Timothy P. Williams, Society of St Vincent de Paul USA

06/13/2026

St Francis de Sales, a friend and mentor of St Vincent de Paul, taught that, while it would be best if we could attain all the virtues, we should focus on those that are appropriate for our own station and calling. Do you know the Vincentian Virtues? Follow the links in the comments to learn more.

06/12/2026

Contemplation:
Heart to Heart to Sacred Heart

Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which arose in the earliest days of the church, is also closely intertwined with our Vincentian history and spirituality. As Pope Francis explained, this devotion has its roots in the image of the wound in the crucified Christ’s side, which pours out blood and water as “a fountain of grace and a summons to a deep and loving encounter.” Today, the formal devotion is inspired by the Seventeenth Century visions of St. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque.

St. Marguerite-Marie was a Visitation Nun, and although St. Vincent de Paul had served for many years as Spiritual Director for the Visitandines and their founder, St. Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal, Marguerite-Marie’s visions began more than a decade after his death. Yet during their lives, both Vincent and Louise both evinced a deep devotion to the Heart of Jesus in their writing and in their prayers.

Vincent taught that “on the adorable Heart of Jesus, holy humility was especially engraved,” and that our devotion to His heart could lead us to that same humility. Even more, he urges us to remember our purpose of doing the Will of God by considering “how dear this sacred affection was to the heart of Our Lord.” Over and over he returns to the heart, praying for “God to be the heart of your heart.” He says of prayer that “our soul has the happiness of speaking heart to heart with God.”

St. Louise prayed for a “heart completely filled with affection in the love of the heart of Jesus Crucified,” tying her devotion, as Pope Francis taught, to the wounds of the cross. She sought to unite herself with Him by sowing, “in the heart of Jesus, all the actions of my heart and soul in order that they may grow by sharing in His merits.”

So great was the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s devotion to the Sacred Heart that in 1871, Alexandre Legentil, President of the Council of Paris, wrote what became known as the “National Vow” which helped spur construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre (Basilica of the Sacred Heart) on the highest hill in Paris. On February 5, 1872, the Society consecrated itself to the Sacred Heart, and all Conferences are expected to renew this consecration annually.

St. Marguerite-Marie’s visions offer to us the twelve promises of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Our hearts united to His, and also to the neighbor, may we share the hope of those same promises. As St. Louise teaches, “To help you practice the love you owe your neighbor, remember when you are together that the bond of union among you is the Blood shed by the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.”

Contemplate
How do I live my devotion to the Sacred Heart?

Recommended Reading
This would be a good time to pray the Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart with your Conference.

06/11/2026

06/08/2026

06/05/2026

Contemplation:
Love Never Fails

It is helpful, in organizations, to find an answer to the question, “How do we measure success?” How we measure success derives from our purpose and motives. For a business, success is usually measured in numbers: dollars and cents, sales and profits, customers and market share. Numbers are easy to measure, easy to compare, and easy to understand. This is not so in the Society, given that our primary purpose is our own growth in holiness, and our motive is to serve for love alone. The only numbers we might be able to use are numbers we cannot know, such as how many of us end up in heaven. And so, we measure our success in other ways, ways that are not always quantifiable. Each of us must individually ask, after each meeting, after each home visit, after each moment of service, “Am I a better Christian for having done this?”

As for the outcome of our service, we might be tempted to quantify what we’ve done by tallying up numbers of people assisted, or dollars raised and spent, much like a business might do. Yet by such measures, an increase in poverty would surely make our “numbers” look better, even as they show, in another sense, we are failing God’s command “to do all we can to ensure that there may cease to be any [poverty].” Given that the poor will always be with us, St. Vincent guides us here, teaching that “God does not consider the outcome of the good work undertaken but the charity (love) that accompanied it.” But what is the measure of love?

On the other side of the ledger, there always floats anther question, one that haunts us, “How do we measure failure?” For businesses, again, that measurement is simple, and sometimes final, if losses rather than profits lead to the literal failure, bankruptcy, and dissolving of the company. For us, gaining heaven (or not) is even more final, yet unknowable to us, here and now. It can be tempting, then, to try desperately to find works and prayers that will get us into heaven, and by doing so, elevating the works above the love we are called to bring. We wear ourselves out, each of us merely a human doing. We can then lose sight of our motive of love, and our purpose of not only serving Christ, but of emptying ourselves in order to filled by Him, living no longer ourselves, but Christ living in us. “For He became Man that we might be made God,” St Athanasius teaches.

Our formation, we are taught, is a lifelong process of becoming what God wishes us to be, and what Christ has fully revealed to us: our own nature, and what it is to be human. [RH, 10] If the outcome of our works belongs to God, as Vincent says, then to fail is not to try, not to give of ourselves, not to unite ourselves fully with Him through the love that we share with each other and the poor, not to do the good we can, but trust the rest to God. If each of us can cease to be merely a human doing, but also a human being, we will already be, as we are meant to be, of and in the kingdom.

Contemplate
How do I seek to empty myself to make room for God?

Recommended Reading
15 Days of Prayer with Blessed Frédéric Ozanam

05/29/2026

Contemplation:
All That Counts Can’t Be Counted

It can be tempting, when assembling reports of our works, to try to write them to impress people. Bl. Frédéric once commented on a “rather effusive zeal” that leads some to “go about singing everywhere the praises of our infant work.” He strongly believed in regular reporting for accountability and never thought our Society should be a secret one. He recognized, though, that “inflated reports render us suspect to some and ridiculous in the eyes of others.”

It isn’t necessarily competitiveness or ego that can lead us down this path. Rather, it is that knowing in our hearts the importance of this work, we struggle to put it into the sort of language and numbers that we hope will be easier for others to understand. Yet, as Frédéric recognized, the good of our works can’t be measured in simple counts of funds, or bundles of firewood, or numbers of families assisted. The real good, he knew, is measured in “many mothers’ tears wiped away, many blessings received from the mouths of babes, more than one prayer addressed to heaven for us from grateful voices.”

To some outside of the Society, that may not sound very impressive, but our purpose is not to impress. As St. Vincent put it, “God hasn't sent us to have honorable posts and ministries, or to act or speak pompously and authoritatively, but to serve and evangelize poor persons and to carry out the other activities of our Institute in a humble, gentle, and friendly way.” Vincentians who have participated in these works for any amount of time know that, whether or not our community as a whole knows what good we do, we are very well known to the people we serve – the ones who need to know.

The worst thing we can do is to try to measure our success in purely material terms, as this can in turn lead us perform our works with that in mind, to be guided, in other words, by material incentives, rather than serving “for love alone.” Similarly, we needn’t ever worry about ranking ourselves against other organizations that serve the poor; we should instead be thankful for their work. Our original Rule went so far as to say that “although we may be fonder of our little association, we will always consider it as less excellent than others.”

In this ministry, we are called to give as generously as we can, trusting that, like the poor widow, our generosity will be measured not by its price tag, but by the love, the selflessness, and the presence which accompanied it. In the poor, we serve Christ, who promises that the measure with which we measure will be measured out to us. And so, as we seek to grow in holiness, serving in the hope of eternal union with Christ, let’s try always to measure our works by our love for the neighbor, with confidence that God’s measure, too, is love.

Contemplate
How do I measure my works?

Recommended Reading
Turn Everything to Love

05/22/2026

Contemplation:
Do Much and Talk Little

Vincent de Paul, son of a poor farmer, was sent off to study as a boy because his parents recognized how bright he was. He earned money to pay for his studies by tutoring others, and when he was ordained at only 19, too young to become a pastor, he continued his studies, earning a doctorate in canon law. Frédéric Ozanam began studying Latin around the age of six. He would eventually learn eight different languages, including Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and complete two doctorates by the time he was twenty-six years old. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest professor in the history of the Sorbonne.

Both men had a fluency in scripture that permeated their everyday language, and a deep devotion to the study of the saints who preceded them (in some cases, saints whom they had personally known.) There is no doubt that they both understood the importance of academic study to a holistic formation, but they also shared another strong belief: you can’t just read and study, you have to go out and do something.

For Vincent, this became very apparent as he toured the de Gondi lands, finding people who were poor, starving, and ignorant of their own faith. Meanwhile, Paris was filled with educated clergy who, like Vincent himself had aspired to do, lived in idleness and comfort. When he founded the Congregation of the Mission, each candidate was expected to “seek God alone, submit himself to everyone as the least of all, be persuaded that he has come to serve and not to govern, to suffer and work, not to live in ease and laziness.”

Frédéric, for his part, went so far as to declare that “Religion is less for thinking than for acting...” He recognized that the challenge of the Saint-Simonians to prove the good of the church was more than a simple debate question, to be answered with logic or research; it was a call to action. Like Vincent, he saw in the conditions of his times, the calling of the church.

Study and prayer, Vincent taught, is essential, but it cannot stop there. As he explained, there were many people who, “filled with lofty sentiments of God interiorly, stop at that, and when it comes to the point of doing something, and they have the opportunity to act, they come up short… if there’s a question of working for God…alas! they're no longer around; their courage fails them.”

In an 1842 Circular Letter, President-General Emmanual Bailly warned against the danger of carrying on long discussion of charity “instead of being satisfied with doing its deeds…our Society,” he reminds us, “is one of action, it should do much and talk little…”

Contemplate
Are there times I think and talk about the poverty I see when I really could do more myself?

Recommended Reading
Antoine Frédéric Ozanam

05/15/2026

Contemplation:
Keeping Things in Context

“Speak little, do much,” said Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack, and that is all you need to know. The Alamanack included many of Franklin’s witty sayings, each of which was meant to stand on its own. So clever were they that they are still quoted more than two hundred fifty years later!

By contrast, the quotes we read online from our founders and saints, the Rule, and even Holy Scripture, are always best understood within the context of the full passage from which they are excerpted. Reading and repeating only short clippings not only leads us astray from their wisdom but can also tempt us to seek quotes to support what we already have decided, rather than seeking understanding that can help us to better discern.

“You’d be lucky to get him to work for you!” may sound like a solid reference, for example - unless you understand by context that it was meant to describe a person who doesn’t do much work at all. Similarly, Frédéric Ozanam’s statement that “Charity must never look behind it, but always before” may sound like a warning about changing times but was instead a comment on lost records from the Conference’s first year. Frédéric said that should remind us to be fully dedicated to the poor in front of us, instead of compiling resumés of past works. It is a call to humility and true charity – love – which, he concluded, is like “a tender mother who keeps her eyes fixed on the infant she carries at her breast, who no longer thinks of herself, and who forgets her beauty for her love.”

Seeking context, rather than catchy phrases, leads to better understanding of the words and works on which the Society was founded, and by which it continues to be inspired. We can only build upon tradition if we first understand it.

In a similar way, on our visits with the neighbor, we must never reduce their needs to a spreadsheet, lament their poor decisions, or generalize about “those people,” so that we can move on to solutions we decided on before we even visited. Rather, as St. Vincent once said (in a similar context!) we must “turn the medal” to remind ourselves that this is Christ. We seek to know each neighbor as an individual, through “relationships based on trust and friendship.” Beyond that, as the Society’s friend, Dr. Donna Beegle teaches, we also must never “ignore poverty realities” which also are part of the context of the neighbor’s struggles.

The context of every article of the Rule is the entirety of the Rule. The context of every Bible quote is the entirety of Scripture. The context of every need we seek to alleviate is the entire person we are serving. Imagine how much we can learn by taking the time to understand each of these better.

Contemplate
Do I seek knowledge, or understanding?

Recommended Reading
Letters of Frédéric Ozanam, and be sure to read at least one whole letter at a time!

05/08/2026

Contemplation:
Transaction and Transformation

In discernment, when faced with two apparent contradictions or polarities, the true answer is less about deciding either-or and more about arriving at both-and. This truth is deeply embedded in our faith, no more clearly than in the dual nature of Christ; the hypostatic union of the human and divine, that mirrors our own unitary nature as body and soul together. By putting on the cloak of humanity, God calls us to union with His divinity. As St. Louise put it, “Just as God sees Himself united to man in heaven by the hypostatic union of the word made Flesh, so He wanted such a union on earth so that the human race would never again be separated from Him.” Not either-or, but both-and.

In a similar way, when considering our home visits, we sometimes fall into the either-or trap, viewing our work as a choice between “transaction” and “transformation.” This false choice can in turn lead us to misconstrue the nature of both transaction and transformation. When the neighbor calls us in need of rent, utilities, or food, we always do our best to provide for that need first. It’s reason they called us, and a request for help, as Bl. Rosalie once said, is “proof of friendship.” Paying a bill is, inescapably, a transaction, but this should not lead us to divorce transformation from transaction.

The primary purpose of our Vincentian vocation is our growth in holiness and our primary means towards that growth is to serve Christ in the person of the poor. If we separate transaction from transformation in our work, making it an either-or, we can begin to see it as our mission to transform others, or worse still, to define transformation in merely material terms.

By our witness in words and works, we invite the neighbor to our faith and offer the eternal hope of Christ. This is part of our mission, too, but whether their hearts are converted is ultimately not up to us, but to God. As our first Rule put it, “We are not commissioned to perform the good which it is out of our power to effect.” It is the poor who are the first evangelizers. We are sent to seek, to see, and to serve Christ, and by doing so, to seek our own transformation. Not either-or, but both-and.

Our Rule calls us to form “relationships based on trust and friendship.” It is through those relationships that we are naturally led to the transactions that ease deprivation, the words of comfort that restore dignity, and the ongoing accompaniment of our friends through advocacy, special works, and systemic change. All of these things, though, are mere transactions without God’s transformative grace, for “we can achieve nothing of eternal value without His grace.”

In this work of ours, the transaction becomes a relationship, and the relationship leads to transformation; transformation of ourselves towards holiness, of our neighbor towards hope, and of our society towards a civilization of love. Not either-or, but both-and.

Contemplate
How does my service transform me? What does my transformation call me to do?

Recommended Reading
Faces of Holiness

05/01/2026

Contemplation:
Always a Beacon

It is not the purpose or mission of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul to recruit more members. This may seem counterintuitive, given that without new members, as current members age and retire, the Society would slowly cease to exist. Yet instead, for nearly 200 years, our little Society has flourished.

Vincentians are not soldiers, machinists, or nurses who are recruited to fill quotas, trained, and sent to fill open assignments. This is a vocation, not a profession, and there are no vacancies to fill in the Society, only longings for God in the hearts of potential members.

Unlike organizations that depend upon members’ dues for survival, or who measure their influence or strength by their numbers, the Society has always been grounded in both individual and corporate humility, grateful for our smallness, and humble about any good we may do, knowing that it is God’s work, not our own. As our first Rule put it, “although we may be fonder of our little association, we will always consider it as less excellent than others; we will regard it, as in fact it is, but as a work formed nobody knows by whom, nor how, born yesterday and which may die tomorrow.”

Vincentians do not seek to be part of something big, or to accomplish great things, but to grow in virtue and in holiness, serving Christ where He told us we would find him, through works by which he told us we would be judged. There is no recruiting pitch to vocation. There is only a tug on each heart, and a motive that cannot be directed, but can be attracted by the example of the Society’s love and dedication to the least of God’s children.

The Society grows most effectively in the same way that the church grows, as Pope Benedict XVI taught, not by proselytism, but by attraction. Our primary purpose is, and always has been, to grow in holiness, to grow closer to Christ through our person-to-person service. For those of us who have felt this transformation deep within our hearts, we can hardly help but share it – not because we need more help, but because the grace we receive is meant for all God’s children, and it would be wrong to try to keep it to ourselves.

As much as each Conference is blessed by new members, those members are blessed in return by participation in the Conference. The question that we ask, then, is not “would you like to help?” but rather “would you like to meet Jesus?”

The poor we will always have with us, and through the love of Christ, the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the providence of God, we will also always have Vincentians among us. May the Society of St. Vincent de Paul be always a beacon to both.

Contemplate
Do I invite new members by sharing the joy of my own spiritual growth?

Recommended Reading
Creating a Culture of Welcome