Salesian Literature

Foreword

 

St. Francis de Sales was a prolific letter writer.  Many have been lost, but more than 2,000 have been preserved.  In many cases the actual autographs exist.

 

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.

 

She was then a married woman.  After seven years of his marriage here husband was often away from home and she had to look after their property, see to the education of their children and visit the sick and the poor of the neighbourhood.  She was extremely well educated and, besides her native French, knew Greek, Latin and Italian.

 

While faithfully translating what St. Francis wrote, I have taken the liberty of changing the name of the recipient of his letters and of pretending that someone is writing to him today, in order to allow his words to have a more universal and personal impact.

 

Vincent Kerns MSFS

Easter 1979

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