Saint Francis de Sales

He had no armed escort. Only his cousin, the priest Louis de Sales, went with him. They lodged at the fortress of Allinges, a cluster of old castles on a high hill above the town of Thonon, which had guarded the way into Savoy since the Middle Ages. From there he walked down to Thonon every day to preach to a town that had shut its doors on him and forbidden anyone to listen to him or sell him so much as a loaf of bread.

As the eldest of thirteen children, François had his path laid out from childhood: to inherit the title and carry on his father’s political career, perhaps go further still. He was sent to the best schools Europe could offer. In 1578, at only eleven, he left home for Paris to study at the Collège de Clermont, one of the most prestigious schools of the day, run by the Jesuits, where Latin grammar, rhetoric and scholastic philosophy were taught by the strictest methods of the late Renaissance.

It was in Paris, at nineteen, while attending the lively theological debates that were a regular part of student life at the time, that François fell into a violent crisis of faith, not over whether God existed, but over one particular doctrine: the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination, which held that God had decided from all eternity that some people would be saved and some would go to hell, and that a person had no way of changing their fate by their own merits or good will.

For a sensitive perfectionist like François, that idea became a terrible trap. He became convinced, with nothing to go on but his own obsession, that he was destined for hell, and that however hard he tried to live well, it would be no use. The crisis lasted six weeks without a break. He could not eat or sleep; his slender body wasted away until his friends feared he might die of sheer exhaustion.

In 1588, obeying his father, François left Paris for the University of Padua in northern Italy to study law — entirely in keeping with the career his family had planned. In 1591 he earned a doctorate in both civil and canon law at once, an achievement rare even among the best students of the time.

When he returned to Savoy with a doctorate in law in hand, his father had everything ready for his son’s future: a seat in the Senate of Chambéry — the most powerful body in the duchy — and an arranged marriage with a rich, beautiful heiress. For any young nobleman of the time, it was a dream: power, wealth and fame, all neatly wrapped up, his for a nod.

Only François came forward. He said simply to the Bishop:

“If Your Excellency thinks I can do anything, I am ready to go.”

He knew the danger well, but he went anyway, with only his cousin Louis de Sales.

In the winter of 1594 the two priests settled at the fortress of Allinges, a medieval stronghold on a hill commanding the whole southern shore of Lake Léman, fought over for centuries by Savoy and Geneva. From there François walked down every day to Thonon, the chief town of the region, looking for ways to reach the people.

But the Calvinist ministers had told the people of Thonon never to listen to the Catholic priest, never to sell him food, never to give him shelter. On some freezing winter nights, walking back to Allinges, François was chased through the forest by dogs and even wolves, and had to climb a tall tree and huddle there all night in the bitter cold. Afterward his feet were so frozen that they had to be soaked in warm water for hours to save his toes from gangrene. At least three times assassins hired to get rid of that “troublesome priest” lay in wait for him on the road, and each time he escaped by a hair’s breadth.

At first there was only silence; some people tore the leaflets up as soon as they saw they came from “the papist priest.” But curiosity, especially about something forbidden that turns up at your own door, slowly won out. People began to pick them up and read them, then passed them around by the fire on winter nights, careful not to let the neighbors know. One by one, the knots of prejudice tied over decades began to loosen.

Later, when asked the secret of that remarkable return, François answered with a simple comparison still quoted today in books on persuasion:

“A spoonful of fragrant honey catches more flies than a whole barrel of sour vinegar. You cannot convert people’s hearts with anger.”

Becoming a bishop did not change François’s way of life. He sold what valuables were left in the bishop’s house and gave the money to the poor, went on wearing his faded black cassock, and still walked, sometimes dozens of kilometers over rough mountain roads, to reach the most remote parishes, places that had not seen a bishop in years. He taught catechism to poor children himself, and sat for hours in the confessional hearing beggars whom many priests of the time avoided.

One of the most important encounters of his life came in 1604, when he met Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal — a young noble widow of deep piety, looking for a spiritual companion after her husband died in a hunting accident. A rare spiritual friendship grew between them, with no other aim than to help each other, and others, become holy. In 1610 they founded the Order of the Visitation together, for women, including the frail and the elderly, who wanted to live a consecrated life but lacked the strength for the strict penances of the older orders.

But Francis de Sales’s greatest gift to the Church, the one that carried his name far beyond little Savoy, was the book he published in 1609: “Introduction to the Devout Life,” often called Philothea (“lover of God”). It grew out of private letters of spiritual direction to a relative, later reworked into a handbook for anyone in any walk of life.

The book was a quiet revolution because of an idea that many at the time found almost shocking. Before François, the common view in the Church, even among educated clergy, was that to become truly holy you had to give up life in the world, enter a monastery, and leave behind family, trade and soldiering. François put it bluntly:

“It is a deadly error, even a heresy, to wish to banish the devout life from the soldier’s barracks, the craftsman’s workshop, the court of princes, or the home of married people.”

He compared holiness to the different flowers of one garden, each with its own beauty and its own way of blooming: the soldier becomes holy as a soldier, keeping discipline and upright courage; the mother becomes holy amid caring for her children and the work of the kitchen; the merchant becomes holy through honesty in every transaction.

Seven years later, in 1616, he published the “Treatise on the Love of God” (Theotimus), going still deeper into the theology of love he had lived and taught all his life, with a philosophical and theological depth rare in his day.

At the end of that year he had to accompany the Duke of Savoy’s party on an official journey to Avignon and then Lyon. In the harsh cold of a French winter, he suffered a sudden stroke. He was put to bed in a small, shabby room, once the gatekeeper’s lodge, at the Visitation convent in Lyon, a house of the very order he had founded with Saint Jane Frances de Chantal twelve years before.

Following the brutal treatment common at the time for stroke, the doctors pressed red-hot irons onto the back of his neck, hoping the shock of pain would bring him round. Those present said that in that agony François did not groan or resist at all, but only smiled faintly and whispered:

“Lord, do with me whatever pleases You.”

In 1877, Pius IX proclaimed Francis de Sales a Doctor of the Church, in recognition of the theological worth of his writings, especially the “Introduction to the Devout Life,” a book still in print today, translated into dozens of languages, and more widely read than most religious works of its age.

In 1923, through the encyclical Rerum Omnium Perturbationem, Pius XI named Francis de Sales patron of Catholic writers, journalists and all who work in communications: a fitting choice for a bishop who used handwritten leaflets to open closed hearts long before anyone had heard of “mass media.” The Church celebrates him on January 24 each year.