Suggest an Edit — Confessor Francis de Sales

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Biography

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Francis de Sales was born on 21 August 1567 at the Château de Sales near Thorens in the Duchy of Savoy, the eldest son of François de Sales, Seigneur de Boisy, and Françoise de Sionnaz. Destined by his father for a legal and political career, he received a careful education first at the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris and then at the University of Padua, where he obtained a doctorate in civil and canon law. A period of intense spiritual anxiety about predestination, resolved through prayer before an image of the Virgin in Paris, confirmed his desire for the priesthood. Against his father's wishes he was ordained in 1593 and was soon named provost of the cathedral chapter of Geneva, then in exile at Annecy because Geneva itself had become the centre of Calvinism.

From 1594 he spent several years as a missionary in the Chablais, a Savoyard territory that had largely gone over to the Reformed faith. He relied on patient preaching, personal interviews, and short printed leaflets rather than on coercion. His courtesy and persistence gradually restored Catholicism in much of the district. Consecrated Bishop of Geneva in 1602, he continued to reside at Annecy and devoted himself to implementing the reforms of the Council of Trent: parish visitations, catechesis, clerical formation, and an unusually accessible ministry of preaching and spiritual direction that reached nobles, artisans, and the poor alike.

His Introduction to the Devout Life, assembled from letters of direction and published in 1609, taught that holiness is attainable in ordinary secular occupations and became one of the most widely read spiritual books of the early modern period. The later Treatise on the Love of God developed a more systematic theology of charity. In 1610, together with Jane Frances de Chantal, he founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, originally conceived as a congregation for women unable to observe the strict enclosure and austerities of older orders.

While returning from a mission undertaken on behalf of the Duke of Savoy, Francis suffered a stroke in Lyon and died there on 28 December 1622. His body was conveyed to Annecy and interred in the church of the Visitation. Pope Alexander VII beatified him in 1661 and canonized him in 1665; Pope Pius IX proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church in 1877. His feast is celebrated on 24 January. He is invoked as patron of writers, journalists, the Catholic press, and the deaf, the last patronage arising from his efforts to instruct a deaf man by means of signs.

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