Shortly over a year ago, I wrote a bulletin article in preparation for the celebration of the 75th Jubilee of the dedication of the church of Mary Immaculate. You may recall that I pointed out how time is an essential aspect of the sacred.
When we think of the beginning of creation, it is generally in terms of objects, animate or inanimate. However, God is eternal, without beginning or end. Perhaps then the first order of creation was to create time itself. The Book of Genesis portrays this through the order of creation as the individual days of the week mark and measure what God has wrought.
Our liturgical calendar has its foundation in the liturgical structures of the Old Testament. Now, as then, the mysteries of the faith are celebrated throughout the year according to a calendar. The weekly feasts, the monthly feasts, the yearly feasts provided the rhythm of worship that knit the People of God together and ensured that the Covenant in all its parts was properly recalled.
For the People of God, an essential component of sacred time is Sabbath of Years. Every seven years, there were important activities that governed the use of the land and the management of the flocks. When seven cycles of Sabbath Years passed, a Jubilee was celebrated. Leviticus 25 details all the aspects of the Jubilee: “You shall treat this fiftieth year as sacred. You shall proclaim liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to your own property, each of you to your own family.” The normal Sabbatical Year practice of not tilling and sowing the land was required. The right stewardship of God’s blessings from the previous six years would provide all that was needed. Additionally, forgiving debts, releasing prisoners, freeing slaves, and the restoration of land that was sold to offset poverty were important duties of the Year of Jubilee. The customs of the Jubilee in effect recalled the original grace of the Garden, when Adam and Eve were provided for all their needs, didn’t have to work for their food, and all was right and just among living creatures.
The Catholic Church has kept the intention of the Jubilee Year in many ways, especially with the custom of Holy Years. The next jubilee Holy Year will be in 2025 and is themed “Pilgrims of Hope.” But one doesn’t need to wait every 25 years for the special grace of a Jubilee. Wedding anniversaries, especially the Golden Anniversary, anniversaries of the founding of parishes or building of churches, ordination anniversaries, and anniversaries of significant events are all occasions of special grace. In most of these cases, the Church provides for plenary indulgences for those who participate in the anniversary celebrations, attend Mass, celebrate Reconciliation, and pray for the Pope’s intention.
This then leads to the point of this article. On Wednesday, December 28, Pope Francis published the apostolic letter, Totum Amoris Est (Everything Pertains to Love). The letter marks the fourth centenary of the death of Saint Francis de Sales. The Holy Father is keeping with the custom of the popes’ writing letters on the occasion of significant anniversaries, for example, his letter Patris Corde, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of Saint Joseph as the patron of the Universal Church.
Once you become aware of these connections, it becomes apparent that the papal teachings make up a wonderful tapestry of grace woven throughout the centuries, connecting so many different eras by the central truths of our faith. In regard to Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Pope John Paul II wrote a letter for the 400th anniversary of Saint Francis’ episcopal ordination. And Saint Pope Paul VI wrote a letter for the 400th anniversary of Saint Francis’ birth.
Saint Francis de Sales was born into a noble family in eastern France, near the border with Switzerland close to Geneva. He enjoyed the best of families, of dwellings, of education, and all the secular pursuits available to wealthy gentlemen of his day. He lived at the bridge of the 16th to the 17th Century. Christianity in Europe had imploded leaving behind great destruction and political division. One of the greatest calamities of the rupture in the Church was the faith life of the ordinary person. The Peace of Augsburg attempted to quell the violence and bloodshed by determining that each region would follow the faith of the monarch, prince, or other ruling figure.
Saint Francis set aside a lifestyle of wealth and privilege so that he could attend to those whose faith had been so damaged by a century of conflict. He himself was a victim of the terror that had been unleashed in the Wars of Religion. Not necessarily because he was subject eventually to plots against him, but because one of the more contested aspects of the religious conflict, predestination, tormented him to despair regarding his eternal fate.
He found peace, consolation, and a true conversion in a moment of prayer before a statue of the Blessed Virgin in Paris. He prayed the Memorare, consecrated his life to Mary, and decided from then on that he would devote his life to God. If, as the Scriptures teaches, God is Love, then God wished nothing but good for Francis. His anxiety over his own inability to be holy enough for God was replaced by trust in God’s mercy through pure abandonment to God’s will. He trusted that God would only will the best for him, and therefore he could trust in divine providence for the rest of his life.
Saint Francis de Sales learned about God in the “school of his own heart”. As a priest, as a diplomat, as a bishop, as a confessor, spiritual director, and as a missionary, Francis accompanied countless individuals on their extraordinary pilgrimages of faith as he engaged with the people of his age from every background or way of life. While he is best known for his two great works of spirituality and theology, An Introduction to the Devout Life and his Treatise on the Love of God, we realize that these two works, and the thousands of letters he wrote to so many, were only reflections of a prior commitment to concrete relationships. First of all, a loving relationship with God, and second a loving, charitable relationship to everyone he encountered.
In his apostolic letter, Pope Francis highlights the remarkable gift that God gave the Church in raising up Saint Francis de Sales in a time of great change and turmoil. What should faith in God look like in a time when the social, political, and ecclesial unity that had been enjoyed in Europe for centuries so quickly disintegrated? The cultural trappings of faith no longer held. Religious life was no longer solely the affair of the professed orders.
What was required was an intense, personal, affective relationship with God. Saint Francis taught that people could be devout and holy, no matter what the circumstances were, if they responded to God’s invitation to love. Having first been given the gift of love, which they come to recognize in Jesus Christ in the examples of other Christians, in times of prayer and meditations, through the teachings of the Church—Francis de Sales was an early adopter of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrines method of catechesis, aka CCD!—and through the Sacraments, the devout soul is to give that same gift of love to others.
Saint Francis de Sales can teach us so much about our present age, so filled with un-civil discourse and in desperate need of charity and kindness. Francis de Sales wished to rebuild society on a foundation of love and charity. He did this by teaching people how to pray, and to fall in love with God. Having fallen in love with God, then one can’t help but fall in love with all his creatures and treat them with the same respect, dignity, and tenderness that God has first shown us.