They say that God loves the French more than he does others. Why? Because they have the ability to see things in life that others miss. There may well be something in that, for it’s often quite an achievement in life simply to see the obvious.

There’s many a burning bush in our lives but we fail to see it. Moses didn’t until he took off his shoes. It seems we can be insulated against the Divine by our life style, even if it is only a question of footwear. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “Nor can foot feel now being shod”.

The one above all who had this gift of seeing with an artist’s intensity of vision was Jesus. Across the centuries he has made the whole world see with his vision-the corn seed falling among thorns, a speck of dust in the eye, the patch on an old coat. He has made us see, and includes among our familiar acquaintances, a Jericho tax collector, a thief on the gallows and a mad man from Decapolis.

St. Vincent, I think, shared with Jesus this great gift of seeing and the first thing he saw was that the poor are real people, not statistics. In this simple act of seeing he broke through the class barriers in the France of his day.

For a man who always started from people not from theories about them, Vincent built up a veritable empire of works and organisations and mobilised a multitude of diverse people to help him. And what an astounding list it was - the deprived, all those living in poverty, refugees, the war torn, the wounded in battle, the sick and the foundlings. For Vincent they all had one thing in common - they were people. He could see that where others didn’t.

It does seem strange that in the France of Vincent’s day there were many holy people who didn’t seem to have been alive to the situation and failed to see the obvious-the plight of the poor. But Vincent saw it, and the way he saw it was in the light of the gospel of Jesus, who himself always saw things so clearly and so humanly.

Vincent stirred up the complacency of his age and helped so many others to see - see the misery and injustice inherent in society.

It is said that it takes the soul of an artist/architect to make a building come alive, to make the “stones sing”. Vincent was such an artist. Pope John Paul 11 called him, “the artist in pastoral work”.

Make no mistake about it. The real secret of all his life’s activities was the person of Jesus Christ. Vincent saw what Matthew 25 tells us to see: “I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink”.

We’ve all often heard that injunction to see Christ in the poor. Perhaps today Vincent would ask us a different question, “Do they see Christ in us?”