A New Look At An Old Temptation: Saint Vincent de Paul\u27s Temptation Against Faith and Resolution to Serve the Poor

According to Vincent de Paul’s first biographer, Louis Abelly, Vincent prayed to have a temptation against faith transferred to him to free a doctor of theology who was originally suffering from it. The temptation continued for three or four years until Vincent resolved to serve poor persons. While many biographers have accepted this story, its truth is doubtful for many reasons besides those that follow. Vincent never spoke of having this temptation himself. He never would have prayed for a transfer of temptation without advice from his spiritual director, and this advice would not have been given. The temptation would have occurred during a year that he said was the happiest of his life. At the time that the temptation would have ended, Vincent was not serving the poor. Instead, he was reforming clergy, converting heretics, and serving the Gondi family. It is well documented that Vincent’s work with persons who were poor developed out of responses to unanticipated needs and events, not as a result of an astonishing conversion

Vincent de Paul\u27s Discernment of His Own Vocation And That of the Congregation of the Mission

Vincent de Paul discovered his vocation and that of the Congregation in several ways. These were fulfilling the Church’s needs, seeking evidence of God’s will in events, and obeying God’s will, either as mandated by superiors or by following inspiration that responded to events. Such inspiration was always carefully examined before being put into practice. These elements are traced through Vincent’s life and career. Through work with Pierre de Berulle, he saw the need for properly formed priests, especially for country parishes. His ministry on the Gondi estates, especially the mission at Folleville, further convinced him of the poor’s need for priests. When no one else would undertake rural missions, Vincent’s obedience compelled him to act on inspiration and to found the Congregation. As part of efforts to reform the clergy, the archbishop obliged the community to give retreats to ordinands. Again, Vincent was led by obedience. His seminary work was an inspiration in response to the same need for priests, but he only began after consulting Cardinal Richelieu

Vincent de Paul\u27s View of Common Life in the Congregation of the Mission

For Vincent de Paul, community life enabled the Congregation to follow Jesus’s example, both in the work of evangelization and in the development of Christlike virtues that supported the work. To be effective missionaries—to travel and to share the life of the poor while evangelizing them—confreres were to embrace poverty. They also were to model Christian behavior for others by demonstrating it among themselves; this was accomplished through the virtues of uniformity, patience, and fraternal charity. Uniformity meant that the confreres were to have the same judgments and practice. Patience called for the tolerance of each other’s faults and the awareness of one’s own faults. Fraternal charity was the most important virtue. Confreres had to show each other Christian love to spread that love through missions. The order of the day is described to show how virtues were to be cultivated. The regimentation of community life and the ways it contributed to the apostolate are also explained

Segregated Catholicism: The Origins of Saint Katharine\u27s Parish, New Orleans

The complicated history of the establishment of Saint Katharine’s, a black parish in New Orleans, is recounted. For reasons explained in the article, the city’s Catholic churches were originally racially integrated. There were two groups of blacks in New Orleans: colored Creoles (the term they used for themselves) and African Americans. Colored Creoles were people of Afro-French descent and they were Catholic. African Americans were Protestant and worshipped in separate churches from whites. This was partly because of racism in the white community and partly because African Americans wanted to control their own religious affairs. Francis Janssens, the archbishop, wanted blacks to control their churches and he wanted to win African American converts. Moreover, he believed there were many defections among colored Creoles. He saw the solution to all of this in Saint Katharine’s establishment, though he stressed that black Catholics were free to choose between it and their home parishes. The colored Creoles opposed segregation for any reason and therefore opposed Saint Katharine’s. The negotiations for its establishment with the Vincentians and with Katharine Drexel, who provided funds, are described in detail. Saint Katharine’s was dedicated in 1895. With the advent of official segregation, it became a successful parish

The Phantom Five Years

For centuries, Vincent de Paul’s birth year was held to be 1576. Pierre Coste’s research established that it was actually 1581, and that Vincent knew his age and referred to it consistently. There are many reasons for the five-year difference in tradition. As was common at the time, Vincent lied about his age at ordination, being nineteen and not the requisite age of twenty-four. Early biographers either left his comments about his age undated or tampered with sources to make them add up to his traditional age of eighty-five at his death

God is Wonderful in All His Works : A Contemporary Account of Vincentian Activity in the District of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 1828-1850

John Francis McGerry recounts the Vincentians’ role in establishing Catholicism in the Cape Girardeau region. He describes John Timon’s ministry, which mostly consisted of baptisms, work with condemned prisoners, and various efforts to help the Daugherty family, including purchasing their land. McGerry also relates how John Mary Odin and John Brands worked with non-Catholics and converts despite anti-Catholic prejudice. Finally, McGerry gives details regarding the building and beginning of Saint Vincent’s College at Cape Girardeau

Missing energy in black hole production and decay at the Large Hadron Collider

Black holes could be produced at the Large Hadron Collider in TeV-scale gravity scenarios. We discuss missing energy mechanisms in black hole production and decay in large extra-dimensional models. In particular, we examine how graviton emission into the bulk could give the black hole enough recoil to leave the brane. Such a perturbation would cause an abrupt termination in Hawking emission and result in large missing-energy signatures.Comment: addressed reviewer comments and updated reference

Decoupling Limits in M-Theory

Limits of a system of N Dn-branes in which the bulk and string degrees of freedom decouple to leave a `matter' theory are investigated and, for n>4, either give a free theory or require taking $N \to \infty$. The decoupled matter theory is described at low energies by the $N \to \infty$ limit of n+1 dimensional \sym, and at high energies by a free type II string theory in a curved space-time. Metastable bound states of D6-branes with mass $M$ and D0-branes with mass $m$ are shown to have an energy proportional to $M^{1/3}m^{2/3}$ and decouple, whereas in matrix theory they only decouple in the large N limit.Comment: 23 Pages, Tex, Phyzzx Macro. Minor correction

Massive IIA flux compactifications and U-dualities

We attempt to find a rigorous formulation for the massive type IIA orientifold compactifications of string theory introduced in hep-th/0505160. An approximate double T-duality converts this background into IIA string theory on a twisted torus, but various arguments indicate that the back reaction of the orientifold on this geometry is large. In particular, an AdS calculation of the entropy suggests a scaling appropriate for N M2-branes, in a certain limit of the compactification, though not the one studied in hep-th/0505160. The M-theory lift of this specific regime is not 4 dimensional. We suggest that the generic limit of the background corresponds to a situation analogous to F-theory, where the string coupling is small in some regions of a compact geometry, and large in others, so that neither a long wavelength 11D SUGRA expansion, nor a world sheet expansion exists for these compactifications. We end with a speculation on the nature of the generic compactification.Comment: JHEP3 LaTeX - 34 pages - 3 figures; v2: Added references; v3: mistake in entropy scaling corrected, major changes in conclusions; v4: changed claims about original DeWolfe et al. setup, JHEP versio

Intrinsic Geometry of D-Branes

We obtain forms of Born-Infeld and D-brane actions that are quadratic in derivatives of $X$ and linear in $F_{\mu \nu}$ by introducing an auxiliary `metric' which has both symmetric and anti-symmetric parts, generalising the simplification of the Nambu-Goto action for $p$-branes using a symmetric metric. The abelian gauge field appears as a Lagrange multiplier, and solving the constraint gives the dual form of the $n$ dimensional action with an $n-3$ form gauge field instead of a vector gauge field. We construct the dual action explicitly, including cases which could not be covered previously. The generalisation to supersymmetric D-brane actions with local fermionic symmetry is also discussed.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, no figures. Minor correction; version to appear in Physics Letters