhouse church in Paris.
To download the complete book for iPad or PC, please click here: Full Book Download
Individual .pdfs for each article are also available for download here: Article Downloads & Repository
“Revitalizing our Identity at the beginning of the Fifth Century of the Congregation of the Mission” — Theme of the C.M. XLIII General Assembly 2022
Each year on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, we remember the beginning of the Congregation of the Mission (C.M.). According to St. Vincent de Paul, this happened in Folleville, France, on January 25, 1617, when he preached his “first sermon of the Mission.”(1) Many say that experience with a dying man transformed Vincent’s heart and imbued him with a desire to serve those in need.
This historical event is an important one for DePaul University, though it is not widely celebrated. The Congregation of the Mission (commonly called “Vincentians”) founded our university 123 years ago. DePaul’s history and identity are deeply linked to the values and convictions of the Congregation in the United States.
Originally, Vincent founded the Congregation of the Mission to provide direct service to all those living in poverty, especially “the most abandoned,”(2) and for the formation and education of Catholic clergy in need of reform. These original intentions have evolved with time, especially over the past 50 years.
Today the Congregation of the Mission works together with many other branches of the Vincentian Family. This wider family includes the Daughters of Charity and other orders of religious sisters, as well as lay members of the worldwide International Association of Charities, and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. They comprise an ever-growing network of people and organizations who provide direct spiritual and material service, advocacy, and the promotion of systemic change.
In many ways, the primary Vincentian mission along with its communal approach have not changed. To better respond to all kinds of needs Vincent summoned as many as he could, rich, poor, humble, and powerful, and used all means to inspire them to serve people living in poverty.(3) As a Catholic priest, Vincent privileged the image of Christ. Based on the Gospel of Luke, ‘the evangelizer of the poor’ [Luke 4, 16-22], he prompted all his collaborators to help the poor directly and indirectly as Jesus did.
The Congregation of the Mission, from the time of Vincent de Paul, and through his inspiration, recognizes itself as called by God to carry out the work of integrally serving the poor. Officially called “Congregatio Missionis,” they are also called “Vincentians” in Anglophone countries, “Paules” in Spain, “Missioners” in Slavic lands, and in Latin America they are known as “Vicentinos.” The unofficial motto of the Congregation: Evangelizare pauperibus misit me [He has sent me to evangelize the poor] sums up the works of Jesus the Congregation endeavors to follow.
While we celebrate the founding of the Congregation of the Mission in 1617, the official date of its institution is noted to be April 17, 1625. On that day, encouraged by Madame de Gondi, the lords of the Gondi family, in whose territories Vincent de Paul served as Chaplain, signed a contract with him in which they provided funding to support a group of priests to serve impoverished people in the countryside. This act gave needed economic sustainability to the project of the Congregation.
Vincent ultimately created the community he had dreamed of. By the day of his death, September 27, 1660, twenty-six Vincentian communities had been formed: nineteen in France, four in Italy, two in Barbary (Northern Africa), and one in Poland. And, by the time of the French Revolution of 1789, when religious communities were suppressed in France, a great dissemination of the Congregation had taken place around the world, with missions in the Middle East, in Asia, and soon thereafter in the Americas. Especially significant were the Congregation’s missionary efforts in China. Today the Congregation has more than 3,000 members, priests, and brothers, serving in 81 countries. They continue to provide a wide array of services including education, spiritual and pastoral care, direct service to the poor, and socio-political advocacy, while remaining dedicated to systemic change and collaborations that will end poverty and homelessness.
As we know, one of their projects was DePaul University, founded in 1898 to serve the children of immigrants in Chicago who needed both access to education and a chance to escape poverty. Without Foundation Day, DePaul as we know it would not exist. That it does, and that we are now a part of more than two million Vincentian Family members worldwide, is certainly something worth celebrating on the 25th.
1) Conference 112, Repetition of Prayer, 25 January 1655, CCD, 11:162-164.
2) Conference 164, Love for the Poor, January 1657, CCD, 11:349.
3) See, for example, Constitutions and Statutes of the Congregation of the Mission (Rome, 1984), 10. Online at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/cm_construles/23/
Reflection by Rev. Guillermo Campuzano, C.M., Vice President of Mission and Ministry
The Vincentian Studies Institute is extremely pleased to promote the publication of our colleague and fellow board member’s new work. Dr. Brejon de Lavergnée is a Professor of History and the Dennis H. Holtschneider Chair of Vincentian Studies at DePaul University.
“The Daughters of Charity are today the largest community of Catholic women, with 15,000 sisters in about 100 countries. They devote their lives to serving the poorest in hospitals, schools, and care centers for homeless or migrants, as well as working to promote social justice. Until now, however, the history of the Daughters of Charity has been almost wholly neglected. The opening of their central archives, combined with access to many public and private archives, has finally allowed this to be remedied.
This volume, the fruit of several years’ work, covers the history of the Company from its foundation by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac as a confraternity of young women to the suppression of the order during the French Revolution. The study, at the juncture of women’s history and religious history, shows how much the Daughters of Charity contributed to the emergence of a new and ambiguous status in post-Tridentine society: neither cloistered nuns nor married women, but “seculars.” The Company has certainly offered a framework that enabled many resolute women to lead lives out of the ordinary, taking young peasant women to the royal court, intrepid hearts to Poland, and, more generally, generous souls to the “martyrdom of charity” among the poor and the ill.”
ISBN Number: 978-1-56548-027-8. 668 pages. Available at Amazon.com or directly from the publisher: The Streets as a Cloister
To read an interview with Dr. Brejon de Lavergnée about his new book and the Daughters of Charity, please see Crux: Taking the Catholic Pulse
The DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute is pleased to announce the publication of our newest peer-reviewed e-book edition of Vincentian Heritage (Volume 35, Number 2).
Of note, this edition includes a significant new translation, never before published, of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s testimony on the virtuous life of Vincent de Paul. The document, at one time thought lost, follows after those prepared for the canonization process and offers insight from a man who knew the saint during his life. The book also advances our new design and features the following articles:
To download the complete book for iPad or PC, please click here.
Individual .pdfs for each article are also available for download here.
Rev. Stafford Poole, C.M., Ph.D.
6 March 1930 – 1 November 2020
Joseph Poole and his wife Beatrice Smith welcomed a son into the world, Richard Stafford, on March 6, 1930, who was baptized in his parish church of St. Charles Borromeo, in North Hollywood. He attended elementary school at Rio Vista Elementary School, then transferred to the Parish School of St. Charles Borromeo for his Junior High School years. He entered Los Angeles College, the precursor to Our Lady Queen of Angels Seminary in 1942. Stafford entered the Congregation of the Mission on October 7, 1947, and continued his philosophical and theological studies for ordination at St. Mary of the Barrens Seminary in Perryville, Mo. He was ordained to the priesthood on May 27, 1956. He earned the degree of Master of Arts from St. Louis University in 1958 with a major in Spanish Literature and in 1961 earned his Doctor of Philosophy in U.S. and Mexican History from St. Louis University.
As he was completing his doctoral studies, Fr. Poole was planning on researching Slaveholding in Catholic Missouri. However, God intervened. Fr. Bannon, the director of the history department was presented with some rare documents from Latin America that included documents from the Third Council of 1585 and presented Stafford with a project. In Stafford’s own words he describes what happened next:
The next time I walked into Bannon’s office, my life took a total reversal. I got working on it and became fascinated with the whole thing. But actually, I had had only one graduate course in Latin American history, and that was a survey. Other than that, I was self-taught.1
From these beginnings flowed an impressive contribution to the field of Catholicism in Colonial Latin America, as well as his works on the history of the Congregation of the Mission and the US Catholic Church. Included in his life’s work were 14 books, 23 publications in Anthologies and Encyclopedias, 62 journal articles, as well as some unpublished studies on Vincentian themes and numerous book reviews. Among Fr. Poole’s works are Seminary in Crisis (1964); Church and Slave in Perry County, Missouri 1818 – 1860 (co-authored with Douglas Slawson, 1986); and Our Lady of Guadalupe: Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531 – 1797 (1995). Fr. Poole was also a longtime member of the DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute, and served as the editor of Vincentian Heritage and other of their publications over many years. In 2006 he received the Institute’s prestigious Pierre Coste Prize for his lifetime of distinguished achievement in Vincentian Studies.
While many would count this a complete life’s work, Fr. Poole was also a teacher, academic dean, and seminary rector. His students not only remember his lectures with fondness, but also appreciated his wit and wisdom. Stafford was a clock maker. He spent his leisure time making and repairing clocks of all sorts. After he had left St. Mary of the Barrens in 1971, students would comment that “Fr. Poole needs to come back to the Barrens to fix the clock on the A Building!”
During his retirement, Fr. Poole continued to be active as a scholar and mentor. He encouraged other confreres to take up the critical history of the Congregation of the Mission. He supported his colleagues in both the American Catholic Historical Association and other professional organizations to continue the study the Church’s earliest mission activity in Latin America and its impact upon the people.
Infirmity overcame Fr. Poole in his final years, as his health declined, he slowly put aside the unfinished research and prepared to meet his Creator. He returned to the Barrens to receive added care. On the Feast Day of All Saints, he returned to his Creator. A Vincentian who dedicated his life to telling the story of the life of Colonial Latin American Church and the Little Company.
1) Susan Schroeder, “Seminaries and Writing the History of New Spain: An Interview with Stafford Poole, C.M.,” The Americas 69:2 (2012), 237-254.
2020: DePaul University’s Community Responds to Crises
The DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute would like to invite everyone from our community—faculty, staff, students, and alumni—to participate in a special call to submit publishable materials dedicated to the unprecedented crises we have been challenged to confront in 2020. Covid-19 has disrupted daily life and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. At DePaul it has forced us to change how we work, how we teach, and how we learn. How has it changed you? Our nation has also erupted in protests over the brutal killing of George Floyd. His senseless death has reignited the Black Lives Matter movement and challenges us as a people to dismantle inequality, oppression, and systemic racism in the pursuit of justice. How has this affected you, your colleagues, or your family? How has your perception of DePaul, of Chicago, of our country, been changed? Considering both crises and their effect on marginalized peoples how do we see that they interplay? How can we move forward? How can our Vincentian values help guide us through this time of great pain and suffering? Ultimately, we would like to know, how have we responded as a Vincentian higher learning community?
What We Are Asking of You
We are asking for your contributions in the hope that they help us to reflect on what has happened and is still happening. Every type of production is welcomed: academic papers, short essays, poems, fiction, paintings, photographs, videos, etc. Individual or collective proposals are welcomed. Shorter works will be featured online, promoted by the Division of Mission & Ministry, and shared with the university community. Longer written works may be featured in a special collection published in the VSI’s scholarly journal Vincentian Heritage.
Process to Contribute
The DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute in the Department of Mission & Ministry, Chicago, Illinois, is pleased to announce our English language translation of A General History of the Congregation of the Mission Beginning after the Death of Blessed Vincent de Paul, by Claude-Joseph Lacour, C.M. This new title is offered free-of-charge to the public and is available for download now.
This work is the earliest known history of the Congregation of the Mission and dates from about 1730. Vincentian historian John E. Rybolt, C.M., building on the initiative of Stafford Poole, C.M., completed this English translation from the original French. The author, Claude-Joseph Lacour, C.M. (1672-1731), drew from already published materials and his own recollections. While the story he tells may seem familiar, Lacour included materials that are unknown anywhere else and delivers a first-hand account of the Congregation’s rapid growth in those early days. The text is essential reading for anyone wishing to better understand Vincent de Paul’s society of apostolic life of priests and brothers following his death.
A General History of the Congregation of the Mission is the latest monograph in our continuing series of scholarly, important works published by the V.S.I. It is designed for tablets and computer as a high-res interactive .pdf. The eBook has been rigorously annotated by Fr. Rybolt and is fully illustrated and searchable. We recommend that you utilize Adobe Reader or a similar program to optimize your reading experience.
It is available to download online free-of-charge here: