Salesian Literature

A MAN TO HEAL DIFFERENCES: Essays and Talks on St. Francis de Sales

Elisabeth Stopp

 Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 1997

ISBN: 0-916101-22-3

 

No scholar has done more than the late Elisabeth Stopp to make St. Francis de Sales known, understood, and appreciated in the English-speaking world in the 20th century. This volume collects ten talks and essays by Dr. Stopp delivered or published over four decades. These pieces focus on De Sales' education al the Jesuit College de Clermont in Paris, attitudes to friendship, literary art, ecumenism, reception in Anglican England, and links with other major figures of the Christian tradition, such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, and Cardinal Newman.

 

Upon her death in November 1996, The London Times described Dr. Stopp thusly: "A gifted scholar who achieved distinction in two quite different fields. Elisabeth Stopp was also a laywoman of quiet authority and influence in English Roman Catholicism." Dr. Stopp received her Ph.D. in 1937 from Cambridge, where she was later made a Fellow of Girton College and University Lecturer in Modern and Medieval Languages. In the area of Salesian studies, she published many articles and a half-dozen books, including St. Francis de Sales: Selected Letters (London: Faber & Faber/New York: Harper & Row, I960), Madame de Chantal: Portrait of a Saint (London: Faber & Faber, 1962; Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1963: Spanish translation, Madrid: Rialp, 1966), and St. Francis de Sales: A Testimony by St. Chantal (London: Faber & Faber/Hyattsville: Institute of Salesian Studies, 1967). Dr. Stopp also published widely on German Romanticism. Recently, she completed an annotated translation of Goethe's Maxims and Reflections for the "Penguin Classics" series.

 

Dr. Stopp was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1963. In recognition of her scholarship in the field of Romanticism, she received, in 1982, the medal of the Eichendorff-Gesellschaft. This is the first time the medal was awarded to a woman and a non-German. In 1986, she received the Cambridge-Doctorate of Letters. Her Salesian work was recognized by the honor of Affiliation to the Order of the Visitation.

 

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''This is a most attractive book and should appeal to a wide audience, both Catholic and Protestant. As an author, Dr. Stopp has some of her saint's qualities: a beautiful prose style, a capacity to 'heal differences' in charity without compromise of the truth, a lightness of touch that takes the reader into profound subjects almost without noticing. There is much here that is fresh and exciting."

- John Saward [St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook, PA]

 

"As a scholar of Salesian spirituality, I often turn to the writings of Elisabeth Stopp to guide and inform me in my work. It was thus with anticipation that I began to read this collection. I was not disappointed. There is invaluable information here."

 - Wendy M. Wright [Creighton University]

 

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