Author: Louise Stacpoole-Kenny

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE: It has been said that St. Francis de Sales has no enemies. The author of this delightful little biography calls him "the Gentle Saint"; he is also commonly known as "the Gentleman Saint."

But St. Francis de Sales had brains as well as heart, and one must not allow his winning personality to obscure the fact that he was very intelligent and in fact one of the greatest men of his day. At the university he simultaneously pursued degrees in law and in theology. He was examined in both fields, yet the examiners declared they had never before met anyone so well prepared. St. Francis de Sales is in fact one of only thirty-three Doctors of the Church during nearly 2000 years.

St. Francis' reconversion of the Calvinists of the Chablais region of France is one of the great missionary stories in the history of the Church. Figures vary, but they reach as high as 72,000 Calvinists converted back to the True Faith in just 4 years—almost the entire Chablais. Yet these people and their leaders had previously been notably hostile to Catholicism, and St. Francis had been given no resources to work with, not even a roof over his head.

In addition, the Saint co-founded one of the great religious orders in the Church—the nuns of the Visitation—and he wrote a book that has become one of the three or four most popular Catholic classics: An Introduction to the Devout Life. One Pope expressed the hope that that volume might be read "by all." St. Francis' Treatise on the Love of God is also a spiritual classic and is built on the firm foundations of scholastic theology. Plus, The Catholic Controversy reveals on every page the author's great command of Church history, theology and biblical prophecy.

Perhaps the best assessment of our Saint comes from another Saint, his contemporary: St. Vincent de Paul stated that St. Francis de Sales was the best Christian he had ever met. This comes from a fellow Frenchman who was himself dubbed "the Father of his Country" because of his great accomplishments for war-torn 17th-century France. St. Vincent even stated that at one low point of serious illness in his own life, his most comforting thought was of how clearly God's infinite goodness was reflected in the Bishop of Geneva, St. Francis de Sales. "For if a man can be so good," he said to himself, "how good You must be, O my loving Creator, how sweet and how gracious!"* It is the story of this good man that the present little volume sets out to tell.