Some church groups were in the media last week criticising Prime Minister Julia Gillard over her proposed East Timor processing facility for asylum seekers.

For example Saint Vincent de Paul Society chief executive, Dr John Falzon, was “disappointed” and called it “a missed opportunity to genuinely move forward”.

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Saint Vincent de Paul, a 17th century Roman Catholic priest, founded groups within the Church to cater for the physical and spiritual needs of the poor in France.

This year happens to be the 350^th anniversary of his death in 1660.

Today, July 19, happens to be his official feast day.

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These days, the only messages from the Saint Vincent de Paul Society reaching the public seem to be political opinions, like the above.

Yet St Vincent’s personal emphasis was never primarily political, but always spiritual.

Here are some of his sayings addressed to his workers:

* You are servants of the poor, to be always smiling and good-humoured.  The poor are your masters, sensitive and exacting masters, you will discover.  The uglier and the dirtier they are — the more unjust and insulting — the more love you must give them. 

* We must love our neighbor as a being made in the image of God and as an object of His love.

* However great the work that God may achieve by an individual, he must not indulge in self-satisfaction — but rather be all the more humbled, seeing himself merely as a tool which God has made use of.

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St Vincent was a true saint.

His greatest wish for all people was they should find salvation through Jesus Christ and his Catholic Church.

The Society bearing his name today does a lot of good. It will do even more good by remaining behind the scenes ministering to the poor and needy — leaving political theorising and telling the government its job to somebody else.

The world is full of would-be political experts.

It is short, however, of those able to offer both physical compassion and the saving message of the Gospel.