Partners in Charity: St. Louise de Marillac and St. Vincent de Paul

The Lumen Christi Institute

A webinar lecture with Professor Bronwen McShea (Augustine Institute; Institute on Religion and Public Life). Originally delivered on January 7, 2021. This event was co-presented by the Lumen Christi Institute and the Bollandist Society. In this talk, we will examine side by side the lives and legacies of two major saints of French Catholicism's seventeenth-century golden age. Louise de Marillac and Vincent de Paul co-founded the Daughters of Charity, one of the most successful socially-oriented women's congregations in the Church's history, when the Tridentine-era bishops were attempting to enforce strict claustration for women religious. They also collaborated with a wide circle of lay and religious women and men of different social backgrounds in ways that transformed Christian life in and beyond France for centuries. We will reflect on the two saints' fruitful spiritual friendship of several decades. We will also consider why De Marillac is far less well known than De Paul in modern times, something that stems in part from the different trajectories their causes for sainthood took in the wake of each saint's death, only several months apart from the other's, in 1660.