St. Francis de Sales: The Doctor of Divine Love for Today

Upon his election as pope in March, 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio chose the unprecedented name “Francis.” People at first assumed that he was honoring Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the great Jesuit missionary to China. It soon became clear, however, that Pope Francis’s namesake was in fact the Franciscan poverello, Francis of Assisi (d. 1226). The affinity between these two Francises is obvious. Like his holy patron, Pope Francis (d. 2025) had a heart for the poor; he echoed Saint Francis’s “Canticle of the Creatures” in the title and content of his encyclical Laudato si’; and he strove for peace amid the outbreak of Russia’s war against Ukraine, dedicating his pontificate at its outset to our Lady of Fatima.

As his papacy progressed, however, Pope Francis developed a closer relationship to another Saint Francis, namely, Saint Francis de Sales (1567–1622). Composed in the last year of his life, Pope Francis’s beautiful encyclical Dilexit Nos (2024) explains the history and significance of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In it, Pope Francis devotes five paragraphs to the teaching of Saint Francis de Sales on the heart of Jesus. Co-founder with Saint Jane Frances de Chantal (1572–1641) of the Sisters of the Visitation, Francis de Sales had a devotion to Christ’s heart that certainly prepared the ground for the mysticism of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690), a Visitandine nun. Two years before the encyclical Dilexit Nos, however, on December 28, 2022, Pope Francis issued an apostolic letter, Totum amoris est, to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Francis de Sales. The apostolic letter gives evidence of Pope Francis’s serious meditation upon the early modern saint, known today as the “Doctor of Divine Love.” In Totum amoris est, we find this passage:

On this anniversary of the fourth centenary of his death, I have given much thought to the legacy of Saint Francis de Sales for our time. I find that his flexibility and his far-sighted vision have much to say to us. Partly by God’s gift and partly thanks to his own character, but also by his steady cultivation of lived experience, Francis perceived clearly that the times were changing. On his own, he might never have imagined that those changes represented so great an opportunity for the preaching of the Gospel. The word of God that he had loved from his youth now opened up before him new and unexpected horizons in a rapidly changing world. That same task awaits us in this, our own age of epochal change (§§19-20).

Pope Francis obviously saw the saintly doctor, Francis de Sales, as a kindred spirit, someone who found joy in spreading the Gospel, and who sought to do so in a manner suited to the tumultuous climate of the times, making use of its exigencies as evangelical opportunities. I suspect that Totum amoris est spurred Pope Francis’s thought in the direction of the much longer encyclical, Dilexit Nos. Jesus has loved us (dilexit nos), because in the divine plan, “everything pertains to love” (totum amoris est). As John Cavadini has written, Pope Francis was calling for a “revolution of tenderness,” the tenderness of a heartfelt love—a love from heart to heart that salvages, preserves, strengthens, and sanctifies our humanity.

Building upon Pope Francis’s observation that Francis de Sales has a legacy for our time, I would like, first, to point to three ways in which the challenges of the late sixteenth century stand parallel to our own challenges. First, like Christians in the era of Reform and Counter-Reform, we experience a violent polarization here and abroad. Second, iconoclastic currents are destructively at work. And, third, technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence, and the media increasingly unveil a manifold, dehumanizing potential. Then, I will comment on how Saint Francis’s teaching on the human and the divine heart delineates an indispensable, pastoral and pedagogical strategy of love suited to times like ours.

Point one: polarization. Polarization in politics and in international affairs is a palpable reality about which nearly everyone talks—often in a way that serves to increase polarization through a rhetoric of blaming the other for the polarization. And it does not stop with words; it “speaks,” so to speak, with guns, knives, riots, assassinations, firing squads, missiles, land mines, and drones. The Protestant and Catholic polemical tracts written during the early modern period were also frequently incendiary, bearing fruit in violence against people and property. The infamous Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which began in Paris on the eve of that saint’s feast in August, 1572, left thousands of French Huguenots dead. As bishop of Geneva, the stronghold of Calvinism, Francis de Sales suffered several assassination attempts. He was not allowed to reside in Geneva, his episcopal see. A learned, gentle man, he was remarkable in that often cruel age for his clearly reasoned, but gentle apologetics and for his humane, respectful outreach to Protestants like the French Calvinist Theodore Beza (1519–1605), whom Francis befriended and tried, albeit without success, to win back to the Catholic Church.

Point two: iconoclasm. In one of his apologetic works, The Defense of the Cross, Francis de Sales defended the erection of a large cross on the road toward Geneva against the complaint of a Calvinist protestor. Writing to instruct, Francis explained the meaning and value of such a visible emblem of the faith. During those tumultuous years, Catholic churches often suffered iconoclastic attacks that tore down religious statues and paintings, mutilating and defacing them. The theological argument advanced by Protestant iconoclasts at that time was that such artwork detracted from the true image of God found in the human person, and that the money spent beautifying the house of God would be better spent feeding the poor.[1] Francis de Sales, like Pope Francis after him, championed the value of devotional artwork—statues, crosses, and icons—as an important means to discover, protect, and express human dignity. Strange to say, we have entered into a newly iconoclastic age here in the United States. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, at least 396 incidents of vandalism have occurred in Catholic churches across 43 states and the District of Columbia since May 2020.

A frequent anti-Catholic theme in these acts of vandalism, contrastive with the argument of sixteenth-century Calvinists, is that the Church’s upholding of human life as sacred is symbolically expressed (and consistent with) in its sacramental veneration of God and the saints in objects of stone and wood, carved and painted. Therefore, just as babies may be aborted, the “body” of the church and of its religious art may be cut and slashed. More recently, children may even be martyred while at prayer in a Catholic church during Holy Mass, as occurred on August 27 of this year at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis.

Point three; dehumanizing technologies. The astonishing inventiveness of our technology—of AI composition, robotics, and the internet—has proven gravely threatening to human life, ushering in the triumph of the post-human. The isolation fostered by nearly constant internet use is taking a huge toll on our mental health. My students tell me that despair, hopelessness—one of the seven deadly sins—is laying its claim to being the chief of the sins in their young lives, in part because they are constantly being inundated with local and global bad news, threatening war and violence; in part because they are lonely, lacking a sense of belonging to flesh-and-blood persons who care about them. No amount of internet contacts and ChatGPT exchanges can substitute for real friends with an interior life, a heart that cares. The world of robotics proposes to us that machines, thinking and talking like humans, will satisfy our need for friends. A quick internet search reveals thousands of offerings that advertise the possibility of robotic friendship. “If I only had a heart,” lamented the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.

Not unlike many high-striving students today, Saint Francis de Sales himself suffered a severe depression leading even to his hospitalization during his student days at Clermont, the Jesuit school in Paris. The world around him was in violent turmoil, political and religious; he was still young, scrupulous, and struggling to find an inner balance; Protestant doctrine about a double predestination to hell or heaven seized his soul with an existential anxiety and near despair, despite Catholic teaching to the contrary. The contemporary, theological polarization put his very access to truth itself seemingly in jeopardy. This severe spiritual and psychological crisis ended in an hour of grace when the young Francis, kneeling before a statue of the Black Madonna, prayed the Memorare, abandoning himself to Mary’s intercession and to the loving mercy of God: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known, that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided . . . .” As Wendy Wright describes it, the young seminarian’s “audacious spiritual leap of freedom,” a leap of unconditional surrender to God out of childlike trust in him, an “act of “Pure Love,” freed Francis from his manifold anxieties.[2]

Like Pope Francis after him, Francis de Sales pointed to the heart of Jesus, who proclaimed, “Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart” (Matt 11:29). Francis’s liturgical sermons often invoke the image of Christ’s pierced heart as the symbol of his great love for us. Answering to the great need of his times for trust in the divine mercy, Francis invited his listeners to imagine themselves looking through the wound in Jesus’s side to see the Lord’s heart, on which their names have been written:

What will we do, dear souls, . . . when through the Sacred Wound of His side we perceive that most adorable and most lovable Heart of our Master, aflame with love for us—that Heart where we will see each of our names written in letters of love! “Is it possible, O my dear Savior,” we will say, “that you have loved me so much that you have engraved my name in Your Heart?” And the prophet, speaking in the name of Our Lord, says to us, “Even if it should happen that a mother forget the child she carried in her womb, I will never forget you, for I have engraved your name in the palms of my hand.” But Jesus Christ, enlarging on these words [Isa 49:15-16], will say: “Even if it were possible for a woman to forget her child, yet I will never forget you, since I bear your name engraved in my Heart.”[3]

As Pope Francis comments, “With the image of our names written on the heart of Christ, Saint Francis sought to express the extent to which Christ’s love for each of us is not something abstract and generic, but utterly personal, enabling each believer to feel known and respected for who he or she is” (Dilexit Nos §115). The indelible nature of the inscription on the heart indicates, too, that Christ never ceases to love those for whom he died, no matter what sins they have committed. As Saint Francis points out in his Lenten sermons, Jesus gave his grace, his heart, to Peter, to Judas, and to Paul.[4]

Using the same image of the inscribed heart in a letter to Jane Francis de Chantal, Bishop de Sales, who was her friend and spiritual director, encourages her with the thought that she should see not only her own name, but also the names of all the people she loves written in the heart of Jesus, kept in Christ’s never-ending love: “Each of us can look therein and see our name carved in letters of love, which true love alone can read and true love has written. Dear God! And what too, beloved daughter, of our loved ones? Surely they will be there too; for even if our hearts have no love, they nonetheless possess a desire for love and the beginnings of love.”[5]

Father Joseph Kentenich (1885–1968), the founder of the international Schoenstatt Work, called Francis de Sales his favorite saint. Among the many signs of Salesian influence on Schoenstatt’s spirituality is the so-called inscriptio cordis in cor, the act of writing Mary’s name into one’s own heart as a sign of a deep and total self-surrender to her, heart in heart with Jesus, for the sake of others. A short prayer, frequently used by Schoenstatters, expresses this mutual writing of names in a union of hearts:

O Mother in your holy heart,
Deeply inscribe each name.
And as a sign that we are yours,
Write it with blood and flame.
In love and childlike gratitude,
Your name shall also be
Deeply inscribed within my heart
For time and eternity. Amen.[6]

Glossing this image of Christ’s heart and Mary’s heart inscribed with our names, Salesian scholar Wendy Wright (d. 2025) once recalled the incisions left on her own body after birthing three children by Caesarian section:

One is never the same. After each birth, the body adjusts. But things are never as they were before. Silver-webbed stretchmarks are only an outward sign. More hidden are the now elastic vessels of the vascular system, the pliancy of muscle walls, the flat pouch of the once inhabited womb. Each child impresses upon waxen flesh the unique imprint of its life. Inscribes one’s own life with an image all its own. Often I have thought how true that is of the heart as well. Each child occupies its own space and in growing pushes out the bounded contours of one’s heart. Each fashions a singular, ample habitation like no other. . . . A habitation inscribed with a name. How could it be otherwise in the heart of God?[7]

The comparison Professor Wright makes is apt. Saint Francis de Sales celebrated the maternal connection between the hearts of Jesus and Mary, describing them in his sermons as closely united, indeed, inseparable in their love, which was both natural and supernatural. Jesus received his human heart from Mary, and she, writes Saint Francis, “drew her knowledge from the very Heart of her dear Son, our Savior, who is the Wisdom of the Eternal Father [Sir 1:4].”[8] When she gazed upon her newborn Son, she understood that, being God Incarnate, he was the Incarnation of God’s love, God’s suffering love. In a sermon preached at Christmas, Saint Francis paints this picture for his listeners: “Oh, you will see how reverently the glorious Virgin your Mother kept looking at His Heart, all aflame with love, as she wiped the sweet tears which flowed so softly from the gentle eyes of this blessed Babe. . . . Behold, God Incarnate!”[9] At the wedding feast at Cana, Francis imagines that Mary appealed to the heart of her Son for the miracle of water turned to wine, saying to Jesus: “Your Heart is so merciful and full of pity; please grant me what I ask for these poor people.”[10] Standing beneath the cross, Mary’s heart was pierced along with Christ’s for the love of God’s children. “Father, forgive them,” Jesus prayed. “With this prayer,” Saint Francis explains, “[Jesus] wanted to make us understand the love He bore us, undiminished by any suffering, and to teach us how our heart should be toward our neighbor.”[11]

Just as the hearts of Jesus and Mary were joined as one, so too in their union of hearts the hearts of Christians should be united with one another. Writing to Saint Jane Francis about the religious community they were co-founding, Saint Francis envisions the emblem of the Sisters of the Holy Visitation: “I think we should take for our coat of arms a single heart pierced with two arrows, enclosed in a crown of thorns, and surmounted by a cross. This poor heart will be engraved with the sacred names of Jesus and Mary.”[12] Pope Francis, along with many other scholars, is not wrong to see this emblem of the Order of the Visitation also as a symbol of the bond of holy, heartfelt friendship between the two co-founder saints, Francis de Sales and Jane Francis de Chantal.

To come to a full understanding of the devotion to the Sacred Heart expressed in this emblem, however, one must turn to St. Francis de Sales’ theological masterpieces, the Introduction to the Devout Life and his Treatise on the Love of God. One might (wrongly) expect that the Treatise takes as its rhetorical starting point God himself, the divine love that unites the three Persons of the Trinity, and that overflows in the works of creation and salvation. Instead, the titular “love of God” points to God as the objective genitive. The treatise is about the human being’s love for God. In particular, it describes the origin, the starting point, of that love in the human heart; what hinders and what enables that love to grow and develop; and finally, how that love of God perfectly obtains its object in loving union with God. “Love,” writes St. Francis, “is simply the movement, outflowing, and progression of the heart towards good.”[13] Man’s love for God, of course, “owes its origin, growth, and perfection to God’s eternal love for us,”[14] as we read in Book Four of the Treatise.

The first four books of the Treatise constitute the theoretical part, followed by eight books on charity in practice. The last three books provide a synthesis of the theoretical and practical parts. Although the imagery of the Sacred Heart is not pronounced in the Treatise on the Love of God, its meaning is everywhere present, as indicated in the prayer with which St. Francis dedicates the work to the hearts of Jesus and Mary:

Beloved Mother of the well-beloved Son . . . humbly I dedicate this little work of love to your intense affection for the Child you bore. I entreat you, through the heart of your dear Jesus, who is king of all hearts, to inspire me and all who read this book . . . to offer ourselves, our loves, as holocausts to God. Inspire us so to live and die that we may come to life again eternally, that we may burn with the fire of charity which our Lord, your Son, so greatly wished to kindle in our hearts (Luke 12:49); for which he worked, for which he longed unceasingly, until it brought him to death, death on a cross (Phil 2:8).[15]

In this prayer, the hearts of Mary and Jesus are interlocked with each other and with our own hearts, which are meant to burn with a love like their own, the love of charity. Jesus died, we are told, to set our own hearts afire with love. Notice, too, that Mary’s love for Jesus is described as an “intense affection for the child [she] bore,” a truly human love, instinctive, rich with feeling, but also spiritually enlightened.

For St. Francis, the human being is not in the first place a thinker, but a lover, a being that loves and that starts to love already in the cradle, if not even earlier, in the womb: “Emotions, in short, are the only things that move the will; among these, love—the first mover and principal emotion—gives impetus to all the rest, the spark for every other movement of the soul.”[16] Saint Francis explains:

Love . . . is the first feeling of satisfaction at the awareness of good; so, obviously, it comes before desire—in fact, we only desire things when we love them; it comes before pleasure; for would we find pleasure or joy in anything if we did not love it? It comes before hope, because hope reaches out only to a future good that we love. It comes before hatred, for we only hate evil, because we love good; evil is only evil because it is opposed to the good. It is the same with the other passions or emotions; they come from love—their root, the source of all their activity.[17]

For Francis, love begins with a feeling of attraction, but it does not end there. When asked about what causes an attraction, the saint gives a twofold answer: similarity and complementarity. The child, for instance, instinctively senses a similarity between itself and its parents, and vice versa: the parents see something of themselves in the child. At the same time, the child’s weakness seeks to be complemented by the parents’ power to care for him or her, and the parents discover that new powers of love are awakened in them as they are complemented by the small, needy child in their arms.

The qualities of similarity and difference are easily seen to apply to the human being’s relationship with God. Created in the imago Dei (Genesis 1:27), the human being is intrinsically similar to God, who “is love” (1 John 4:8); at the same time, an infinite distance exists between the Almighty Father and the little creature whom God sustains in existence. Both features, in Francis’s analysis, make it possible for the human being to love God: “Man needs the completion that only God can give—so humanity provides God with an outlet for the external expression of his perfection. . . . God is full of all good things, and longs to give them.”[18] At the same time, “the human heart’s natural delight, natural trust in God is due solely to the relationship between soul and God,” which is “the closest of connections,” for the human soul is “wearing the image and likeness of God.”[19] The love of God, in short, has a natural basis in the human heart. As Pope Francis explains in Totum amoris est,

An experience of God is intrinsic to the human heart. Far from a mental construct, it is a recognition, filled with awe and gratitude, of God’s self-manifestation. In the heart and through the heart, there comes about a subtle, intense and unifying process in which we come to know God and, at the same time, ourselves, our own origins and depths, and our fulfilment in the call to love (§2).

The process that Saint Francis describes in his Treatise on the Love of God is one of growth from what he calls “selfish love” to “unselfish” or “benevolent” love. Selfish love loves something or someone because of what we get out of it; unselfish love simply desires the other’s good for its own sake. Perfected love loves God for God’s own sake:[20] “Once faith has pictured to the mind the beauty of the goal of its natural tendency [to love the good], God alone knows how we thrill through and through with joy and happiness!”[21] Through our willing cooperation with grace, love becomes virtuous. “For love to reach maturity, when we love God more than anything else,” St. Francis instructs, “that demands the life of grace, the habit of charity.”[22] Benevolent love can then further develop into a variety of affective forms, especially the form of friendship. Saint Francis defines charity as “the unselfish love of friendship, by which we love God for his own sake, because his goodness is supremely lovable.”[23]

Like Saint Francis of Assisi, St. Francis de Sales must have loved birds, because his writings include many comparisons to different kinds of birds. In his Treatise on the Love of God, for example, he brings up the example of a bird with very short legs, a ground-roller (apodens) that, when fallen to the ground, cannot fly on its own unless it is caught up by a gust of wind. As St. Francis explains, the wind that raises us up from our earthly attachments, the wind that catches our wings, enabling our flight of love upward to God, is the Holy Spirit.[24]

Let me conclude with some pedagogical reflections, important for us here at our Lady’s University, but also wherever education takes place, beginning in the home and family life. St. Don Bosco, founder in 1859 of the Salesians, drew his practical principles of education from the teaching of St. Francis de Sales. Working with poor and migrant youth during the Industrial Revolution, Don Bosco understood that love is the starting point for each child’s flourishing. According to Don Bosco, the child must not only know, but also feel, that he or she is loved by the educator.[25] Love awakens the child’s love, trust, openness, and hope. Love precedes and motivates the child’s learning, which involves the child’s whole self in its development. In his “Philosophy of Education,” the Servant of God Father Joseph Kentenich similarly stresses this principle, invoking Francis de Sales and Don Bosco by name.[26] Blessed Basil Moreau, CSC, dedicated himself and the Congregation of Holy Cross to an educational mission involving mind and heart.

The reason the human heart must be involved in each one’s work of education and self-education is ultimately because God is love; the human being, made in God’s image and likeness, is made by love, through love, and for love. Naturally, this theology places a high demand upon the educator, who must invest himself or herself benevolently in every child, each student. But Jesus himself offers the example, the way, and the means: “Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of Heart” (Matt. 11:29).

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally delivered as a Saturdays With the Saints lecture, sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life, on October 4, 2024. Michael Baxter will deliver next lecture in the series on October 18, 2025 at 10:30AM in the Andrews Auditorium of Geddes Hall.

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