Via Caritatis The Way of Charity

Since Saint Vincent de Paul, French Catholics have kept founding new works for the poor. In the nineteenth century, as industry drove whole families into destitution, Catholics joined prayer to the service of the poor; in the twentieth, others took that work into the working-class suburbs. The Church took up their intuitions in its social teaching, born with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum in 1891. The group visits the places where they served and reads the Gospel with its priest.

In Paris, the opening Mass is celebrated before the relics of Saint Vincent de Paul, in the chapel on the rue de Sèvres. In the seventeenth century, Monsieur Vincent organized charity in France. On the rue de Vaugirard, in the crypt of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes, you will pray at the tomb of Blessed Frédéric Ozanam. A student from a Lyon family, on April 23, 1833, he founded the first Conference of Charity with five fellow students, under the presidency of Emmanuel Bailly, publisher of the Tribune catholique; the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul grew from it, and Saint John Paul II beatified him in Paris in 1997.

The second day takes you to the peripheries. In Ivry-sur-Seine, you will enter Madeleine Delbrêl’s house at 11 rue Raspail. She came in 1933 to run a parish social center in this working-class town governed by the Communists, lived in this house from 1935 and died there in 1964; Pope Francis declared her Venerable in 2018. In Noisy-le-Grand, the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Sans-Logis, Our Lady of the Homeless, built in 1957 in a camp for homeless families and rebuilt a few hundred yards away in 1970, keeps the memory of Father Joseph Wresinski, sent to these families by his bishop in 1956. The ATD Fourth World movement was born in this camp, and the chapel has been a listed historic monument since 2016.

Then the road heads into Champagne. In Reims, the Hôtel de La Salle is the birthplace of Saint John Baptist de La Salle: a canon of the cathedral, he gave up his canonry and his fortune to devote himself to free schools for poor children, and founded the Brothers of the Christian Schools. At Val-des-Bois, in Warmeriville, the industrialist Léon Harmel ran the family spinning mill as a Christian community, with the chapel set among the workshops and with councils through which the workers shared in running the mill. He was known as the “Good Father.” In 1887 he led 1,400 workers, 100 employers and 300 priests to Rome, and these pilgrimages of working France helped hasten Rerum novarum.

The train then brings the group to Lyon, the city of the silk weavers and one of the homes of Social Catholicism. At the Prado, in the Guillotière district, Blessed Antoine Chevrier rented a former dance hall in 1860 to teach the faith to the children and young people of the neighborhood; you will see the room where he died in 1879 and pray at his tomb in the chapel. Saint John Paul II beatified him in Lyon in 1986. It was in Lyon, too, that Marius Gonin founded in 1892 the review that became the Chronique sociale, whose team launched the Semaines sociales de France, the Catholic social weeks, in 1904.

On the slopes of Fourvière, the Maison de Lorette keeps the room of Blessed Pauline Jaricot, who founded the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1822 and the Living Rosary in 1826. Her plan for a model factory run on Christian principles failed and left her poor until her death in 1862; beatified in Lyon in 2022, she rests in the church of Saint-Nizier. On the last morning, those who wish will work with a charity in Lyon before the closing Mass, serving Christ in the poor (Matthew 25:40).