Salesian Literature

 St. Francis de Sales, the holy bishop, founder, and Doctor of the Church, is known throughout the Church for his great sanctity, learning, theological knowledge, gentleness, and understanding of the human soul. Through these marvellous gifts he converted and guided innumerable souls to God during his own lifetime, and reconverted 70,000 from Calvinism. He continues to direct many souls through his spiritual writ­ings and published sermons. Today St. Francis de Sales is known as one of the great figures of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and of the 17th-century rebirth of Catholic mystical life.

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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. 

 

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.

 

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.   

   

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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