This book undertakes a close analysis of de Paul’s wide-ranging activities during the principal decades of Catholic reform in France, offering unprecedented insights into the ways in which de Paul engaged with it, and influenced its direction. The conclusion confirms that de Paul stands out amongst a host of distinguished peers in the dévot environment, because he succeeded in articulating and applying traditional teachings and existing practices in new, enterprising, and systematic ways. It also concludes that he exploited the potential for association and collaboration that lay amongst a cross-section of his contemporaries to realize his goals to carve out a particularly distinctive and popular manifestation of religious activism. The Lazarist Congregation was endowed with multifaceted features of pastoral care, and stood at the heart of an enterprise geared towards the reform of contemporary religious practices.
This book offers a major reassessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul. Confronting traditional explanations for de Paul’s prominence in the dévot reform movement that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion, it explores how he turned a personal vocation to evangelize the rural poor of France into a congregation of secular missionaries, known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Lazarists, with three interrelated strands of pastoral responsibility: the delivery of missions, the formation and training of clergy, and the promotion of confraternal charity. It demonstrates that the structure, ethos, and works that de Paul devised for the Congregation placed it at the heart of a significant enterprise of reform that involved a broad set of associates in efforts to transform the character of devotional belief and practice within the church. The book’s central questions concern de Paul’s efforts to create, characterize, and articulate a distinctive and influential vision for missionary life and work, both for himself and for the Lazarist Congregation, and it argues that his prominence and achievements depended on his remarkable ability to exploit the potential for association and collaboration within the dévot environment of seventeenth-century France in enterprising and systematic ways. It is the first study to assess de Paul’s activities against the backdrop of religious reform and Bourbon rule, and to reconstruct the combination of ideas, practices, resources, and relationships that determined his ability to pursue his ambitions.
Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Version of attached file:Published VersionPeer-review status of attached file:Citation for published item: Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002204690200564XPublisher's copyright statement:2003 Cambridge University Press Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source• a link is made to the metadata record in DRO• the full-text is not changed in any wayThe full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.
At the end of January 1654, Jean Le Vacher-member of the Congregation of the Mission, vicar apostolic of the Holy See and acting French consul in Tunis-sent a report to the cardinals of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith, in Rome, in which he described his missionary work in and around Tunis. Le Vacher's letter focuses on the life of the Christian slaves in the region and on his efforts to provide spiritual and material assistance to them. It offers insights into early modern slavery in North Africa, the efforts of the Catholic church to strengthen its presence in the area, and the culture and organisation of societies on the border between Islam and Christianity. This article includes the full text of Le Vacher's report in the original Italian and in English translation, together with an introduction, commentary, and editorial notes. In the 1600s, the French monarchy was the most active of European governments in the caravan trade, though this was highly contested by the English and the Dutch throughout the century. 3 It also oversaw, theoretically at least, those who chose to operate under its flag: crown officers, missionaries, consuls, and French merchant communities in Ottoman ports, and was represented in the Ottoman regencies of Tunis and Algiers by consulates first established by King Charles IX. These French outposts were located in areas that Europeans regarded as 'pirate republics', but although the office of consul was in theory state-owned, it was, like many other offices in the crown's gift, subject to purchase and farming-out. Consular income derived from fees such as those paid by Catholic merchant ships for anchorage in port (when relations between the ruling authorities and the French crown permitted it). The office was also secular. Yet, in 1648 it came into the possession of the Congregation of the Mission, a society of secular missionary priests established in 1625 to undertake missions to the rural poor and galley convicts. 4 At the time still under the direction of its founder, Vincent de Paul, the Congregation owed the transfer to the generosity of one of its major patrons, Marie de Vignerod de Combelet, the duchess of Aiguillon, niece of the late Cardinal Richelieu. In granting the Congregation the office of consul and the right to appoint to it, Aiguillon presented de Paul's congregation with the means to promote both French and Catholic ambitions in this region, thereby formally combining the public goals of the French crown with the missionary wishes of Catholic Reformation Dévots. Although de Paul and the missionaries that he sent to the region did not articulate their reasons for their congregation's presence there in these terms, in practice they stepped in to minister to slaves, to prevent their contagion by North African and Islamic culture, and to repatriate those of them who were French Catholics. 5 Except for the merchants and artisans who settled there or passed through for business purposes, the majority of the Christian population in Tunis and the other two Ottoma...
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