A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
You can find today’s readings here.
R. Kindness and truth shall meet.
Kindness and truth shall meet;
justice and peace shall kiss.
Truth shall spring out of the earth,
and justice shall look down from heaven. (Ps 85:8, 10, 11-12, 13-14)
Today’s responsorial psalm offers us a strange and wonderful promise that “kindness and truth shall meet.” As I sit down to write this reflection, I struggle to imagine a world where this famed meeting would not result in total chaos. I’m not alone here, right? Kindness comforts, understands and uplifts, while truth challenges, convicts and unsettles. How can their collision bring us closer to God’s salvation instead of driving us farther apart, especially when the truth can be—and often is—unkind?
I remind myself that today is the memorial of St. Francis de Sales. Nicknamed “The Gentleman Saint” for his wisdom, kindness, and gentle demeanor, St. Francis de Sales set out on a spiritual mission to make profound theology accessible to all. The patron saint of writers, journalists, the deaf and educators, he led a stoic, intelligent and faith-filled life overflowing with examples of what can occur when kindness and truth meet.
Perhaps the best example of how St. Francis de Sales embodied kindness and truth lies in his famous axiom, “a spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar.” Suaviter et fortiter, “gentle and firm,” was another motto that captured his approach to living and sharing the faith with believers and non-believers alike.
Born two months premature in 1567 in what is today Thorens-Glières, Haute-Savoie, France, St. Francis de Sales was a thoughtful young man known for his serene demeanor and gentle approach to conflict. His noble upbringing enabled him to become an accomplished swordsman and horseman, and in 1578, he attended the Collège de Clermont, then a Jesuit institution in Paris.
As a scholar of rhetoric and the humanities, he sat in with curiosity on a theological discussion about predestination, but quickly became convinced that he was damned to hell. (What college-aged person hasn’t shared this thought?) His resulting crisis of faith proved a key turning point in his later studies at the University of Padua, where he discerned his priestly vocation.
Physically ill and bedridden—not unlike St. Ignatius, whose year in recovery from a cannonball that shattered his leg led him to reading The Life of Christ and The Lives of the Saints—St. Francis de Sales read the Bible and concluded that God had a plan for him, because “God is love,” as in 1 Jn 4:16 (“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”). He consecrated himself to the Blessed Virgin Mary and decided to dedicate his life to God, and at Padua, De Sales took Antonio Possevino, a priest in the Society of Jesus, as his spiritual director.
After his schooling, early priesthood and several efforts to bring Calvinists back into the Catholic fold as archpriest of the cathedral chapter of Geneva, St. Francis de Sales served as Bishop of Geneva from 1602 to 1622. His attempts to evangelize creatively yet compassionately stretched far beyond the norm. He famously slid Catholic pamphlets under doors and into mailboxes when people refused to hear him preach, and his simple tactics of delivering truth to non-believers divided by the Protestant Reformation opened countless doubting hearts to God and sparked conversions.
Above all else, The Gentleman Saint emphasized the universal call to holiness. St. Francis de Sales believed that holiness was not solely for monks or mystics, but for anyone who had a heart open to God and a desire to be like his Son, Jesus Christ. In 1609, he wrote Introduction to the Devout Life (1609), a timeless spiritual guide for lay people seeking to live a life of faith amidst their daily responsibilities.
His accessible approach to spirituality in his Spiritual Directory was not unlike that of St. Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises. As a member of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales and president of Rockhurst University Thomas B. Curran, S.J., wrote for America in 2007, Francis and Ignatius were strikingly similar: “Both men wanted all people to pursue holiness. They rejected the notion that holiness was restricted to those entering monasteries, seminaries and convents. Instead, they were convinced that all people can find God in the world without necessarily being of the world.”
“Like hand and glove,” Curran writes, “the Ignatian and Salesian approaches complement one another.”
Like hand and glove, too, did kindness and truth meet in the person of St. Francis de Sales. May we remember him through our desire to live in love, so that we might live in God—and God in us.
