St. Francis de Sales Shows Us How to Be Missionaries of God’s Love| National Catholic Register
On the memorial of St. Francis de Sales, there are many ways we can celebrate him: as a doctor of the Church for his teachings on the devout life, the love of God and the universal call to holiness, as the patron of journalists and communicators, and as the “Gentleman Saint.”
At a time, however, when Pope Leo is summoning us together to “look for ways to become a missionary Church,” it is fitting to focus on St. Francis as one of the great missionaries in Church history, one who almost single-handedly carried out the reevangelization of an enormous region of the French alps after the people of the Chablais had given up, and many turned against, the practice of the Catholic faith.
St. Francis came from a noble family in southeastern France. His father had provided him with a tremendous education, and the brilliant student graduated with a doctorate in law at the age of 20. By the time he returned home, his dad had already arranged for him to marry an heiress and become a senator. When Francis told him he had made a promise of chastity and felt called to become a priest, his father was outraged, thinking Francis had lost his mind.
A difficult struggle ensued, with Francis trusting in God to find a solution. Eventually, at the intercession of one of Francis’ maternal uncles who was a priest, the bishop of Geneva made a commitment to appoint Francis as vicar general of the diocese upon his ordination. This placated his father’s pride. Francis was ordained and took up his duties. In addition to the administrative tasks for which he was responsible, he quickly became a much-sought-after confessor and friend of the poor.
But the Diocese of Geneva had a huge problem to tackle: Decades of scandals among the clergy and the people’s poor catechesis from decades of neglect left them incensed at the hypocrisy of their local Churchmen and vulnerable to Calvinist arguments. Many ran their priests out of town and took up a form of Christianity that to them at least seemed to be moral. The bishop of Geneva even had to flee the city and take up residence in Annecy. Some reports state that there were only about 20 Catholics left in the vast region.
Nine months after Francis’ ordination, the bishop held a meeting with all his priests, seeking volunteers to send to the region to try to persuade the people to return. He didn’t hide the dangers or the difficulties. Many of the people were not only ill-disposed but downright hostile: The first priest who had been sent had been attacked repeatedly until he was expelled from the region.
None of the clergy at the meeting stepped forward for what minimally was a tough assignment but could prove a fatal one. Finally, Francis stood up and said, “If you think I am capable of undertaking the mission, tell me to go. I am ready to obey and should be happy to be chosen.”
The bishop accepted the proposal, over the fierce objections of Francis’ father, who thought his son was signing up for a suicide assignment. According to worldly logic, his father was right.
At 27 years old, Francis, traveling by foot, set out to try to win back the vast geographic area. The work was rough and dangerous. For his protection, he was ordered to sleep at night in a military garrison. On two occasions, assassins ambushed him along the way; both times, seemingly miraculously, he survived. On another occasion, he was attacked by wolves and had to spend a glacial night in a tree.
He labored on, despite little to show for all his efforts. “We are but making a beginning,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “I shall go on in good courage, and I hope in God against all human hope.”
Because of the opposition, he began to write tracts that could be put under doors in the middle of the night and left where people congregated. In them, he patiently set forth Catholic teaching, charitably explaining the errors of Calvinism, and tackling head-on controversial issues. These tracts began to have an impact, as they were copied by hand and passed from person to person. A steady stream of lapsed Catholics began to seek reconciliation. He welcomed them with the love of the father of the prodigal son, and soon his warmth and gentleness in restoring them to communion brought many others.
“I have always said,” he insisted, “that whoever preaches with love is preaching effectively against the heretics, even though he does not say a single controversial word against them.” When sinners were filled with shame, he comforted them: “God and I will help you; all I require of you is not to despair. I shall take on myself the burden of the rest.” When he was criticized for leniency, he responded, “Are they not a part of my flock? Has not our blessed Lord shed his blood for them? These wolves will be changed into lambs; a day will come when they will be more precious in the sight of God than we are. If Saul had been cast off, we should never have had St. Paul.”
Within the span of five years, the holy “Apostle of the Chablais” had reconciled and reevangelized almost the entire region. To the sins that had caused schism and heresy, he responded with holiness and the truth. To the anger with which he was welcomed, he responded with meekness. “Never forget that one can catch more flies with a spoonful of honey,” he quipped, in an expression that has since become famous, “than with a hundred barrels of vinegar.”
In 2022, as the Church marked the 400th anniversary of de Sales’ death, Pope Francis published an apostolic letter, Totum Amoris Est (“Everything Is of Love”), to help Catholics everywhere profit from de Sales’ spiritual legacy.
In the opening paragraph, the Holy Father focused on de Sales’ last apostolic trip in which he was asked to accompany a cardinal to Avignon to meet King Louis XIII of France.
Francis was sick. He was exhausted. Nevertheless he went.
“Were it not most helpful to them for me to make this trip,” he said, “I would surely have many good reasons to excuse myself. Yet if I can be of help, alive or dead, I will not refuse, but go or let myself be dragged there.”
Pope Francis said that such a willingness to serve, even if it would precipitate his death, was the summary of his missionary temperament. In Avignon, in addition to high-level meetings, he heard confessions, preached sermons, gave conferences and wrote many spiritual letters. With love, because “everything is of love” — the love of God enlivening our own love toward God and toward all those God loves — he poured himself out.
In his famous Treatise on the Love of God, St. Francis had written about what he called the “ecstasy of work and life,” where the experience of being loved by God and loving him back leads us to “ecstasy,” literally standing outside of ourselves. Ecstasy, he taught, shouldn’t be reduced only to a mystical experience of the consoling heights of prayerful communion with God; the experience of God, rather, is meant to lead us joyfully and exuberantly — even in the midst of difficulties — to want to share the love of God with as many as we can. De Sales’ whole missionary life was an “ecstasy in work in life” that all of us are summoned to emulate.
St. John Paul II, during the great Jubilee of 2000, praised at length St. Francis de Sales’ “evangelizing fervor” as a model for the Church. In a talk to missionaries who had taken de Sales as their patron, he urged them and all in the Church to reflect St. Francis’ “love of God and of neighbor, his apostolic zeal, his humility and simplicity, his joy and his optimism.”
The mission of the Church, he added, is “to reveal and communicate the love of God to all peoples and nations,” and he urged us to “press on in this task, secure in the knowledge that the Holy Spirit, who directs the mission of the Church and opens people’s minds and hearts to Christ, “goes ahead” of us.
To celebrate St. Francis de Sales well, then, is not merely to admire with gratitude a refined spiritual master. It is to hear again the call to the “ecstasy of work and life” as missionaries of the love of God. It’s to see how we “can be of help” and to offer ourselves for the mission to the Chablais in which we dwell, “happy to be chosen.”
