Saint Francis de Sales
Bishop of Geneva and Doctor of the Church1567–1622
Feast · January 24
- Where to pray
- Annecy, Thorens-Glières
- Patron of
- journalists and Catholic writers, named by Pope Pius XI in 1923.
Life
Francis was born on August 21, 1567, at the castle of Sales near Thorens, in Savoy, the son of the lord of Boisy, of an old noble family. From 1578 he studied at the Jesuit college of Clermont in Paris. There, at about twenty, he went through a grave spiritual crisis over his salvation and found peace in the resolve to love God without asking anything in return. He then studied law at the University of Padua and took his doctorate in 1591.
He was ordained a priest on December 18, 1593, and in 1594 he was sent to the Chablais, on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, to win its people back from Calvinism. Named bishop of Geneva, he was ordained bishop on December 8, 1602. Since Geneva was a Calvinist city, its bishops lived at Annecy, and there he spent the rest of his life; in the winter of 1606–1607 he founded the Académie Florimontane there with the jurist Antoine Favre.
His Introduction to the Devout Life taught that holiness is possible in every state of life. In the preface to his Treatise on the Love of God he wrote that in the Church “everything pertains to love,” the words that gave their title to Pope Francis’s apostolic letter of December 28, 2022. On June 6, 1610, with Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, he founded at Annecy the Order of the Visitation, which joined the contemplative life to the care of the sick.
Francis died at Lyon on December 28, 1622, at fifty-five, in the gardener’s lodge of the Visitation monastery. His body was brought back to Annecy on January 24, 1623, the date now kept as his feast.
Further reading: Paray-le-Monial: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Sacred Heart; Black Madonnas of France: A Pilgrim’s Guide; Sacred Heart in France: Paray-le-Monial to Montmartre.
Cult and relics
Pope Alexander VII beatified Francis in 1661 and canonized him on April 19, 1665. Pope Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1877, and on January 26, 1923, Pope Pius XI named him patron of journalists and Catholic writers. His relics were venerated in the church of the first Visitation monastery at Annecy until the Revolution, and on August 2, 1911, they were carried with those of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal to the new basilica of the Visitation, escorted by thousands of the people of Annecy.
Saint John Bosco named his Salesians after him. The Visitation spread from Annecy to monasteries across Europe and the Americas, among them houses in the United States, and Pope Francis marked the four hundredth anniversary of his death with the letter Totum amoris est.
In art
At Thorens the chapel of Sales, built in 1672 by his nephews on the site of the room where he was born, in the castle destroyed in 1630, keeps a baroque altarpiece of 1677. At Annecy the basilica of the Visitation, which holds his relics, stands on a rock above the town, with a bell tower 236 feet high and a carillon of thirty-eight bells.
Patron of
Patron of journalists and Catholic writers, named by Pope Pius XI in 1923.
Where to pray
- Annecy, Basilica of the VisitationThe church on the hill above the town where his relics have rested since 1911, beside those of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal.
- Annecy, church of Saint-François-de-SalesThe church of the first Visitation monastery, where the sisters moved in 1612 and where his relics were venerated until the Revolution.
- Annecy, Maison de la GalerieThe house where the Visitation began on June 6, 1610, kept today by the Sisters of Saint Joseph.
- Thorens-GlièresThe chapel of Sales, on the site of the room where he was born; it is private, and visitors see the interior through a glass door.
On our ways: Annecy.