4 August 1989
Curitiba, Brazil

My dear Friends of Jesus Christ,

A few months ago Pope John Paul II published a document for the Church on the subject of the vocation of lay people. It was the fruit of his reflection and that of the Bishops, priests and laity who had met in Rome for a month in 1987 to discuss the role of the laity in the Church and in the world today. On the opening page of this pastoral exhortation the Pope recalls Our Lord's parable about the man who had a vineyard. The owner of the vineyard wanted workers, and so at different hours of the day he went out into the market place and hired those who were unemployed. Each time he gave the same orders to the workers: "You go into my vineyard too." (Mt 20:4). The Pope goes on to say: "From that distant day the call of the Lord Jesus, `You go into my vineyard too,' never fails to resound in the course of history: it is addressed to every person who comes into this world." (p2).

Each of us here today has received a personal invitation to work in the Lord's vineyard, and your very presence here is an indication that you have accepted that invitation. All of us are united through baptism, but we are also united through our love for St. Vincent de Paul and his spiritual family. As members of that spiritual family--and it is a large family--we have been given a particular piece of that vineyard of the Lord to cultivate. We have been asked to take particular care of those who are needy or poor, who are without the means to live a life that is worthy of a child of God. We have been asked to work in a neglected part of the Lord's vineyard. When I speak of a neglected part of the Lord's vineyard, I am thinking of neglected people. A person who is neglected is a person who has not been chosen, who is left aside and rejected. The rejection is not on the part of God, but on the part of society today.

Our vocation as members of the Vincentian family is to recall the parable of the Good Samaritan often, and not only to recall it, but to live it and to be the Good Samaritan. That is what St. Vincent de Paul was. He walked down the road of life, and in his early years he was rather like the Priest and the Levite in that parable. You will recall that the Priest and the Levite passed by the poor man who was lying on the road after the robbers had mugged him and had stolen his money. In the early part of his life Vincent de Paul was not distinguished by his love for the neglected of this world. Then he changed and by the grace of God came to realize the importance of being like the Good Samaritan. He had eyes for every form of human suffering, physical and spiritual. He was unwilling to pass by those who were suffering deprivation of any kind. Not only would St. Vincent cross the road and look at the poor and deprived, but like the Good Samaritan, he took practical action to heal and rehabilitate the wounded forms of humanity which he found. St. Vincent says to each one of us what Our Lord said to the lawyer who drew forth from Him the parable of the Good Samaritan: "Go and do likewise." (Lk 10:37).

The heart of St. Vincent's message to his large family is summed up aptly in a phrase of a homily which Pope John Paul II preached when he celebrated Mass in honor of St. Vincent in St. Peter's Square on the 27 September 1987: "With the testimony of his life completely dedicated to Christ present in the poor and needy, Vincent seems to speak to the men of his epoch and to those of today with the same words which St. Paul uses in his letter to the Philippians '....Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others.'" (Phil 2:4, L'Osservatore Romano, 28 Sept. 1987).

The interests of others, individual or familial, open up for us a field of immense work. They can appeal to our sense of charity and also to our sense of justice. The Church in our day has been focusing our attention on the claims which the poor have been making in the name of justice. Often we feel powerless in the face of unjust structures in society. However, even in the face of such powerlessness we must ask ourselves if there are any steps, however small, that we can take. It is towards the end of his pastoral exhortation on the Vocation of the Laity that the Pope remarks: "Each person is called by name to make a special contribution to the coming of the Kingdom of God. No talent, no matter how small, is to be hidden or left unused." (p56).