St. Francis de Sales

St. Francis de Sales (1567 to 1622) was bishop of Geneva, a preacher and spiritual director in Savoy during the religious wars, and the author of the Introduction to the Devout Life, the first great Catholic handbook of spirituality written for people living ordinary lives in the world. He was canonised in 1665, declared a Doctor of the Church in 1877, and named patron of writers and journalists by Pius XI in 1923. His central claim was that holiness belongs to every state of life, three and a half centuries before the Second Vatican Council said the same thing.

Born 21 August 1567, Savoy Died 28 December 1622, Lyon Bishop of Geneva Doctor of the Church Feast: 24 January

The Gentleman Saint

St. Francis de Sales was born on 21 August 1567 at the family castle at Thorens in Savoy, the eldest son of a minor noble family with plans for him. He was sent to the Jesuits in Paris and then to Padua, where he took a doctorate in both civil and canon law in 1591. His father had a legal career, a seat in the Savoyard senate and a marriage arranged for him. Francis told him he intended to be a priest, and it took a year and the intervention of a cousin who was a canon in Geneva to make it stick. He was ordained in 1593.

He is called the Gentleman Saint because of his manner, and the manner was a deliberate policy rather than an easy temperament. His own testimony, repeated by his contemporaries, is that he was naturally quick-tempered and spent decades bringing it under control. Jane Frances de Chantal, who knew him better than anyone, said he was the gentlest man she had met and that the gentleness had been made rather than given.

His teaching begins from a single conviction: devotion belongs in every condition of life. In the opening pages of the Introduction to the Devout Life he argues that devotion is practised differently by the gentleman, the artisan, the servant, the prince, the widow, the unmarried woman and the wife, and that a devotion which would take a man out of his shop or a wife away from her household is a false devotion. The Second Vatican Council said the same thing in its chapter on the universal call to holiness, and the Catechism repeats it: all Christians are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity (CCC 2013).

The Crisis in Paris

While studying in Paris in his late teens, Francis went through a period of severe interior distress about predestination. The question of whether God had already determined his damnation was live in the theological climate of the 1580s, and he became convinced that he was among the reprobate. He lost his appetite and his sleep and was physically ill for weeks.

The resolution came in a church in Paris, before an image of Our Lady, where he prayed the Memorare and made a decision he kept for the rest of his life: whatever God had determined about eternity, he would love God for as long as he was able to love at all. He would love God in this life even if he could not love him in the next.

The episode explains the shape of everything he wrote afterwards. His spirituality is built on the goodness of God and on confidence, and he refuses fear as a motive throughout. A man who has personally believed himself damned and come out the other side writes about consolation differently from one who has only read about it.

Mission to the Calvinists

The Chablais, the district on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, had been occupied by Protestant Bern for sixty years and had returned to Catholic Savoy by treaty. In 1594 the bishop asked for volunteers to re-establish Catholic life there. Francis and his cousin Louis went, and the response was hostile. Doors were shut, sermons went unattended, and there were threats. He slept in a farmhouse and on at least one occasion in a tree to escape wolves.

His response was to write. He composed short sheets setting out points of Catholic doctrine in plain language, had them copied, and distributed them by hand and under doors. He kept it up for years. The pieces were collected after his death and published as Les Controverses, known in English as The Catholic Controversy, and they are the reason he was later named patron of writers and journalists.

The method matters as much as the medium. He argued without insult, answered the strongest form of the Calvinist position, and asked for conversation rather than surrender. He also went to Geneva itself and met Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor, more than once, in courteous discussions that changed neither man's mind. The Catholic population of the Chablais was substantially restored over the four years he worked there, and he was appointed coadjutor bishop of Geneva in 1599.

The Seventy Thousand Converts

Popular accounts of the Chablais mission, including the earlier version of this page, say that Francis won back about seventy thousand people. The figure appears in devotional literature and it should be treated with caution.

The Chablais was a rural district of scattered villages on a lake shore. Its total population in the 1590s was a fraction of seventy thousand, so the number cannot describe conversions in that territory. It appears to have grown by repetition, in the ordinary way of hagiographic arithmetic, and possibly by extending the count across the whole diocese and the whole of his episcopate.

What can be said is well documented and impressive enough. Francis went into a district where Catholic worship had been suppressed for two generations, worked for about four years in physical danger and near-total public indifference, and the Chablais returned to Catholic practice. The archives of Savoy record the re-establishment of parishes and the public celebrations of the mid-1590s. Removing an inflated number costs the story nothing, and it keeps the rest of the account trustworthy.

Bishop of Geneva, Resident at Annecy

Francis became bishop of Geneva in 1602. He never lived in Geneva. The city had been Calvin's headquarters since the 1530s and remained a Protestant republic, so the Catholic bishops of Geneva resided at Annecy in Savoy, about twenty miles away, and did so for centuries.

His episcopate ran twenty years and was pastoral in the strict sense. He catechised children himself, personally and weekly. He preached constantly, in a plain style he had to work at, having been trained in the elaborate manner of the period. He visited the parishes of a large mountainous diocese on foot and by mule. He heard confessions and gave spiritual direction to an enormous correspondence of laypeople, and it is those letters, rather than any treatise, that grew into his books.

He was one of the bishops who put the reforms of the Council of Trent into effect in his own diocese: seminary formation, resident clergy, regular visitation, catechism for the young. On that work he belongs beside St Charles Borromeo, whose Milanese model he admired and used.

He died at Lyon on 28 December 1622, aged fifty-five, after a stroke, while returning from a journey. His body was brought back to Annecy.

Introduction to the Devout Life

The Introduction to the Devout Life was published in 1609 and has never been out of print. It began as letters of direction written to Madame de Charmoisy, a married cousin by marriage who had asked him for help, and a Jesuit who read the notes told him to publish them. He addressed the book to a reader he calls Philothea, which means the soul who loves God.

Its argument is that a serious interior life is possible, and required, for a person with a household, a business, a family and social obligations. It contains a method of daily mental prayer that anyone can follow, practical counsel on the examination of conscience and confession, chapters on the ordinary virtues of patience, humility, gentleness and honest speech, and a long and unusually shrewd section on temptation, discouragement and the sadness that follows spiritual failure.

The tone is the achievement. Francis writes to an intelligent adult, uses examples from gardens, bees, doctors and courts, and refuses to frighten. He tells Philothea to be patient with everyone and first of all with herself, and that the person who worries about being anxious will simply be anxious twice. Four hundred years of readers with no interest in the seventeenth century have found the book usable, which is the practical test of a spiritual classic.

Treatise on the Love of God

The Treatise on the Love of God, published in 1616 and addressed to a reader called Theotimus, is the mature work and the harder one. Where the Introduction gives a beginner a method, the Treatise sets out a whole theology of charity: how the human will is drawn to God, what happens as prayer becomes simpler, how consolation and dryness both serve, and what it means to conform one's will to God's.

It draws on his direction of the Visitation nuns, on his reading of Augustine, Bernard and Teresa of Avila, and on twenty years of listening to people describe their prayer. It is the work the Church had chiefly in view when it named him a Doctor.

A reader coming to Francis for the first time should start with the Introduction and come to the Treatise later. His letters of spiritual direction, widely available in translation, are the third place to go and often the most immediately useful.

Friendship and Founding

He formed a deep spiritual friendship with St Jane Frances de Chantal, a widow with four children whom he first met when he preached in Dijon in 1604. Their correspondence over eighteen years is one of the great records of spiritual direction and of Christian friendship between a man and a woman, and it was conducted with complete openness about what it was.

Together, in 1610 at Annecy, they founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary. The original plan was unusual and deliberate: a congregation with a light rule that would accept widows, women in poor health and women of an age that other orders refused, and whose sisters would go out to visit the sick and the poor in their homes. That is where the name came from.

The archbishop of Lyon required the community to accept solemn vows and enclosure as a condition of expansion into his territory, and Francis accepted, so the Visitation became a contemplative order rather than an active one. The visiting work he intended was taken up a generation later by St Vincent de Paul and St Louise de Marillac with the Daughters of Charity. Jane de Chantal governed the Visitation for the rest of her life and it grew to more than eighty houses before she died.

Doctor of the Church, Patron of Writers

Francis was beatified in 1661 and canonised by Alexander VII in 1665, forty-three years after his death. Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1877, and he is often called the Doctor of Charity for the subject of his major work.

In 1923, for the third centenary of his death, Pius XI issued the encyclical Rerum omnium perturbationem on him and named him patron of writers and journalists. The reasoning was the Chablais pamphlets: a bishop who had reached a hostile population by producing short, clear, printed pieces and getting them into people's hands was the obvious patron for the Catholic press.

Several religious families carry his name. St John Bosco named the Salesians after him in 1859, choosing him as the model of the gentle approach to young people. The Oblates of St Francis de Sales and the Missionaries of St Francis de Sales also take their name from him. Pope Francis wrote an apostolic letter on him, Totum amoris est, in December 2022 for the fourth centenary of his death.

Feast Day and Devotion

His memorial is 24 January in the general Roman calendar. The older calendar keeps 29 January. He died on 28 December, and the January dates relate to the translation of his body to Annecy.

He is patron of writers, journalists and the Catholic press, of the deaf and of teachers of the deaf, from an episode in which he taught a deaf man in his household the faith using signs, and he is a patron of Savoy and of the diocese of Geneva.

His tomb is at the Basilica of the Visitation in Annecy, alongside that of Jane de Chantal. Devotion to him is carried today chiefly by the Salesian family, by the Visitation monasteries and by the very large readership of the Introduction to the Devout Life.

Quotable Wisdom

"Be who you are and be that well."

The saying circulates in this compressed English form. The fuller thought in his letters is that we should not wish to be anything other than what we are, and should try to be that perfectly.

"A spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar."

The honey and vinegar saying is traditionally attributed to him, and it summarises his approach to evangelisation: gentleness and love win more souls than harsh argument.

"Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself."

This line is from his counsel on discouragement, which is the most practically useful part of his writing for most readers.

What a Reader Can Take From Him

Holiness fits your actual circumstances. A devotion that would require you to abandon your job, your marriage or your responsibilities is the wrong devotion. Francis says so in the opening pages of his most famous book.

Be patient with yourself first. His counsel on failure is that impatience with your own faults is itself a fault, and usually the more damaging one.

Gentleness is a skill, and it can be acquired. He was hot-tempered and worked at it for twenty years. Nobody is disqualified by temperament.

Write it down and get it into people's hands. The Chablais mission turned when he stopped waiting for audiences and started producing pages. That is a transferable method.

Give people the strongest version of the position you disagree with. He met Beza in person, argued the Calvinist case fairly, and converted people who had been shouted at for decades by others.

For the differences he was addressing, see Catholic and Protestant belief compared and Calvinism. For the practice he taught, see prayer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St Francis de Sales?

St Francis de Sales was a Savoyard priest and bishop who lived from 1567 to 1622. He led the Catholic mission to the Calvinist Chablais district in the 1590s, became bishop of Geneva in 1602 while residing at Annecy, wrote the Introduction to the Devout Life and the Treatise on the Love of God, and co-founded the Order of the Visitation with St Jane Frances de Chantal. He was canonised in 1665 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1877.

Why is St Francis de Sales the patron saint of writers and journalists?

During the Chablais mission he could not get audiences to hear him preach, so he wrote short pieces of Catholic teaching in plain language and distributed them by hand and under doors, keeping it up for years. Those pieces were later collected as The Catholic Controversy. Pius XI named him patron of writers and journalists in 1923, in the encyclical Rerum omnium perturbationem marking the third centenary of his death.

Did St Francis de Sales convert 70,000 Calvinists?

The figure of about seventy thousand appears in devotional accounts and should be treated with caution, because the rural Chablais district had far fewer inhabitants than that in the 1590s. What is documented is that he worked there roughly four years in danger and public indifference and that the district returned to Catholic practice, with parishes re-established and public celebrations recorded in the Savoyard archives.

What is the Introduction to the Devout Life about?

Published in 1609 and grown out of letters of direction to a married cousin by marriage, it is a practical handbook arguing that a serious interior life is possible and required for people with households, businesses and families. It sets out a method of daily mental prayer, counsel on confession and the examination of conscience, chapters on the ordinary virtues, and a long section on temptation and discouragement.

Why is he called the Gentleman Saint?

Francis was known for courtesy and gentleness in an age of savage religious polemic, and he treated gentleness as a deliberate policy of evangelisation. He also said of himself that he was naturally quick-tempered and had spent decades bringing it under control, and Jane de Chantal, who knew him best, said the gentleness had been made rather than given.

When is the feast day of St Francis de Sales?

His memorial is 24 January in the general Roman calendar, and 29 January in the older calendar. He died on 28 December 1622 at Lyon, and the January dates relate to the transfer of his body to Annecy, where he is buried in the Basilica of the Visitation.