Salesian Literature

4. The Chablais (1594-1596)

 

The story of the four-year Chablais apostolate in which, from start to finish, François de Sales played so much the leading role that success seems inconceivable but for his imaginative zeal, his winning character and his indefatigable endurance, demands a book in itself. Here we must be content to treat it as a passing episode in his spiritual development and an indication of the kind of person he was. This is all the more important in that there is always the temptation to misunderstand his charm, his sensi­tivity, his humanity, and to suppose that there was an element of softness in him hard to reconcile with great sanctity. The Chablais episode between the ages of 27 and 31 reveals for the first time the strength of character which was more and more to make itself felt as the real explanation of the balance and attraction of his personality. In this, the reader will doubt­less feel, as the biographer must, how spontaneously and inevitably, as it seemed, François de Sales was to model himself on the pattern of perfection, the Christ we know from the Gospel records.

 

Among Thonon's three to four thousand inhabitants there were only some twenty Catholics. How make contact with such a people? Foreign missionaries today may at least expect a certain initial curiosity on the part of those among whom they come. In the English mission of that time, Catholics were in sufficient number to shelter the priests from abroad and to make the necessary introductions. But de Sales's theoretical security under the legal Savoie sovereignty and the local protection of the Allinges garrison were in themselves another apostolic handicap. He was an intruding political as well as a religious enemy of the people.

 

The Governor, who was a friend of his, at once put the position to him in idealistic and realistic terms. Pointing to the guns protecting the fortress, he said: "We shall not long need these, providing, please God, that the Huguenots down there are ready to listen to you." It was a formidable proviso. The missionaries could give fresh heart to the scattered handful of Catholics, but how make contact with the Protestants? When de Sales invoked his legal right to preach in the bullet-pocked church of Saint-Hippolyte, only a few nervous Catholics were there to listen to him The Protestants passed by, jeering at him and shouting "squint-eyed, squint-eyed " (louche in French having the double-meaning of the physical defect and a shady person). The preacher, in fact, was simply put in Coventry.

 

Francois wrote to Favre after a fortnight: "The Governor, together with a few other Catholics, has spared no pains and no persuasions to get the neighbouring peasants and bourgeois of Evian to come to our sermons. He has done his best to promote the interests of religion with his enlightened zeal. But the Devil soon saw to it, and the leaders of Thonon assembled their council and swore perfidiously that neither they themselves nor the people would come to our sermons . . . Their object is to make us lose hope of ever succeeding here and so force us to quit. It shall not be. So long as the truce lasts, we shall by the will of God and the State's authority continue absolutely resolved to carry on our task." He gave a fuller explanation to his Bishop: "The excuse the people give is that they may be maltreated by the Bernese and the Genevese as deserters to their faith if they approach otherwise than with insults on their lips and stones in their hands. The truth is that our job here is not only to get rid of heresy, but most of all of worldly self-interest."

 

So it continued that first year in utter frustration, as autumn turned to an exceptionally cold winter. The task seemed hope­less, even if de Sales could take courage from some signs of thawing in that one or two of the Calvinist leaders went out of their way to be personally polite and even friendly.   That was where he would score, for his personal charm was irresistible.

 

When Louis returned home for a while, François, we are told, felt a special strength in his absolute loneliness as he trudged from door to door, seeking out the occasional Catholic home and hoping to obtain an introduction to a Protestant one. Physically strong and well built, de Sales suffered all his life from a poor circulation which in the end caused his early death. One can then imagine him, his hands covered with vicious chilblains and easily chilled through his whole body, enduring day by day and often even at night exposure in that hard winter. Physical attacks on his life occasionally occurred, sufficiently serious to terrify Georges Rolland, a servant from Thorens whom de Sales's father had at last consented to send. Rolland, an intelligent boy of 18, was not born brave. After an ambush in which two men threatened his master with swords, Rolland could stand it no longer and sent a message to tell the story to M. de Boisy. The latter immediately ordered his son to return to civilisation. For once de Sales answered with a certain asperity. "If Rolland had been your son instead of only being your servant, he would not have been such a coward as to run away from the little trouble in which he was involved, exaggerating it into a great battle. No one need have any doubts about the bad will of our enemies, but at least spare us the wrong of doubting our courage. I earnestly ask you, therefore, not to see in our determination to stay here any sign of disobedience." Strange that the old man could not see in his son the same spirit as he himself had once shown at the siege of Landrecies, many years before.

 

Still, M. de Boisy could say "I told you so" as time passed and no appreciable progress was made. It was imperative to discover some way of breaking the deadlock.

 

De Sales wrote to Favre in January, 1595: "My mind is turning over the idea of some meditations on the mutations of heretics in our times," and a little later; "You wish to see the first pages of my work against the heretics. I want it very much too, and I would not like to carry my standards into the enemy lines with the spirit the cause deserves until I obtain your approval of the plan, the battle and the tactics to be adopted. But I realise the difficulties of the undertaking and, moreover, I am short of the auxiliary troops I need: I mean the books neces­sary to a person who holds in his mind only a small number of ideas."

 

His plan was simple—to reach by the written word those he could not reach by word of mouth. The idea seems simple enough to us. But apart from the physical difficulties of printing and distribution, the plan to write doctrinal tracts in much the same way as we should write pamphlets or magazine articles seemed hazardous. Writing in those days was, as he expressed it in his announcement of the project to the "Messieurs de Thonon," the prerogative of "the learned and most polished intelligences. When speaking, your action, voice, appearance help on the word, but in order to write you must ' know a great deal.' "It was a strange doubt on the part of a person who would always find it easier to express himself by the written word than the spoken. He would pour out his feelings in his letters, but he talked, we are told, slowly and hesitatingly. Anyhow, now there was no alternative if he was to carry on, despite the lack of books, which only included the Bible, Bellarmine's Controversies and Canisius's Catechism.

 

The idea, as it worked out, was to write a series of doctrinal extracts from his sermons in the defence of the Catholic faith-extracts short enough to be copied and slipped under the doors of the citizens' houses.    But it became evident that if these tracts were to do their work, they would have to be printed.   Soon, the doctrinal broadsheets were postered up on convenient places as well as distributed by hand.    In modern terms, it was a kind of Catholic journalism, published by a writer who had to work by candlelight after a day's tramping on arduous and disappointing apostolic missions.  The writer could not have imagined that a day would come when these sheets, sets of which were to be discovered at Le Thuille, 36 years after his death, would find permanent publication under the name of Controverses.    In his letters, he called them Memorials or Meditations. Their aim, in fact, was not so much controversial as expository. The straightforward journalistic style has a natural appeal today, and the Controverses often read more easily than his later and deeper writings. One can open the book at random and take a passage as illustration. Here is an example on Infallibility.

 

"Surely it is not reasonable that any individual should call himself infallible when interpreting or explaining Scripture. See the result! Who would be willing to accept his authority? Why this person rather than the other? Let him talk as much as he likes about analogy, enthusiasm, the Lord, the Spirit—well, I for one would never thus restrict the freedom of my mind. If I have to take my chance, let it be my own judgment rather than someone else's, be he able to speak Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Tartar, Moorish or any language you can think of. If we must risk being wrong, surely we should prefer to follow our own judgment than enslave it to a Calvin or a Luther! Everyone would certainly feel free to think as he wants to and follow up different points of view. Who knows—he might strike on the truth as readily as the next man! Really it is an impiety to think that Our Lord left us no supreme judge on earth—a judge to whom we could look for the solution of our difficulties; a judge so infallible in his judgments that we could not make.

 

In another example he refers to Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor, whom he was soon to meet at the Pope's request. "You will tell me that Beza says that the Roman Church errs today in necessary beliefs and this was why he left it, but that he does not hold that the true Church has ever been in error. He certainly cannot wriggle out by that path. Which Church existed in the world two, three, four, five hundred years ago, if not the Catholic Roman Church exactly as it is today? There was no other. It must therefore have been the true Church in error or else there was no true Church in the world. If so, Beza must agree that this state of affairs arose from intolerable error even in things necessary to salvation, for I have already sufficiently shown the absurdity of his idea of a secret Church within which the faithful are dispersed. Besides, when they admit that the visible Church may err, they are undermining the Church to which Our Lord tells us to appeal in our difficulties—the Church which St. Paul calls 'the pillar and foundation on which the truth rests,' St. Paul's witness could only refer to the visible Church. If you do not believe that, you must admit, first, that Our Lord wanted us to consult something invisible, imperceptible and completely unknown or, second, that Saint Paul was telling Timothy to speak to a gathering of which he himself had no knowledge."

 

It was all straightforward hard-hitting stuff coming into the hands of ordinary men and women who for a couple of genera­tions had hardly heard a word against the teaching of their religious leaders.

 

The tracts were slowly to do their work, and de Sales decided early in 1595 to leave the security of Allinges as a headquarters and stay with friends in Thonon itself where he could at least minister to the few Catholics. For Mass, however, he had to ride each morning across the Dranse into the Catholic part of the Chablais, an undertaking as perilous in winter as so much else, for the stone bridge had been washed away and a wooden plank, often covered with ice, substituted for it.

 

There was no optimism in a letter he wrote to Possevino at this time. "I need not underline for you what it means to me to make a resolution involving the abandonment of my interest in the affairs of the world and in my family. It is as much as we can do to keep the Catholics going here—such is the cost to them of keeping the faith… However, I have some relations and friends who respect me for special reasons. These reasons I cannot entrust to others. That is what keeps me here. Only the hope I have of better times prevents me from being too depressed… Anyway, it would be a waste to have someone else working here uselessly—someone likely to be of better service elsewhere than I could be. Besides, I am the sort of preacher who is only good enough to preach to walls as I have to do in this town."

 

However, he was soon a little more optimistic. To Favre he wrote: "Just now some ears are beginning to ripen in this great harvest, and if, in this unhappy time, I do not gather them, the danger is that the grains of the true faith will be dispersed, espe­cially if the wind blows from the north—as the Prophet says, 'every evil comes from a north wind.' Among the ears I refer to I count Pierre Poncet, a learned jurist with his heart in the right place. Despite his gross errors in regard to nearly every­thing about our Faith, he has for a long time held correct views about the real presence of Jesus Christ's Body in the Eucharist. So it was not hard to draw him away from Calvin's sect with its false views about this august sacrament, views which have deceived so many. But it was much more difficult to bring him back to the fold of the Church."

 

That hard and spiritually so disappointing winter was indeed ending as the sun of April shone across the lake again. Not only was Poncet converted, but so was the Baron d'Avully, a Calvinist who had first been moved by de Sales's first sermon in Annecy nearly two years earlier. D'Avully, one of the leading figures in the Chablais, professed himself converted, but deferred his public abjuration for political reasons. The ice was breaking, despite de Sales's recent pessimism, and all the sufferings, dangers and depressions of so unrewarding an apostolate for so young a priest were proving not to have been in vain. The example of such leading figures would slowly spread.

 

After seven months de Sales had earned a rest, and for a few weeks he returned to the spiritual peace of Annecy whose arcaded ways alongside the waters seemed to him like a monastic cloister where he could pray again and peacefully greet so many friends among rich and poor. But the Chablais mission was not to everyone's taste in the episcopal town. Was not the young Provost stirring up political trouble in the district? Was he certain that the highest political circles in Savoie approved of his mission? Such was the talk of the town he was overhearing.

 

In a letter to Favre on May 16, he turned from congratulating his friend on a volume of poems dedicated to himself ("Staying as I am with my relations amidst the birds singing in the springtime, I keep on admiring all the details of this flowing poem") to more practical matters: "I am getting ready to return to Thonon. You are about the only person who really approves of my deter­mination. When in another four months my year's work will have been finished, only you will be able to persuade me to carry on. The general belief is that we are working in that province without the Duke's consent, and many go so far as to say that our work is against his will. Seeing that a word from him would make all the difference, his silence is certainly an effective argument. But there is another: the sight of men at work within the domains of the Church and under a Catholic Prince, living in so pre­carious a way and, one might say, just from day to day. But do not breathe a word of this to anyone, for you know how easily it could be misinterpreted."

 

His nephew, Charles-Auguste de Sales, tells us that God sent him a special grace on the feast of Corpus Christi that summer. When in prayer his sense of closeness to God was such that he could only mutter "Hold back, O Lord, this flow of grace. Come not so near me, for I am not strong enough to endure the greatness of your consoling touch which forces me to the ground." This was the first, so far as we know, of similar spiritual experi­ences which indicate how close to God he was living his inner life —so close that it was as if the normal frame and space and time occasionally broke away to allow a sensible revelation of the reality which self-love, sin and constant preoccupation with the things of earth shut off from normal human experience. The time would come when he would acquire a deeper spiritual per­ception too close to the divine for even this kind of sensible consolation. This first experience may well have been God's compensation for his patience and determination in his frustrating and criticised work.

 

After seven months de Sales had earned a rest, and for a few weeks he returned to the spiritual peace of Annecy whose arcaded ways alongside the waters seemed to him like a monastic cloister where he could pray again and peacefully greet so many friends among rich and poor. But the Chablais mission was not to everyone's taste in the episcopal town. Was not the young Provost stirring up political trouble in the district? Was he certain that the highest political circles in Savoie approved of his mission? Such was the talk of the town he was overhearing.

 

After his return to the Chablais in June, he could still write in a mood of depression to Favre: "The Thonon harvest is beyond my own strength, though I am determined not to give up, save with your agreement and at your orders. Meanwhile I am doing all I can to prepare new workers for the task and to find means of arranging for their upkeep. [He was writing from Annecy] I can see no end, no way out, given the infinite wiles of the enemy of the human race. I have been tormented, as I still am, by the thought that amid so many threatening catas­trophes, we have hardly a moment to give to the spiritual prepara­tion of which we are so much in need."

 

This discouragement must have been largely due to fatigue, for in fact the tide was now slowly turning. His preaching—even apparently only to blank walls—, his tracts and, above all, his personality were causing many to think again. We are told that the children could not resist him, and that as he chatted and played with them, their parents realised what sort of man he was. He had the gift, too, of patiently gossiping with the simplest folk. We hear, for example, of the case of an old woman, worried about her faith, who loved to talk to him. One day she got on to the subject of the celibacy of the Catholic clergy, a matter which, she said, scandalised her. "But, my dear," he said to her, "you keep on coming to see me. Think of the time it takes to talk to you. How on earth could I manage to help you with all your difficulties if I had a wife and children! "

 

By September, he was writing much more cheerfully to Favre: "A wider and more beautiful door is opening out before us in the harvest of Christians… They are now so keen on hearing my expositions of the Catholic faith… that, not having been able to come publicly because the law forbids them, they listen at a spot where they cannot be seen. I only hope the weakness of my voice has not spoilt it all ... I am sure that now they are ready to come to terms, they must soon, according to the proverb, capitulate."

 

Best news of all at this time was the Pope's official acceptance of the abjuration of Protestantism by the King of France, Henri IV, for this would free the Due de Savoie from his commitments to support the Catholics in France against the Protestant king, and enable him to give at least moral support and the necessary funds absolutely needed if the individual conversions were to lead to the re-establishment of normal Catholic parish life in the Chablais. No wonder de Sales who, as a student, had not been able to stomach the idea of a Protestant Henri IV in France was now delighted to join with the Pope in welcoming the Catholic Henri IV. "If the news is true," he wrote to Favre, "may peace reign in the strength of the Lord—a peace all the happier in that the heretics will hardly relish it, I think. I am pressing forward now with these 'Messieurs de Thonon,' and I shall be pressing on even further when I have finished, as best I can, the little work I have so long been engaged on."

 

By this second winter, the tally of converts was some two hundred—a tiny number, whose true significance, however, was to be measured by the wider signs of good-will achieved through an apostolate resting only on love, fair argument, self-sacrifice and prayer—an apostolate practically unique in those times because in no way supported by customary Catholic force. On the contrary, it was even denied the political sympathy and material resources that could legitimately be expected of his own country by any missionary in any period of history.

 

In the circumstances it is not surprising that he wrote at the end of the year to his sovereign, Charles-Emmanuel I of Savoie. "It is absolutely necessary," he said, "to have sure and reliable funds to support a goodly number of preachers… Equally necessary will it be to rebuild the churches and to provide for parish priests." He also wanted a commission of senators to enter the Chablais and invite the people in the name of the Duke "to listen closely to the reasons given by the preachers to encourage a return to the Church from which the people had been torn, not through reason, but by sheer Bernese force." The presence of some young soldiers would give heart to youth, "and would not be a useless means of stimulating courage in the religious question, provided the soldiers are organised in a religious spirit and linked to some Christian institutions." A Jesuit college would also be useful. "In obstinate cases those persisting in their errors should be deprived of their judicial and public positions."

 

The Anglican clergyman, L. Woolsey Bacon, to whom we have already referred, tried to account for the success of the Chablais mission by de Sales being "flush of money and resources of every kind, backed by the treasury and army of Savoy." He also maintained that conversions were politically dictated by the threat of the use of military force by the soldiers stationed in the country. Such charges are today no more than a curiosity of religious controversy, for few can have been less well founded. Nevertheless, it is necessary to realise that François de Sales at the end of the i6th century by no means shared all the views Catholics would take today.

 

To understand this, we must distinguish between his attitude to heresy as a political evil and his attitude towards the person of the heretic. "There can be no convention between Jesus Christ and Baal," he declared, and heresy, however many Catholic faults had contributed to its origin, was the work of Baal. He could not therefore conceive of a Catholic State giving equal rights to heretics and to Catholics. The Due de Savoie would have been fully within his rights to use political and military force to drive heresy and obstinate heretics out of his country. Had Woolsey Bacon's contention been true, de Sales would not have been intellectually scandalised. But because de Sales, as a person of deep spiritual insight, understood very well the difference between the method of love and Christian charity and the method of force, whether political or military, he himself was only personally interested in conversions by purely spiritual means. "I assure you that I have never used invectives and reproaches without being sorry for it," he confessed. " We must hold it an absolute fact that men do more through love and charity than through severity and harshness." So much was this the case that even among the different means of obtaining truly free conversions, only the best really appealed to him. Bossuet, in the panegyric he preached after François de Sales's death, reported the charming words of Cardinal du Perron on methods of conversion. "If you want heretics to be convinced," du Perron said, "I believe you could do worse than refer them to me; but if you are anxious to have them converted, you must take them to François de Sales, the Bishop of Geneva."

 

As we shall see, the conversion of the Chablais was completed with the help of the Due de Savoie's political authority, whose rights de Sales did not deny, but for three years de Sales prepared the way and brought about the conversion of thousands by purely spiritual means. It should also be remembered that the leaders of the Protestants who had used force to Protestantise the country saw no more virtue in toleration than the most rabid of Catholics. But for their fear of the Duke's revenge, they would have driven de Sales out of the land or killed him. The unusual circumstances on both sides might have been designed to enable a saint to show the world how a true Christian apostolate should be carried out.

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