Saint Francis de Sales

Francis was born in 1567 at the castle of Sales in Savoy, the eldest son of a noble family. His father wanted him to be a lawyer and senator. He studied in Paris and then at Padua, where he took a doctorate in law. In Paris, as a student, he passed through a terrible crisis, convinced that he was damned. He was freed from it praying before an image of Our Lady, resolving to love God whatever happened.

Against his father’s wishes he became a priest in 1593. The region of the Chablais, south of Lake Geneva, had become Calvinist, and he volunteered to go there as a missionary. For four years he walked from village to village in all weathers, often in danger. When people would not come to hear him, he wrote short leaflets explaining Catholic teaching and slipped them under their doors. In time most of the region returned to the Church.

In 1602 he became Bishop of Geneva, though he had to live at Annecy since Geneva itself was Calvinist. He was a tireless pastor, preacher and confessor, famous for his gentleness: “A spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar.” His Introduction to the Devout Life (1609) taught that holiness is possible and necessary for everyone, soldiers, workers and mothers of families as well as monks. It became one of the most widely read Catholic books. With Saint Jane Frances de Chantal he founded the Order of the Visitation in 1610.

He died at Lyon on 28 December 1622 and was buried at Annecy on 24 January, his feast day. He was canonized in 1665, declared a Doctor of the Church in 1877, and made patron of writers and journalists in 1923.