St. Vincent Pallotti

Who they were

Vincent Pallotti was a Roman priest, confessor to seminaries and chaplain to the sick and the condemned, whose fixed idea was in his century nearly alarming: that the apostolate belongs to every baptized person, laywomen and laymen fully included, commissioned and organized rather than merely assisting the clergy.

His Union of Catholic Apostolate, founded in 1835, yoked clergy, religious and laity together as collaborators, a structure the Church would not fully bless in principle until the Second Vatican Council, which is why his admirers read St. John XXIII's council as his vindication. He promoted the Epiphany octave that brought Eastern and Western rites into shared celebration. And he lived a personal poverty of almost comic thoroughness: his bed, his boots, and repeatedly his coat went to whoever lacked them, and the cold he caught after giving his cloak to a shivering man became the illness that killed him in January 1850. He was canonized in 1963, during the Council, which is either coincidence or the neatest timing in the calendar.

Why people turn to St. Vincent Pallotti

Every volunteer, catechist, lector, usher and committee member, which is to say most of the people holding a parish together. Lay ecclesial ministers, formally.

How to ask their intercession

Over your actual apostolate, named as one. Call your volunteer work by his word once, out loud, and then pray it. That is the whole exercise and it changes how the next shift feels.