Saint Francis de Sales: Doctor of Love

1626

My very dear Mother in Our Lord,     

    This letter is meant to let you know that there are others besides the domestic servants who honor and cherish the master of the house, that is to say, your venerable Father… You must then be a daughter and Religious with a great heart, as your holy Father once wrote to a very courtly lord: “The house of the Visitation has to be a house of daughters with great heart, in order to be daughters of a Father who had a heart that was greater and larger that the diameter of the earth.”   Francis de Sales, whom I named, in the presence of your daughters yesterday, ‘the Prelate of divine love, the Bishop of charity‘.  Blessed are the eyes which have seen the things that you have seen!                                                                                                                       

                                                                     Father François Barroise, S.J.  to Mother Paula-Jéronyme    (L’Année Sainte, Vol. V, p.77)

Webster’s Third Unabridged Dictionary, 1935, defines “doctor” as teacher, with the etymology of the French verb, docere, “to teach” being noted.  In 33 Doctors of the Church, its author Fr. Christopher Rengers, O.F.M. states, “There are three requisites for this highly distinguished title: holiness of life, importance and orthodoxy of writings, and official recognition by the Church.”  In his brief declaring St. Francis a Doctor of the Church on November 16, 1877, Pope Pius IX connected his work as Doctor of Love to devotion to the Sacred Heart, stating: “It is in particular marvelous how, filled with the Spirit of God and drawing near to the Author of sweetness Himself, Saint Francis de Sales sowed the seeds of this Devotion to the Sacred Heart which, in these unhappy times, we have the great joy of seeing marvelously spread, to the great profit of religion.”  Past-master of spiritual direction, Francis de Sales, Doctor of the Church, is a sure guide to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.   Long before Jesus’ revelations to the Visitandine of Paray-le-Monial, Saint Margaret Mary, Francis de Sales lived and taught this devotion.  In Margaret Williams’ book, The Sacred Heart in the life of the Church, she notes, “It was not sufficient for him to write a Treatise on the Love of God; Saint Francis clothed his own person in that sweet charity, so humorous, benign, and self-spending, with which he gave himself away to souls in need… He drew his charity from the Heart of the God-man, with whom he could so truly say, ‘Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart.’ ”  (p.95)

In Bishop Bougaud’s classic Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, Chapter VIII,  he details point by point how the Sacred Heart was established to be the abode of the daughters of the Visitation.  One paragraph serves as a summary:  “Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus! This is the name that St. Francis de Sales gave to his religious sixty years before the revelation made to Margaret Mary.  He established them to be the ‘adorers of the Sacred Heart’; ‘the servants of the Sacred Heart’.   The Heart of Jesus will be ‘their sojourn’; ‘to take from Jesus His Heart, and to open their breast to lodge Him therein, as in a sanctuary’ “. (p.48)

Because Jesus “formed his (Francis’) heart on the model of His own and rendered it the meekest and humblest of all hearts” (LSMMA, p.144), and because his careful pedagogy is developed “in spirit and truth”, we can trust this Doctor of Divine Love to teach us true devotion to His Sacred Heart.