It was April 23rd: Frédéric Ozanam founded the Conference of Charity

On April 23, 1833, Frédéric Ozanam, a twenty-year-old law student at the Sorbonne, gathered five friends in a room on Rue du Petit-Bourbon-Saint-Sulpice in Paris, the headquarters of the newspaper La Tribune Catholique. Together, with journalist Emmanuel Bailly as their mentor, they founded the first Conference of Charity, with a simple yet radical ambition: to put words into action and prove through concrete steps that the Catholic faith was alive and active. That evening, two of them delivered the last of their firewood for the winter to a poor acquaintance. A modest but foundational gesture. From this meeting of six young men without means would emerge the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, which today has more than 800,000 volunteers worldwide.

A student outraged by the misery of his time

Born on April 23, 1813, in Milan, then a French city, into a pious and charitable family, Frédéric Ozanam grew up in Lyon, where his father, a doctor, treated the poorest of the poor free of charge. Brilliant, multilingual, and passionate about journalism, he arrived in Paris to pursue law studies in a university environment deeply hostile to religion. Faced with repeated attacks against the Catholic Church, he did not simply respond with arguments: he wanted to demonstrate that faith translates into action. It was in this spirit that he and his friends launched the Lenten Conferences at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1834, attracting hundreds of students each year. But it was above all the direct visits to the poor in their homes, a practice then extremely rare, that became the hallmark of his work. Guided by Sister Rosalie Rendu, a Daughter of Charity nun who knew the impoverished neighborhoods of Paris intimately, the young founders learned to go to the poor rather than wait for them to come to them. By the end of 1833, the association had twenty-five members and had to move to new premises. On February 4, 1834, it was officially placed under the patronage of Saint Vincent de Paul.

The precursor of the Church's social doctrine

Having earned a doctorate in law and become a professor of history at the Sorbonne, Frédéric Ozanam tirelessly advocated for a Church reconciled with its time and committed to social issues. A disciple of Lamennais and Lacordaire, he relentlessly denounced economic liberalism and the exploitation of the most vulnerable, convinced that Catholicism could not remain indifferent to the inequalities produced by the Industrial Revolution. In 1848, he embraced republican ideals, seeing them as a means to alleviate widespread poverty. Having suffered from fragile health since childhood, he traveled throughout Europe in his later years seeking medical care, from Biarritz to Spain, then to Marseille and Italy, before dying in Marseille on September 8, 1853, at the age of forty. His dream of a "vast network of charity" encompassing the world, however, has outlived him: the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul is now present in 141 countries. On August 22, 1997, during World Youth Day in Paris, Pope John Paul II beatified Frédéric Ozanam, officially recognizing him as the precursor of what the Church would later call its social doctrine.