SAN Vicente History Bacon District, Sorsogon City

07/02/2015

06/02/2015

1. ST. VINCENT FERRER
(1350 – 1419)
St. Vincent Ferrer was born at Valencia, in Spain on the 23rd of January, 1350. Excitement foreshadowed the child's birth. His mother, Constance, experienced only joy and painlessness during her expectancy; furthermore, his father had a prophetic dream in which an unknown Dominican preacher appeared to him and told him that he would have a son whose fame would be world-renowned. Also, a poor blind woman predicted that the child Constance bore within her was an "angel who would one day restore her sight" – which he did years later. St. Vincent brought with him into the world a happy disposition for learning and piety, which improved from his cradle by study and a good education. In order to subdue his passions, he fasted rigorously from his childhood every Wednesday and Friday. The passion of Christ was always the object of his most tender devotion. The Blessed Virgin he ever honored as his spiritual mother. Looking on the poor as the members of Christ,

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2. he treated them with the greatest affection and charity, which caused his parents to make him dispenser of their bountiful alms. His father having proposed to him the choice of a religious state, an ecclesiastical, or a. secular state, Vincent without hesitation said it was his earnest desire to consecrate himself to the service of God in the Order of St. Dominic. His good parents with joy conducted him to a convent of that Order in Valencia, and he put on the habit in 1368, in the beginning of his eighteenth year.
He made a surprisingly rapid progress in the paths of perfection, taking St. Dominic for his model. To the exercises of prayer and penance, he joined the study and meditation of the Holy Scriptures and the readings of the Fathers. For three years, he read only the scriptures and knew the whole Bible by heart. Soon after his solemn profession, he was appointed to read lectures of philosophy, and, at the end of his course, published a treatise on Dialectic Suppositions,

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3. not quite twenty-four years old. He was then sent to Barcelona, where he continued his scholastic exercises, and at the same time preached the word of God with great fruit, especially during a great famine, when he foretold the arrival of two vessels loaded with corn the same evening to relieve the city, which happened, contrary to all expectation. From thence he was sent to Lerida, the most famous university of Catalonia. There, continuing his apostolic functions and education, he received his doctorate, receiving the cap from the hands of Cardinal Peter de Luna, legate of Pope Clement VII, in 1378, being twenty-eight years of age. At the earnest requests of Wthe bishop, clergy and the people of Valencia, he was recalled to his own country, and pursued there both his lectures and his preaching with such extraordinary reputation, so manifestly attended with the benediction of the Almighty, that he was honored in the whole country above what can be expressed. As a humiliation, God

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4. permitted an angel of Satan to mo**st him with violent temptations of the flesh, and to fill his imagination with filthy ideas. The arms which the saint employed against the devil were prayer, penance, and a perpetual watchfulness over every impulse of his passions. As he grew into manhood it was said that his countenance was beautiful and radiant, which reflected the beauty of a soul filled with the love of God. Even in his old age, this radiance never left him. He was most radiant, however, when he gave a sermon on the Mother of God or the joys of Heaven. He was firmly devoted to the Passion and enjoyed a childlike devotion to Mary, which included a faithful observance of praying the Angelus. His heart was always fixed on God and he made his studies, labor, and all his actions a continued prayer. The same practice he proposes to all Christians in his book entitled, A Treatise on a Spiritual Life, in which he writes thus: "Do you desire to study to your advantage? Let devotion

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5. all your studies and study less to make yourself learned than to become a saint."
Consider some of the phrases in this marvelous book. "What is meritorious is not that a man should be poor, but that, being poor, he should love poverty." "A vain question deserves nothing but silence. So learn to be silent for a time; you will edify your brethren and silence will teach you to speak when the hour is come." "Regard yourself as more vile and miserable in the sight of God because of your faults than any sinner whatever, no matter what his sins... and consider closely that any grace or inclination to good or desire of virtue you may have, is not of yourself but of the sole mercy of Christ." "Try to convince yourself that there is no crime-laden sinner but would have served God better than you... if he had received the same graces." "Once humility is acquired, charity will come to life – a burning flame devouring the corruption of vice and filling the heart so full that there is no place

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6. vanity."

Missionary Travels
Before the end of the year 1392, St. Vincent being forty-two years old, set out from Avignon towards Valencia. He preached in every town with wonderful efficacy; and the people having heard him in one place followed him in crowds to others. Public usurers, blasphemers, debauched women, and other hardened sinners everywhere were induced by his discourses to embrace a life of penance. He converted a great number of Jews and Mohammedans, heretics and schismatics. He visited every province of Spain in this manner, except Galicia. He went thence into Italy, preaching on the coasts of Genoa, in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Savoy, as he did in part of Germany, about the Upper Rhine and through Flanders. Numerous wars and the unhappy great schism in the Church had been productive of a multitude of disorders in Christendom; gross ignorance and a shocking corruption of manners prevailed in many places, whereby the teaching of this zealous apostle, who, like another

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7. Boanerges, preached in a voice of thunder, became not only useful but even absolutely necessary, to assist the weak and alarm the sinner. The ordinary subjects of his sermons were sin, death, God's judgments, hell, and eternity. He delivered his discourses with so much energy that he filled the most insensible with terror. A great number of his sermons have come down to us, some in Latin and many in the vernacular. By them one seizes the man and the saint to the life. They are masterpieces of naturalness, intelligence, picturesqueness and, at moments, poetry. In their kind there is nothing better. And they all develop one same theme.
First of all, there is sin as he had known it in the world under its seven root forms, stripped of all its pretenses and of its false promises of delight. After that comes penance, which can drive out sin or at least dull the sharpness of its edge, fortifying us against sin's assaults and uniting with the Blood of Christ to plead for us before the

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8. of God. Finally is the Judgment with its alternative for those who have done evil – Purgatory or Hell. That inevitable judgment, which awaits each one of us in the moment of death, he made concrete and dramatic by building it into one thing with the terrible picture of the universal Judgment, the Last Judgment, when Christ will appear on the clouds of heaven to summon the living and the dead to that damnation or glory. He showed it in all its splendor, all its horror – in that light which is beatitude or torment, which ravishes the soul or burns it without end. Punishment is certain; punishment is at hand. It is coming towards us relentlessly. Every day we live brings it one day closer. It may be upon us in an hour, in a second. He felt it so and he made sinners tremble with the feeling. He returned to this theme frequently and on great occasions. "Yes," you will say, "he wanted to frighten them." He did indeed want to frighten them because he himself was afraid. And as his fear

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9. for himself grew less, his fear for them grew greater. Not, alas, that he believed himself just. How could he when he still had life before him and might still, therefore, fail? And if he failed that day? What if God held him responsible for the sins of his brethren because he had not succeeded in raising and fortifying them in virtue?
At his sermons he was frequently obliged to stop to give leisure for the sobs and sighs of the congregation. His sermons were not only pathetic, but were also addressed to the understanding and supported with a wonderful strength of reasoning and the authorities of scriptures and fathers, which he perfectly understood and employed as occasion required. His gift of miracles and the sanctity of his penitential life gave to his words the greatest weight. Amidst these journeys and fatigues, he never ate flesh; fasted every day except Sundays, and on Wednesdays and Fridays he lived on bread and water, which he treated them with the greatest affection