St. Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, Doctor of the Church and Founder of the Order of the Visitation, is honoured by the Holy Father on the occasion of the IV centenary of his death.
Newsroom (December 30, 2022, 8:10 PM, Gaudium Press) Through an Apostolic Letter of about twenty pages, published on Wednesday, Pope Francis honours St. Francis de Sales, who died on December 28, 1622.
“An excellent interpreter” of his time, who in a new way had “a thirst for God,” and an “extraordinary director of souls,” able to help people seek the Lord in their hearts and find him in charity.
The Holy Father makes us better acquainted with the earthly journey of this tireless pastor and preacher of the “Great Century,” marked by grave political crises in the Kingdom of France and religious wars. With numerous quotations from the Doctor of the Church, the Pope explores his spirituality more broadly.
His “God-filled lifestyle” teaches that faith is “above all an attitude of the heart,” that “the experience of God is evidence for the human heart,” Francis emphasizes: “If man thinks a little carefully about divinity, he immediately feels a sweet emotion in his heart, which proves that God is the God of the human heart.”
For the Pontiff, this is the synthesis of his thought: “In the heart and through the heart that man recognizes God and together with himself, his origin and depth, his fulfillment in the vocation to love.
As St. Francis de Sales wrote, “it is charity and love that give value to our works. Love, which is manifested notably in gentleness, is the cornerstone of Salesian spirituality – and the Pope highlights it in the very title of this apostolic letter, Totum amoris est (All belongs to love). The “source of this love that draws the heart is the life of Jesus Christ,” Francis points out, especially in the cross, the apex of Christ’s charity.
It is not by chance that St. John Paul II called him “Doctor of Divine Love,” Francis recalls, not only because he wrote “a Treatise on it, but above all because he was a witness to it.”
Francis de Sales also learns to “refuse nothing and desire nothing,” not out of quietism or voluntarism, but by living abandonment through “contemplation of the very life of the Incarnate Son.”
The Pope praises the ability of the Bishop of Geneva to reconcile “contemplation and action,” thus overcoming “any useless rigidity or withdrawal into himself,” asking himself “at every moment, at every choice, at every circumstance of life, where the greatest love is found.”
The universal call to sanctity
The founder of the Order of the Visitation – with Saint Joan of Chantal – always desired that every believer, whatever his state of life, be able to live his faith fully, showing also that “holiness is not the prerogative of one class or another” (Saint Paul VI). “To go through the earthly city preserving the interior life, combining the desire for perfection with every state of life, finding a center that does not separate itself from the world, but learns to inhabit it, to appreciate it, learning also to keep its distance. This was his intention and continues to be a valuable lesson for all the men and women of our time,” the Pope said.
His witness of virtue, optimism and goodness bore fruit during his lifetime, but even more after his birth in heaven. St. Francis de Sales is part of the eternity of those who “urge us to walk the unique and specific path that the Lord has thought for us,” Francis explained.
Compiled by Zephania Gangl
