Salesian Literature

Francis de Sales: Sage & Saint

by André Ravier S.J.

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The saints are such a rich source of inspiration and guidance that the Catholic Church has always looked to them as the best interpreters of God’s work for the age in which they live.  But like Scripture itself, the lives of the saints have to be reread and reinterpreted in every age.  St. Francis de Sales was a saint who clearly had a message for the 20th century and for those trying to live up to the challenges of the Second Vatican Council.  He saw that the laity especially had a vocation specifically theirs and that the piety of the cloister or the sacristy was an encouragement but not a model for the layman.  Every age – but especially our own – should get to know the saintly author of Introduction to the Devout Life and Treatise on the Love of God.  He has the appeal of his namesake from Assisi but a message which approaches that of the Little Flower’s Little Way: something for all of us.

“Doctor of both civil and canon law, a priest and bishop of a diocese torn by Calvin's schism and ravaged by Genevans; a diplomat, a pastor, a director of souls, and a spiritual writer of Savoy and France... how does one encompass in a brief biography a personality of such diverse aspects? Francis de Sales lived during an era that marked a turning point in history: the former European Catholicism versus the recent fragmentation of Protestantism, the Renaissance versus classicism, the Church of the Middle Ages versus the Church of the Council of Trent.... What a welter of events and adventures in his lifetime!”

 

 

André Ravier, S.J., is a widely respected spiritual writer and Church historian in Europe. 

He has written other works on lives of the saints and on spirituality, his most recent being Ignatius Loyola and the Founding of the Society of Jesus.

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Title of the French Original:  Un Sage et un Saint: François de Sales,

© 1985 Nouvelle Cité, Paris

 

Translated by Joseph D. Bowler, OSFS,

© Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1988

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