Vincent De Paul
Vincent de Paul is situated in George’s street Portlaw. The centre and the clothes shop, which is, called Square Deal. They do meals on wheels twice a week, on Tuesday and on Thursday they also do meals on the same days. There are a lot of volunteer’s to help with the meals. They also play cards some nights of the week. The also go out for their meals on special occasions such as Christmas and other events like this.
The Square Deal is open Some days of the week, but is only open for a few hours and there are also volunteer’s that help in the shop.
How Vincent De Paul started
V
incent de Paul was born in France in 1581. In his early twenty’s he was ordained a priest. A short while later he taken captured and was sold as a slave in Africa. After as short time he escaped and went back home to France, and began to work for the Queen as her chaplain. Part of his job was to organise the Queens donations to the hospitals of Paris.He soon became aware of the terrible conditions, which existed in these hospitals. Those who were very sick and sometimes dying, lay huddled in the straw next to those who were already dead. One day while he was working Chatillon he was getting ready to celebrate mass when a report came in of a family on the outskirts of the parish dying of hunger and sickness. Vincent made an appeal from the pulpit after mass the people of the parish came rushing with all sorts of food and provisions. This incident prompted Vincent to establish the confraternity of charity, a sort of meals on wheels’’ organisation which was the new beginning of the now world most famous Vincent De Paul Society.
Vincent also
started an order of priests called the ‘’Congregation of the Mission’’
whose work was to give missions to the poor all over France. Meanwhile, the
Confraternity of Charity was continuing its work under the organisation of
Mademoiselle Le Gras. The organisation was now a nation-wide one, and since up
to then most of the work was done on a voluntary basis, Vincent decided that it
was necessary to have a permanent group of trained workers, who could dedicate
themselves to the service of needy.
He suggested to Mademoiselle Le Gras that she should open a house where girls would be trained to do the work of looking after the poor. Thus began the order we know as the Daughters of Charity. Up until then, nuns spent most of their time inside the convent walls and so it was quite revolutionary now to find them working on the streets and in the hovels of the poor in Paris. Vincent’s work for the poor earned him the title ‘’Father of the Poor’’. Today one of the largest lay organisations in the church, the Society of St Vincent De Paul has around 600,000 people, working to relieve the suffering of the poor in our world.
