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The saints

St. Francis de Sales

A young lawyer volunteered for the hardest mission in Savoy, and won it with patience.

Feast: 24 January · 1567 to 1622 · Reformation and missions · Savoy and Annecy

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The Basilica of the Visitation at Annecy: a pale stone church with a tall pointed spire against a blue sky.

Medium69 (William Crochot), 2015. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Home / The saints / St. Francis de Sales

Le Chablais, Savoy, 1594

The territory of Le Chablais, south of Lake Geneva, has had the Reformed faith imposed on it by Geneva.1

A young priest with a doctorate in law volunteers to go there.1

He confuted the preachers sent by Geneva to oppose him. One by one, people began to return.

Patron of all writers2

01St. Francis de Sales

Bishop of Geneva

Francis was born at Thorens in the Duchy of Savoy in 1567 and studied in Paris and Padua.1

He became Bishop of Geneva, whose seat had been fixed at Annecy since the Reformation.1

With St. Jane Frances de Chantal he founded the Order of the Visitation in 1607.1

02St. Francis de Sales

Annecy

He died at Lyons in 1622 and his body was brought back to Annecy, though his heart was left at Lyons.1

The Basilica of the Visitation at Annecy: a pale stone church with a tall pointed spire against a blue sky.
The Basilica of the Visitation at Annecy, where St. Francis de Sales is buried. Medium69 (William Crochot), 2015. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

He wrote that holiness is for everyone: soldiers, merchants, mothers. People believed him because he was so gentle.

Live it this week

Answer gently, in writing

Francis won over a hostile region with patience, even scattering handwritten leaflets when no one would come hear him. Before you post or reply to anything heated this week, rewrite it once to be gentler. If it isn’t kind, don’t send it.

Notes

How we know · 2 sources for this page
  1. Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), “St. Francis de Sales”. New Advent edition. newadvent.org
  2. Pius XI, Rerum omnium perturbationem (1923), 34. vatican.va. vatican.va

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.