Salesian Literature

About 4,000 in all are addressed to persons from all walks of life

– senators, bishops, nobility, religious – seeking counsel. 

Francis offered direction, and as minister of God effaces himself

and teaches the soul to listen to God,

the only true director.  For him active work did not weaken

his spiritual inner peace but strengthened it. 

He directed most people through letters, which tested his remarkable patience.

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Letters to a Wife and Mother

If ever a man revealed himself in his letters it was St. Francis de Sales.  His rich sympathetic nature stands out vividly.  We are reminded of Cardinal Newman’s words in his Historical Sketches: “I want to hear a Saint converse; I am not content to look at him as a statue; his words are the index of his hidden life, as far as that life can be known to man, for ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh’.  Now the ancient saints have left behind them just that kind of literature which more than any represents the abundance of the heart, which more than any other approaches to conversation; I mean correspondence.”

 

In this pamphlet you are going to hear St. Francis de Sales converse through his letters to Madame Madeleine de la Fléchére, his cousin. They were about the same age and he became her spiritual director during the Lenten course of sermons he preached at Rumilly in France in 1608.

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Letters to Persons in the World

St. Francis de Sales guided innumerable souls from all walks of life, adapting himself to each individual mould, each individual rhythm, each individual need.  He himself writes that souls differ more widely from each other than the human faces do.  He, no doubt, needed all the qualities that St. Benedict claims abbots should possess to tend this amazing variety of flowers in God’s garden.

 

Yet he always kept in mind that however different souls might be, all of them ultimately have the same vocation: to glorify God by their holiness – that is, to be transformed in Christ.  Endowed with natural grace, illumined by supernatural grace, St. Francis knew how to adapt himself to each individual case. He made no distinction of persons; to all his spiritual children, whether rich or poor, cultivated or uncouth, male or female, he gave the same loving care, the same unconditional devotion.

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Letters of Spiritual Direction

In reading these letters one gradually becomes aware that our contemporary predicament allows us to find in these letters what is crucial for our own spiritual survival: a Jesus-centred, affectionate friendship. This Jesus-centred, affectionate friendship pervades all the letters that Francis and Jane wrote to their correspondents, but the source is clearly the friendship between themselves … there is no doubt that all the letters published in this book … are undergirded by the “bond of perfection” that bound them together in a mutual Jesus-centred love.   

   

Letters to Persons in Religion 

The motto “Live Jesus!” is more than simply descriptive of a wider Christian contemplative assumption about the human drama and thus aptly applied to the Salesian spirit as well.  “Live Jesus” belongs especially to that spirit.

 

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