Saint Francis de Sales
Bishop and Doctor of the Church
- Feast Day
- January 24
- Life
- 1567–1622
- Canonized
- 1665
- Doctor of the Church
- 1877
- Order
- Co-founder, Visitation Order (with Jane Frances de Chantal)
- Born
- Chateau de Sales, Thorens, Savoy
Francis de Sales was born August 21, 1567, at the Chateau de Sales in the Duchy of Savoy. He studied humanities and law at Paris (the Jesuit College of Clermont) and Padua, taking his doctorate in both laws in 1591. Renouncing a magistracy and an arranged marriage, he was ordained priest in 1593.
His first major mission was the reconversion of the Chablais region, on the south shore of Lake Geneva, which had passed to Calvinism. From 1594 to 1598 he preached, debated, and distributed printed leaflets door to door, the practice that would later cause him to be invoked as patron of journalists. Most of the region returned to Catholic communion. He was named coadjutor bishop of Geneva (residing at Annecy) in 1599 and bishop in 1602.
As bishop of Geneva-Annecy, Francis carried out an extensive reform: parish visitations, catechetical instruction, seminary formation in the Tridentine model, and direction of innumerable laypeople by letter. With Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, in 1610, he founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary at Annecy, a contemplative congregation initially conceived to admit widows and women whose health excluded them from stricter orders.
His Introduction to the Devout Life (1609), originally written as letters of direction to Madame de Charmoisy, became the most widely diffused work of Catholic spirituality of the seventeenth century. The Treatise on the Love of God (1616) is his major systematic work.
Francis died at Lyon on December 28, 1622, returning from a journey. He was beatified by Alexander VII in 1661, canonized by the same pope in 1665, and declared a Doctor of the Universal Church by Blessed Pius IX in 1877. The Roman calendar fixes his memorial on January 24, near the date of the translation of his body to Annecy.
Francis de Sales taught that holiness is for every state of life, not for cloistered religious alone. Introduction to the Devout Life addresses itself to laypeople, married and single, in the world. His doctrine of charity in the Treatise on the Love of God was praised by Pius IX in declaring him Doctor as a complete and balanced exposition of Catholic spiritual life. Pope Francis devoted to him the 2022 apostolic letter Totum Amoris Est on the four-hundredth anniversary of his death.
Patronages
writers · journalists · the Catholic press · the deaf
Catholic Churches Named After Saint Francis de Sales
20 parishes on Catholic Church Times share Saint Francis de Sales's name. Find their Mass times, confession schedules, and adoration hours:
- Church of St. Francis de Sales Sitiawan — Sitiawan, PERAK
- St Francis de Sales Cathedral — Cape Coast
- Saint Francis De Sales Church — Boston, MA
- St Mary & St Francis de Sales Catholic Church — Rangiora
- St Francis de Sales, Yoxall — Yoxall, ENG
- St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church — Little Pond, PE
- St. Francis de Sales Parish — Smiths Falls, ON
- St. Francis De Sales Catholic Church
- Saint Francis de Sales Cathedral — Baker City, OR
- Saint Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church — Aston Township, PA
- St Francis de Sales' Parish, Millmerran — Millmerran, QLD
- St. Francis de Sales — Giant's Lake, NS
- St. Francis de Sales — God's Lake Narrows, MB
- Saint Francis de Sales Catholic Church — Las Vegas, NV
- St. Francis de Sales — Paducah, KY
- Saint Francis de Sales Church — Lebanon, OH
- St. Francis de Sales — Estelline, SD
- Saint Francis de Sales (Washington) — Washington, DC
- St. Francis De Sales — Lansing, KS
- St. Francis De Sales — Cincinnati, OH
Sources