The Particular End of the Company

1. 1. Only priests already formed in seminaries are received into this Company. Thus, ecclesiastics in minor orders are excluded until they have received the priesthood. There is, however, a seminary in Paris where young ecclesiastics who have a vocation to the missions of the Company prepare themselves by learning and virtue to enter it.
2. 2. These priests must be called by God to conduct missions in the footsteps of the poor Apostles, and not to serve as vicars, govern parishes, teach youth, or form priests in seminaries, as do so many other good priests who are called by God to these holy employments. Consequently, they flee these employments as contrary to their apostolic vocation, so as always to be able to say with Jesus Christ: pauperibus evangelizare misit me Dominus [Lk 4:18], or with the Apostles: non misit me Dominus baptizare sed evangelizare; and they regard as a subtle temptation any occasion that ceaselessly presents itself to help the people by these means. This is the detour or the wrong turn that several holy communities have unfortunately taken — communities established in recent centuries by the holy spirit of their founders to conduct missions — and this under the pretext of a greater good. Some have applied themselves to instructing youth, others to forming priests and ecclesiastics; and if they still conduct a few missions, it is only by accident and as if in passing. Most members of these communities remain for entire years sedentary, not to say solitary, in their city or country houses, whose motto is: habitatores quietis, whereas the motto of true missionaries, like St. Paul, is to be able to say in truth as he did: Instabiles sumus. [1 Cor 4:11]
3. 3. Priests who are sickly or too aged — that is, past sixty — are not received, since they are then beyond the battles that missionaries, as valiant champions of Jesus Christ, must ceaselessly wage against the enemies of salvation. If, however, a priest of the Company becomes, through age or illness, unable to assist in missions, he retires to a house that the Company maintains for this purpose.
4. 4. Lay brothers are received, however, to take care of temporal affairs, provided they are detached, vigorous, and obedient, ready to do whatever is commanded of them.
5. 5. Both priests and brothers must be without benefices, even simple ones, and without temporal goods, even patrimony. If they possess any before entering the Company, they relinquish their benefices into the hands of the patrons and their goods to their relatives or to the poor, according to the advice of a wise man — thus exchanging their patrimony for that of God himself, which is the patrimony of Divine Providence and is inexhaustible.
6. 6. Thus detached from every employment and from the care of every temporal good capable of holding them back and fixing them in place, they are light enough to run with the St. Pauls, the St. Vincent Ferrers, the St. Francis Xaviers, and the other Apostles, wherever God calls them — whether to cities or to the countryside, whether to a large town or a small village, whether near or far — always ready to say at the call of obedience: paratum cor meum, Deus, ecce adsum, ecce venio; never being able to say what so many earthbound priests, so many fat benefice-holders, so many pleasure-seeking clergy, so many guests of ease say every day in their own fashion: emi, emi... duxi, etc., ideo non possum, non possum. Habe me excusatum. [cf. Lk 14:18–20]
7. 7. Although they do not limit the grace of God or their zeal to the countryside alone, as do the missionaries of Monsieur Vincent,¹ and they go indifferently to conduct missions in cities as in the countryside according to the will of God as indicated by their Superiors, they nevertheless share in the tenderest inclinations of the Heart of Jesus, their model, who said: pauperibus evangelizare misit Dominus; which ordinarily leads them to prefer the countryside to the city and the poor to the rich.
8. 8. To be permanently committed to the Company, they make simple vows of poverty and obedience for one year in the hands of the Superior, which vows they renew every year. At the end of five uninterrupted years in the Company, if they find themselves and are judged to be truly called by God to the Company, they make the two vows of poverty and obedience in perpetuity. Since these vows are only simple, they could for legitimate reasons obtain a dispensation from the Bishop to leave the Company; and, for its part, the Company, according to the right it reserves to itself, could expel even after his perpetual vows a member who had become so corrupt as to be an occasion of scandal rather than of edification, despite the remedies that had been applied. These two conditions are tacitly attached to this last vow, as they are to the vows of several other communities.
9. 9. The Company never takes charge of any student or boarder, whether ecclesiastical or lay, even if he wished to give it all his goods.