Letters to Persons in Religion

Introduction | Book-I | Book-II | Book-III | Book-IV | Book-V | Book-VI

Introduction by Bishop Hedley on SFS and the Religious Life

IT IS A great pleasure to introduce to Catholic readers, and to others, this, the fourth, volume of the Rev. Henry Benedict Mackey’s translation of the complete works of St. Francis of Sales. It comprises a very complete selection of the holy Doctor’s Letters to “religious” persons. These letters are characterised not only by that depth, sweetness, and attractiveness which we find in all his utterances, but also by matured and powerful instructions, worthy of so great a spiritual director, on the subject of the religious life of persons consecrated to God.

Although St. Francis was not himself a religious, and was indeed occupied during his whole life rather with the care of souls, with anxious missionary work and with the reformation of people of the world, than with monks or nuns, yet it is well known that the religious state shared in his solicitude, his lights and his prayers. It is only necessary to mention the Order of the Visitation for religious women, which he founded, and which still happily flourishes, and to recall to mind the history of the vocation and direction of St. Jane Frances de Chantal.

But in truth the influence of St. Francis of Sales on the religious life is far deeper and more widespread than most people imagine. The beginning of the seventeenth century, when he lived (he died in 1622), was a time when religious life for women was beginning to take new shapes and directions. The moment had come, in God’s providence, when women were to be uncloistered, yet true religious, and were to be formed into societies which should spread far beyond this or that particular diocese. It was not given to St. Francis to establish, or even perhaps to foresee, the new condition of things. For the history of his own foundation is very curious and instructive. His first idea was to found a society of pious women under the diocesan Bishop; a mere Congregation, not a religious order, with simple and not solemn vows, without any formal or canonical enclosure, wearing the dress of secular women, and devoting their lives to the “visitation” of the sick and the poor. The scene at Annecy, when he finally declared to St. Jane Frances what she was called to, places before us in the most striking manner what was passing in his thoughts. She had fallen on her knees before him, and he said, in order to try her, “You are to be a Poor Clare.” “Father,” she replied, “I am ready.” “No,” he continued, “you are not strong enough—you must be a Soeur hospitalière.” “Father, whatever you please.” “Not that either,” said the Saint, “you must be a Carmelite.” “Father, I am ready to obey.” “No,” he said, “what God wants from you is something different; he destines you to establish an order which shall be ruled over by the charity and sweetness of Jesus Christ, into which shall be admitted the weak and the infirm, and whose work shall be to tend the sick and to visit the poor.” When the holy Bishop uttered these words, St. Jane Frances tells us that she felt herself interiorly moved to acquiescence, and filled with light and gentle satisfaction, such as she had not experienced when he made the preceding proposals; so that she knew that this was truly God’s will. It was God’s will; but it was to be fulfilled in a way which, as it would seem, neither of them was given to comprehend even at that moment of divine impulse and illumination. It was all to come true; but the reality was to be far more wonderful than their saintly humility then suspected. St. Francis of Sales was finally overruled by Monseigneur de Marquemont, Archbishop of Lyons, and consented that the Visitation should be a regular religious Order. By a special bull of Pope Paul V., he erected it as such in the year of our Lord 1618.

There were, perhaps, four things as to which St. Francis thought that a change would be good for religious women. Two of them I have already alluded to. The modification of enclosure he gave up, in as far as regards his own foundation. The authority or influence of a Mother-General seems at first sight a point to which he attached no importance; for he insists, over and over again, that every house of religious women ought to be under the immediate jurisdiction of the diocesan Bishop. Nevertheless, it is clear to anyone who studies his Letters and his method of directing foundations, that he held it to be of the utmost moment that the different houses of the Institute should be one in spirit and in practice. We have a letter—translated at p. 232 of this volume—in which he expresses himself most decidedly on the subject of a rumour that the Archbishop of Lyons is going to introduce new laws into the Visitation in that city. In another letter, we have directions to St. Jane Frances as to her “visitation” of the Houses of France (p. 234). Not that the Superioress of the Mother House, or even the Bishop of that House, had any absolute authority over foundations in another diocese; but that it was essential that there should be such communication between the Houses that a kind of moral authority should be acknowledged as belonging to the chief seat of the traditions of the Order. The Visitation is the most conspicuous example in the Church of a religious Order of women holding together in spirit and flourishing in numbers through two centuries by the power and virtue of the instructions of its saintly founders and the intercommunication of the Houses with one another and with the Mother House at Annecy. The government of women by women, admitted from the beginning of the Church in each particular convent, was not recognised on a larger scale till some time afterwards; but the principle has worked in the Visitation since the time of St. Jane Frances. It is she who has been the perpetual Mother-General.

The third point in which the holy Bishop of Geneva made an innovation was the obligation of the Divine Office. This he endeavoured, and with success, to change, in the Visitation, into the Little Office. For his reasons, the reader may find some of them in Letter XXXIV of the present translation (p. 161). He did not conceal his opinion that in more than one convent the recitation of the Divine Office was got through in a way that might “well make the Huguenots laugh.”

The fourth point relates to what he calls the very spirit of the Visitation. When he yielded to the representations of the Archbishop of Lyons, and allowed his little Congregation to pass into the state of an Order, he reserved two things—which, indeed, as far as our present purpose is concerned, may be put down as one. He tells Mother Favre—the generous Savoyard who was among the first three admitted to the vows—that he had yielded without reserve to the Archbishop, except as regards the “principal end” of the Congregation, viz. “that widows should be admitted into the monasteries, these to live in their secular dress till they were free from encumbrance and able to take the habit, and that secular women might come in and live there for a time for devotional purposes.” Thus did he carry out, in spite of all, that inspiration of charitable “visitation” which he received in the beginning. His daughters were not to “visit” outside, but to receive within their own walls those who needed their help. It was the same loving thoughtfulness for others which made him prescribe that consideration of health and strength should not be allowed to exclude from the habit such candidates as were otherwise suitable. “Je suis grand partisan des infirmes,” he writes to a Sister of the Visitation: —

“And am always afraid lest the inconveniences which they cause should excite a spirit of prudence in the houses, and a tendency to desire to dismiss them without getting leave from the spirit of charity, under which our Congregation has been founded, and for which there has been expressly made the distinction of sisters which is seen therein. I favour then the cause of your sick person, and provided that she is humble and acknowledges herself indebted to charity, you must receive her, poor daughter. It will be a continual holy exercise for the charity of the sisters” (p. 189).

To St. Francis, indeed, the monastery was a refuge, an infirmary, in which poor sick and suffering souls were to be treated and cured, and infirm bodies cherished and ministered to. He says, in the thirteenth Entretien, that the Spirit of the Visitation is the humble love of God and “extreme sweetness” towards our neighbour.

It is interesting, and by no means fanciful, to trace the influence of these four points of St. Francis of Sales on the development of Institutes for religious women during the two centuries and a half which have elapsed since his time. These institutions may perhaps be roughly classified under three different heads. First there are the associations, which are not strictly “religious congregations,” because they only take private, and generally temporary vows, such as the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Next there are the Institutes, which have more or less followed the rule and spirit of St. Ignatius, such as the English Virgins, with those widespread Irish branches which have sprung from them; also the Sacré Coeur, the Sisters of Mercy, &c. In the third place come the Orders, chiefly French, on the model of the Congregation of Charity and Refuge founded by Père Eudes. A moment’s consideration will show that the three great legislators for religious in these latter centuries have been St. Vincent de Paul, St. Ignatius, and St. Francis of Sales. Perhaps the word “legislator” is not the right one; these great Saints have, two of them at least, legislated for women; but their influence has mostly come from their firm grasp of certain principles which Divine Providence inspired them to see clearly. The need for a society in which women might live in strict obedience, and yet wholly devoted to charity, was made known to St. Vincent de Paul almost at the same time as to St. Francis. Does not the congregation of the Sisters of Charity seem almost to correspond to the ideal which the latter Saint showed to St. Jane? But God’s thoughts are richer and more fertile than all that even his Saints can take in, and St. Vincent carried out that inspiration in one way, St. Francis in another. The work of St. Ignatius has been not less wonderful, though more indirect. It is worthy of remark, that at the very moment when St. Francis was taking steps to have the Visitation approved at Rome, Mary Ward was in Rome also, and pleading her cause before the tribunals. The “innovations” proposed by that great foundress have nearly all been accepted now; but at the time they were thought to be very doubtful; indeed, and what is worse, the behaviour of some at least of her associates was not calculated to inspire the authorities with confidence. Mary Ward wanted to do away with canonical enclosure, to let her nuns go about the country almost like missionaries, to undertake the teaching of catechism, and to have all the convents of her institute placed under one Mother-General. Her vision has been realised, in the Presentation, the Loretto Sisters, the Irish Sisters of Mercy, and those innumerable offshoots or modifications of these Orders which are even yet multiplying. St. Ignatius, in spite of the Pontifical privilege that his Order should never have to govern nuns, is the patriarch of these active Orders, and has given them their statutes, their discipline, and their freedom for every charitable work. The devoted Congregations which I have called French, with their offshoots, have inherited the spirit of St. Francis of Sales.

For example, the Constitutions of Père Eudes’s institute are almost word for word those of the Visitation, although it is true that he has added one or two which St. Francis himself might have signed. The holy Doctor wished his daughters to “visit” the poor and sick. God has brought the poor and the sick to the very doors of their cells, under the very roof of their chapels. That loving sweetness and devoted sacrifice which were his characteristics are multiplied day by day, all the world over, wherever communities of white-robed nuns gather around them the miseries of nature, of misfortune, or of sin, and practise upon their alleviation the lessons which St. Francis of Sales dictated to the first daughters of the Visitation.

The book now offered to the reader contains these lessons, not in the form of a cold abridgment, but in the warm and living words of the Saint himself. Most of the Letters are naturally addressed to Sisters of the Visitation—many to St. Jane Frances herself. But there are a few also to members of other religious orders. Those in which he speaks so prudently and tenderly of “reformation” are addressed mostly to the Abbess of Puits d’Orbe, a house which was Benedictine in name, but from which secular troubles had banished the Benedictine spirit for a century past. The “general instructions” at the end of this volume contain those treasured instructions which the Saint had either written for particular sisters in a more formal shape than a letter, or which the sisters themselves had reduced to writing in the shape of memoranda for the spiritual life. Among them is the “Livret,” or book of answers given by St. Francis to various questions on the spirit and practice of the Visitation.

The Letters translated by Father Mackey in this volume are of every kind —from trivial to weighty, from playful to severe, from the first instructions of beginners to the deepest counsels of mystical theology. The series of Letters to St. Jane Frances with which the Third Book opens are like a commentary on the sublimest parts of the Amour de Dieu. The letter in which he replies to some sister who had naively asked him how he would behave if he lived in her community, is such as one would expect from a finished master to a simple and well-meaning soul. We have letters to superiors, letters to “officers” of a house, letters to novices; letters to the tempted, to the suffering, to the faint-hearted, to the over-busy. The volume is a series of illustrations of his well-known views—of detachment from earth, of abandonment to God, of patience with ourselves, of “extreme sweetness” for others. Like every great spiritual doctor, he does not trouble himself whether his teachings are “new things” or “old.” There is little that can be called absolutely new in spiritual learning, unless it is also false; but St. Francis leaves in the heart the impression of one who has been raised up to teach the importance of interior acts over exterior, of simple and direct “views” of God as against complicated spirituality, and of the ever-presence of Christ in every human creature around us. Of all this the book is full. Let me give one specimen—a passage in a letter probably written to Mother de Chastel, at Grenoble, in 1620; it is on the subject of trust in God and tranquillity: —

“You go considering your steps too much for fear of falling. You make too much reflection on the movements of your self-love, which are doubtless frequent, but which will never be dangerous so long as, tranquilly, not letting yourself be annoyed by their importunity nor alarmed by their multitude you, say No. Walk simply; do not desire repose of spirit too earnestly, and you will have the more of it. Why do you put yourself in trouble? God is good, he sees very well what you are; your inclinations cannot hurt you, bad as they may be, since they are only left to you to exercise your superior will in making a more profitable union with that of God. Keep your eyes uplifted, my dear daughter, by a perfect confidence in the goodness of God. Do not be anxiously solicitous for him, for he told Martha that he did not wish it, or at least that he was better pleased that there should be no solicitude even in doing good. Do not examine your soul so much about its advancement. Do not want to be so perfect, but in simple earnest spend your life in your exercises, and in the actions which come to be done in their time. Be not solicitous for to-morrow. As to your path, God, who has guided you up to the present, will guide you to the end. Remain in entire peace, in the holy and loving confidence which you ought to have in the sweetness of heavenly Providence” (p. 199).

This volume will therefore serve as an admirable manual of spiritual reading for religious, especially for those whose institute is modelled on the Visitation or carries out the great principle of mercy and compassion which lies at the root of all that St. Francis wished religious women to do.

Perhaps it may be necessary to make one observation here. If one wished to have a true idea of the perfection of a holy person, one would hardly get it from that person’s letters to her confessor, or from the director’s instructions to herself. We must not then judge of the advanced state of the first Mothers of the Visitation from what we read in these letters of their saintly founder and father. We know from other sources how holy and perfect many of them were. Their imperfections, such as they were, or as they seemed to be, have become our instruction, in drawing from one of the greatest of spiritual directors a series of golden teachings, which will lift up and purify to the end of time souls much more in need of help than were those to whom they were first imparted.

But to many of us the great merit and satisfaction of this book of holy Letters will be that it keeps before us St. Francis himself. Nothing displays a human soul like a genuine letter. We have here St. Francis in every paragraph. We have even innumerable hints and suggestions of his outward life and occupations. We see him snatching a minute as the messenger waits to write “four lines” to his beloved daughters. We see him interrupted in his writing the Love of God, and just at the moment when he was filled with a “kind of realisation of the feelings of the blessed when they first see God in Paradise” (p. 166). We can follow him to his father’s house, at Sales, where on a winter’s day, Ash Wednesday of the year 1615, he is all alone in the gallery and the chapel, and where he sees the snow lying a foot deep in the court-yard, and John clearing a space to feed those pigeons which have furnished him with so many an illustration. One letter is written at Grenoble, where he is preaching the Lent in the cathedral known to so many of us, and it relates how all the previous night he had been lying awake revolving “a thousand good thoughts of sermons.” He promises a lady his portrait—“I cannot refuse you anything, my dear daughter! . . . Why have I not striven to preserve the image of our heavenly Father in my soul!” (p. 290). Sometimes he reveals his interior. “I must tell you,” he says to St. Jane Frances, in the year 1621, “that this morning, having a little solitude (at Annecy), I have made an incomparable act of resignation, but one which I cannot write. . . . Oh how blessed are the souls which live by the will of God alone!” (p. 240). “I would never excite myself,” he writes to one of his daughters; “that, thank God, I do already; for I never let myself become excited” (p. 395). And the following passage is very interesting to those who have been struck, as we all have been, by the tone of effusive tenderness which is sometimes perceptible in his communication with his spiritual children:—

“There are no souls in the world, as I think, who love more cordially, tenderly, and (to speak in all sincerity) more lovingly than I; and I even somewhat abound in affectionateness, and words thereof, particularly at the beginning. You know that it is according to the truth and the variety of that true love which I have for souls; for it has pleased God to make my heart so. But still I like souls that are independent, vigorous and not feminine; for such great tenderness disturbs the heart, disquiets it, distracts it from loving prayer to God, hinders entire resignation and the perfect death of self-love. That which is not God is, for us, nothing. How can it be that I feel thus, I who am the most affectionate person in the world, as you know? Yet in truth I do feel it; but it is a marvel how I reconcile it all together; for it is my idea that I love nothing at all but God, and all souls for God. Ah! Lord God, do yet this grace to my whole soul that it may be in you only!” (pp. 203–4).

The saints derive from their association with Christ the power which belongs in its fulness to him, of transforming the heart of those who gaze upon them into their own likeness and the likeness of their Master. No saint seems to have this gift more marvellously than St. Francis of Sales. Therefore, every chance of looking upon him is most precious and acceptable to all who aspire to devotion.

I think the reader will approve of the translation, which has been made with very great care. The Saint’s words and expressions are often archaic and sometimes obscure, and his language has not unfrequently a trait of directness and simplicity which our modern usages hardly tolerate. But Father Mackey seems to have fairly hit the mean between slavish literalness and too great freedom. The division into six books will be found useful. All the letters to the Visitation are kept together, viz., in Books II. and III., and arranged according to date. Book I. contains letters previous to the founding of the Visitation; Book IV. letters to persons outside the Visitation; Book V. “general instructions” for the Visitation, and Book VI. letters on various festivals. The index and analysis will make it easy to find passages and subjects. Father Mackey has added one or two excellent paragraphs of introduction and explanation. He has in many cases put for the first time the real names of the persons to whom the letters are addressed. He has also corrected many dates, and added others. The date will generally enable the reader to find the original letter in the French editions; the few undated letters will mostly be found in the French collections after the dated ones. The headings of the letters are by the translator himself, those found in the French editions being very often wrong or misleading. The book, therefore, is much more than a mere translation. Father Mackey, in executing his task, has made use of all that minute knowledge of the life and writings of St. Francis of Sales which many years of patient study have put him in possession of, and which we may expect to bear still more abundant fruit in the future if his life be spared.

JOHN CUTHBERT, O.S.B., BISHOP OF NEWPORT AND MENEVIA