Their mission was humble and simple: to reach the poor country people, who suffered from ignorance of their faith, a debased clergy, and poverty. In response, Vincent De Paul defined the vocation of his “Little Company” as preaching local missions for free, educating the clergy, and working to relieve the people’s poverty. Soon, however, this vocation was complicated by commands to minister to royal families, including Louis xiv of France and the kings and queens of Poland, which would embroil the Vincentians in international and ecclesiastical politics. In addition, they would begin dangerous foreign missions, such as ministering to the Christian captives of the Barbary pirates, the debased colonists and rebellious natives of Madagascar, and the vendetta-prone Corsicans. For the first time, modern readers have a thoroughly researched history based on original documents and the studies of numerous scholars, past and present. It portrays the Vincentians’ daily lives and describes their failings as well as their exalted acts of heroism. It also details the social and political milieus that conditioned their lives and work. It is an important, down-to-earth side of history not often told.

Their mission was humble and simple: to reach the poor country people, who suffered from ignorance of their faith, a debased clergy, and poverty. In response, Vincent De Paul defined the vocation of his “Little Company” as preaching local missions for free, educating the clergy, and working to relieve the people’s poverty. Soon, however, this vocation was complicated by commands to minister to royal families, including Louis xiv of France and the kings and queens of Poland, which would embroil the Vincentians in international and ecclesiastical politics. In addition, they would begin dangerous foreign missions, such as ministering to the Christian captives of the Barbary pirates, the debased colonists and rebellious natives of Madagascar, and the vendetta-prone Corsicans. For the first time, modern readers have a thoroughly researched history based on original documents and the studies of numerous scholars, past and present. It portrays the Vincentians’ daily lives and describes their failings as well as their exalted acts of heroism. It also details the social and political milieus that conditioned their lives and work. It is an important, down-to-earth side of history not often told.

This second volume begins with the dawn of the eighteenth century, and relates how the Congregation of the Mission, founded by St. Vincent de Paul, worked to remain faithful to his vision while adapting itself to the demands of ecclesiastical and political life in France, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Portugal, overseas missions in North Africa and the Mascarenes, as well as the missions taken up after the suppression of the Jesuits in the Middle East and China. Among other problems, the Missioners found themselves in the middle of fights over Jansenism, but tempered by the success of the canonization of Saint Vincent de Paul. This is an important, down-to-earth side of history not often told.

THE SUBTITLE OF THIS SIXTH AND FINAL VOLUME of The Vincentians, “Internationalization and Aggiornamento (1919–1980),” describes the growth and change of the Congregation of the Mission in the twentieth century. Formerly European in focus, the provinces of the Congregation gained their own voice. Membership in mission lands, such as China, Brazil, and Ethiopia, surged, as local vocations joined their European confreres. The same is true of maturing provinces elsewhere. St. Vincent de Paul’s congregation became internationalized in both outreach and membership. The Vincentians in these recent decades also tasted the bitterness of persecution. The Congregation was suppressed at various times in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Its members often reacted by moving elsewhere, thus furthering the internationalization of the Vincentian charism. Under the Nazis and Communist regimes, many suffered imprisonment, torture, and death. The provinces of Central Europe (Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland), to say nothing of China, were particularly hard-hit. Updating (aggiornamento) was the watchword toward the close of this period. As society changed, so did the Church, and with it the Vincentians. The process was difficult and painful, but it moved the Congregation in directions originally laid down by the Founder. Increasingly, the members emphasized mutual cooperation with many Vincentian-inspired lay organizations, the Vincentian Family. The inspiration shared among them all has been a further manifestation of the compelling insights of St. Vincent de Paul.

THE SUBTITLE OF THIS VOLUME is “An Era of Expansion, (1878–1919).” It reflects the reality of the Congregation of the Mission under the leadership of Antoine Fiat, the superior general who governed the Community longer than St. Vincent de Paul. Like the founder, Fiat was a man of both prayer and action. Also like the founder, Fiat was often hesitant and delayed final decisions. His confreres spread to new missions, such as the republics of Central America and Argentina, and several missions or provinces had grown large enough to be given more autonomy, such as the two American provinces, the Antilles, Barcelona, Ecuador, Belgium and Holland, Madagascar, and Colombia. China continued to attract many missionaries as well as local Chinese vocations despite war and unrest. This volume, then, relates not only that the Vincentians, members of the Congregation of the Mission, grew in number and influence, but how they exercised their ministry. Persecution was their lot in some regions, but they forged ahead. As always, they sought to align their ministries at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries with the original mission entrusted to them by the Church through Vincent de Paul: to bring the Gospel to the poor.

Alan Sweeten’s China’s Old Churches presents a long-term historical view of Catholicism in north China as seen through Western-style sacred structures. Using historical materials as well as architectural and visual evidence, he reveals churches’ former impact and their present-day legacy.

Roman Sources for the History of American Catholicism, 1763–1939 is a comprehensive reference volume, researched and compiled by Matteo Binasco, that introduces readers to the rich content of Roman archives and their vast potential for U.S. Catholic history in particular. In 2014, the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism hosted a seminar in Rome that examined transatlantic approaches to U.S. Catholic history and encouraged the use of the Vatican Secret Archives and other Roman repositories by today’s historians. Participants recognized the need for an English-language guide to archival sources throughout Rome that would enrich individual research projects and the field at large. This volume responds to that need. Binasco offers a groundbreaking description of materials relevant to U.S. Catholic history in fifty-nine archives and libraries of Rome. Detailed profiles describe each repository and its holdings relevant to American Catholic studies. A historical introduction by Luca Codignola and Matteo Sanfilippo reviews the intricate web of relations linking the Holy See and the American Catholic Church since the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Roman sources have become crucial in understanding the formation and development of the Catholic Church in America, and their importance will continue to grow. This timely source will meet the needs of a ready and receptive audience, which will include scholars of U.S. religious history and American Catholicism as well as Americanist scholars conducting research in Roman archives.

The French Revolution nearly destroyed the Vincentians in France, and those in most other countries were isolated, persecuted in every degree from niggling regulations to imprisonment and martyrdom, and sometimes squeezed into oblivion. To these external miseries were added painful internal schisms: the Italians, abetted by other countries and the Holy See, pushed to center the Congregation in Rome; interdicts against communication with foreign superiors forced provinces in many countries to act autonomously; national pressures to swear loyalty and conform to compromising regulations created splits within the community and threatened to divide the Daughters and separate them from their brothers. Reduced membership and funding crippled the Vincentians’ efforts as they emerged from the worst of the state obstructions. Nevertheless, they began rebuilding and even made struggling beginnings in overseas missions, notably the United States, Brazil, the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and China, where the martyrdom of two missionaries galvanized interest in this distant and challenging mission.

The career of the French saint Vincent de Paul has attracted the attention of hundreds of authors since his death in 1660, but the fate of his legacy - entrusted to the body of priests called the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists) - remains vastly neglected. De Paul spent a lifetime working for the reform of the clergy and the evangelization of the rural poor. After his death, his ethos was universally lauded as one of the most important elements in the regeneration of the French church, but what happened to this ethos after he died? This book provides a thorough examination of the major activities of de Paul’s immediate followers. It begins by analysing the unique model of religious life designed by de Paul - a model created in contradistinction to more worldly clerical institutes, above all the Society of Jesus. Before he died, de Paul made very clear that fidelity to this model demanded that his disciples avoid the corridors of power. However, this book follows the subsequent departures from this command to demonstrate that the Congregation became one of the most powerful orders in France. The book includes a study of the termination of the little-known Madagascar mission, which was closed in 1671. This mission, replete with colonial scandal and mismanagement, revealed the terrible pressures on de Paul’s followers in the decade after his demise. The end of the mission occasioned the first major reassessment of the Congregation’s goals as a missionary institute, and involved abandoning some of the goals the founder had nourished. The rest of the book reveals how the Lazarists recovered from the setbacks of Madagascar, famously becoming parish priests of Louis XIV at Versailles in 1672. From then on, fealty to Louis XIV gradually trumped fidelity to de Paul. The book also investigates the darker side of the Congregation’s novel alliance with the monarch, by examining its treatment of Huguenot prisoners at Marseille later in the century, and its involvement with the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. This study is a wide-ranging investigation of the Lazarists’ activities in the French Empire, ultimately concluding that they eclipsed the Society of Jesus. Finally, it contributes new information to the literature on Louis XIV’s prickly relationship with religious agents that will surprise historians working in this area.

Thérèse Peeters shows how trust and distrust affected reform attempts in the post-Tridentine Church, while offering a multifaceted account of day-to-day religiosity in seventeenth-century Genoa.