Jill Fehleison
François de Sales, the Savoyard bishop and saint, is perhaps best known for his guide to daily living, Introduction to the Devout Life (1609), and his establishment of the Order of the Visitation (1610) with fellow saint Jeanne de Chantal. He was also deeply involved in pastoral care and conversion of Protestants during his service to the diocese of Geneva (1592–1622), which included twenty years as bishop (1602–22).1 Being both an avid reformer within Catholicism and an active missionary among the region’s Protestants, de Sales crafted messages in his sermons and in religious tracts to fit particular audiences; however, much of his correspondence, his sermons, and his most famous published writings, can all be broadly characterized as pastoral guides.2 Even his cofounding of the Visitandines originated from his spiritual direction of Jeanne de Chantal after the death of her husband.3 As leader of a diocese, de Sales worked tirelessly to create a body of clergy that offered the laity Catholic orthodoxy through religious [129] instruction and by example.4 De Sales always viewed himself first and foremost as a priest invested with a flock, and he continued delivering sermons and leading catechism instruction throughout his tenure as bishop despite the great demands on his time and talent. By placing high importance on preaching, de Sales was following the directives from Rome after the Council of Trent.
The framers of Trent certainly acknowledged that there were too many members of the clergy who failed in their duties to instruct their parishioners in Christian doctrine. Trent ordained that preaching the gospel was the “chief duty of the bishops.” If a bishop was unable to preach because of other obligations related to his episcopal duties, he was to appoint someone who was “competent” to preach in his place. Clergy who failed to deliver sermons “at least on Sundays and solemn festivals” were to face serious punishment. The reformers at Trent also expected priests to improve the quality of their sermons, reminding members of the clergy, regardless of their rank, that they should craft sermons that matched the educational and intellectual level of the audience. In addition to his own preaching, a bishop was expected to ensure that all of the clergy residing within his diocese—both secular and regular—preached orthodoxy, preached when required to, and did not preach without a license.5 Published sermons and preaching manuals proliferated in the sixteenth century with the spread of the printing press. Many priests did not have the natural skill or education to compose and deliver effective sermons without help, but as Larissa Taylor observes, preachers had numerous options when seeking out printed sermons to serve as models.6 Peter Bayley notes that French oratory shifted dramatically to a less aggressive and partisan approach after the Edict of Nantes (1598), but the five decades before 1650 have been neglected by scholars who have preferred to focus on the latter half of the seventeenth century. The period after 1650 is associated most often with the style of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, court preacher of Louis XIV and considered one of the great orators of the early modern period.7 De Sales is an important preacher for this transitional period from the end of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century when the Francophone regions of Europe witnessed diminishing religious violence.
[130] De Sales’s early sermons preached among the Reformed populations of the diocese offer foundational evidence for his later devotional literature that was so important and influential to seventeenth-century Catholicism and to the larger Salesian spirituality movement. His earliest publications were polemics sparked by his experiences during the Catholic mission in the duchy of Chablais, a region that included Protestant villages located on the outskirts of Geneva and along Lake Geneva. De Sales proved to be a polemicist of some dexterity, a fact reflected in both his sermons and pamphlets of the 1590s. These early sermons, delivered to hostile or indifferent audiences of Reformed followers, proved to be great training for de Sales’s future endeavors as bishop of Geneva that included administering a fractured diocese under the two often warring secular rulers of France and Savoy and with the continued presence of Protestants. After de Sales completed his education at the College of Clermont in Paris under the Jesuits and then in Padua, where the Jesuit diplomat Antonio Possevino served as his mentor, he returned to his native Savoy to begin his career in the Catholic Church.8 His predecessor as bishop, Claude de Granier, was one of the first to recognize the young priest’s talents when he made de Sales provost of the cathedral canons in 1592. De Sales developed a reputation as an outstanding preacher and became a model for reform-minded bishops of the seventeenth century.9 Themes of redemption and spiritual growth through the practice of Catholicism can be found in these early sermons and carry through into his later sermons and published works. As a post-Tridentine bishop, de Sales always strived to convert Protestants inhabiting his diocese and to revitalize existing Catholic parishes, with the ultimate goal of restoring the pre-Reformation boundaries of his diocese.
While this essay highlights the intersection between religious polemic and sermons in the early works of de Sales, these sermons are part of a larger body of pastoral and religious polemical literature produced by Catholics and Protestants living in and around Geneva during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These works offer an important window into understanding how both Catholics and Protestants maintained religious identities in biconfessional regions during the later Reformation. While scholars are often interested in the epistemology of [131] religious doctrine, too often we fail to acknowledge the continued influence of rival systems of belief on the development and maintenance of doctrine. Whatever the initial intent, many of the polemical materials from both confessions were distributed much more widely than the region in which they were produced. And this raises larger questions about religious polemics of the age. Were they meant to rally the faithful, attack opponents, convert religious rivals, or offer something for multiple audiences? Were they intended to produce change in the opposition or simply bolster one’s own allies? To address these questions, it is important that we pay close attention to the rhetorical form, either as a kind of teaching tool or as a window into how each side perceived its vulnerabilities (i.e., the challenged arguments it took the pains to rebut). De Sales’s sermons from the mission in the Chablais offer an important source for understanding the Catholic perspective and position at the end of the sixteenth century. Exiled from the city of Geneva in 1535, the bishops of Geneva were constantly reminded of how the entrée of Reformed ideas into the region had disrupted the diocese. With the advent of the mission among Protestants in 1594, de Sales was able to articulate in sermons and pamphlets the Catholic side to this long-standing rivalry. His experience as a missionary shaped how de Sales approached his episcopal duties and how he understood religious differences throughout the rest of his life.
The Mission in the Chablais
In September 1594, Bishop de Granier sent de Sales to the duchy of Chablais to begin his mission work. For the first several years, de Sales worked in relative isolation and gained only a handful of converts from the Protestant villages. His correspondence from this time reveals a great deal of discouragement, with the future bishop even threatening to quit the mission.10 Over the course of his missionary work in the Chablais, de Sales preached to and disputed with Protestants. He engaged in a battle of words with the Reformed minister of Thonon (a town located on Lake Geneva and the center of the Catholic mission), Louis Viret, over the real presence of the Eucharist that resulted in de Sales’s first publication.11 The dispute between de Sales and Viret began during the late fall or early winter of 1596. According to de Sales, in the preface to his Treatise on the Love of God published in 1616, he was compelled to respond to “the minister, and [132] adversary of the Church,” who publically challenged the Catholic belief in the real presence of the Eucharist.12 Not surprisingly, de Sales preached a great deal on the real presence during the mission in Chablais, especially during the years of 1596 and 1597. Many of the religious leaders from both sides of the confessional divide simultaneously produced both sermons and more overtly polemical texts, and the intersection between the two forms of communication offers scholars a fruitful area of inquiry.
The years of 1596 to 1597 proved to be a crucial turning point in the interactions between Catholics and Protestants in the Chablais. In addition to de Sales’s dispute with Pastor Viret over the Eucharist and his sermons on the same subject, the mission received long-awaited help with the arrival of several reinforcements in 1597 that included two Capuchins, Père Chérubin de Maurienne and Esprit de Beaume, and a Jesuit, Jean Saunier.13 The arrival of the Capuchins, particularly Père Chérubin, revitalized the mission, which began using more confrontational methods to evangelize among the Reformed populations. Besides the Eucharist, the other focal point of the Catholic mission was the veneration of the cross, which led to more conflict with the region’s Protestants. The mission often used these two symbols in tandem in its efforts to sway the Reformed villages. The most significant activity the group initiated was the staging of the Eucharistic celebration known as the Forty Hours Devotions on three separate occasions between September 1597 and October 1598.14 Preparation for these celebrations drew the attention of the Reformed leadership in Geneva. The Company of Pastors in Geneva feared that people would be distracted by Catholic festivities after it was alerted to planned processions, including one in Annemasse, a Catholic parish on the outskirts of Geneva, where a large gathering would erect a cross.15 On 2 September 1597, five days prior to the first Forty Hours Devotions celebration in Annemasse, the ministers received copies of two placards advertising the adoration of the cross, with the first placard offering support from the Bible and church fathers on the virtue of making the sign of the cross and the second providing evidence for why the cross should be honored.16 The company chose [133] Antoine de la Faye to counter with his own propaganda to denounce the forthcoming Catholic festivities.17 La Faye responded directly but anonymously to the content of the placards in a Brief Traitté de la vertu de la Croix et de la manière de l’honorer (1597). There was enough interest in la Faye’s pamphlet for the work to be translated into English and published in London in 1599. The quick publication of la Faye’s treatise was answered by de Sales in an expansive response published in 1600 in Lyon, Defense de l’Estendart de la saincte Croix de nostre Sauveur Jesus-Christ that went on to have numerous reprintings over the course of the seventeenth century as de Sales’s reputation grew.18 This debate between Catholics and Protestants, and many of de Sales’s sermons, focused on the same core issue, namely the Catholic interpretation of physical symbols of the Christian faith. La Faye argued in various ways, including the use of sarcasm, that Catholics were idolaters in their adoration of the cross. In response, de Sales claimed that adoration of the cross was part of the true church as evidenced by the writings of a church father, John Chrysostom, who had compared honoring the cross to giving honor to a prince’s scepter or robe; furthermore, the cross was celebrated everywhere once Christians ceased to be persecuted in the Roman Empire, and it remained a consoling and beloved symbol.19 The broad messages offered by Catholic and Reformed leaders offered starkly different interpretations of Christian practices. The entire Catholic mission in the Chablais centered on the material elements of faith that episcopal officials hoped would resonate with a rural population.
Sermons of François de Sales
A funeral oration for Prince Philippe Emmanuel, the duke of Mercœur, delivered in Paris in 1602 was the only sermon of de Sales to be published during his lifetime, but the notes and sermons recorded in his own hand and those recorded by the nuns of the Order of the Visitation provide a representative look at what he accomplished from the pulpit. The first sermon collection of de Sales was published [135] in 1641 under the guidance of Jeanne de Chantal, offering twenty-seven sermons and outlines written by de Sales and another thirty-three recorded by the nuns of the Visitation of Annecy. While the originals in de Sales’s own hand have been lost, there was a letter of Jeanne de Chantal that attested to the sermons.20 Peter Bayley has questioned the accuracy of the sermons not in de Sales’s own hand, asserting that they “have no manuscript relationship with the preacher at all,” and were based solely on notes taken by a member of the congregation. Conversely, Salesian scholar Joseph Chorpenning argues that the sermons transcribed by the nuns of the Visitation may be the most accurate of de Sales’s sermons since the women were skilled at recording what de Sales actually said without any of their own additions.21 In comparison, some of the best transcripts that exist for sermons of John Calvin are those recorded by a gifted scribe, Denis Raguenier.22 While we cannot recreate the experience of being present at the sermons, the surviving documents do offer a rich source for understanding the often-polemical nature of post-Tridentine sermons.
Fehleison, Figure 1. St. François de Sales Preaching in the Chablais. Engraving by Pitau after François Chauveau (France), from [Henry de Maups du Tour], La vie du vénérable serviteur de Dieu François de Sales . . . (Paris: Chez la Veuve de Nicolas Belley, 1707). Courtesy Salesian Library, Wilmington-Philadelphia Province of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.
There is a clear intersection between the sermons of de Sales from the 1590s and the polemical debates the missionaries entered into with the Reformed ministers of the region. The sermons and pamphlets presented similar subject matter, but de Sales’s tone and his approach to the materials clearly differed between these two forms of communication. His sermons of this period were meant to highlight the validity of Catholic orthodoxy and offer an option for Protestants to reach across the confessional divide and be welcomed into the Roman Catholic Church. The audiences for his pamphlet publications on the Eucharist and on the veneration of the cross included devout Catholics who wanted their faith reaffirmed as well as the Reformed preachers he battled against from the villages of Chablais and from Geneva. His later sermons as bishop, which he preached primarily to the nuns of the Visitation, were much less overtly challenging to the Protestants, though he still used his religious rivals as the “other” in the sermons. This approach of attacking Protestants when the region had been “infected” by heresy but not dwelling on them when the area was already loyal to Catholicism was in accordance with the preaching manuals produced after the Council of Trent.23 Throughout his ministry, de Sales spoke to multiple audiences, sometimes within the same pamphlet, [136] devotional tract, or sermon, and demonstrated the multifaceted duties faced by episcopal officials in biconfessional regions.
Construction and format of sermons varied depending on the intended audience. De Sales’s sermons in the Chablais to a Protestant audience during the period from 1594 through 1597 tended to focus on one or two major tenets of Catholicism and explained why the Catholic view was correct and the Protestant view—in this case the Reformed view—was wrong. He included fewer of the standard Latin elements present in sermons directed at a Catholic audience. His methods for his mission sermons included raising doubts about Protestant interpretations and teachings, demonstrating why the Catholic views were legitimate, and reminding the audience of Catholic orthodoxy. In the case of his later sermons, preached to the Visitandines, the nuns would have held an education in general Catholic doctrine, so de Sales did not have to explain basic Catholic practices, such as why Catholics sing the Latin “Gloria Patri” and “Deum de Deo” as he would explain in a mission sermon.24
De Sales dubbed the Calvinists from Geneva “our adversaries” and described them as men who caused disorder, deceived people, and introduced innovation into Christianity. This image of conflict can be seen throughout the message of the mission in the duchy of Chablais. De Sales reminded his listeners of the iconoclasm committed by the Reformed populations, and in the Chablais, there were many examples of destruction from years of religious and military conflict.25 The cross was a powerful and ancient image of Christianity, and its connection to late antiquity and the first Christians was always a difficult hurdle for the Reformed leaders to overcome. When la Faye attacked the veneration of the cross as idolatry in his Brief Traitté (1597) as a response to Catholic placards and processions, de Sales responded in his pamphlet Defense de l’Estendart de la saincte Croix with the example of early Christians who made the sign of the cross and displayed the emblem. Furthermore de Sales wondered how Catholics could be reproached for speaking ritual responses in the language of their parents when it was the heretics that “produce some new words and find strange the language of domestics.”26 De Sales’s message often settled around the theme that taking away beloved emblems and audience responses from the people was [137] the innovation of the Reformed tradition since these symbols and practices had been part of Christianity from its origins. To reinforce this image of Protestant as innovator, de Sales attempted to demonstrate the inconsistency of Calvin’s ideas of the visible and invisible church. He wondered where was the true church a hundred years ago? How could “these adversaries” be the true church when they were not around fifty or sixty years ago? De Sales claimed it was the design of the devil to make the church invisible. He concluded that the Christian church, which had continued without interruption, thus making the true church, was the Roman Catholic one.27 In this way, he made a point that Catholic missionaries consistently argued—their faith remained more accessible than the Reformed faith, had historical continuity, and possessed more established ties to community traditions. De Sales’s later published works, including Introduction to the Devout Life and Treatise on the Love of God, expanded on this theme of Catholicism offering a place of comfort and stability.
One of the frequent attacks by Protestant reformers against Catholicism was that it contained too many practices that were not based on scripture. Two of the most frequent Catholic practices to be challenged were good works and devotions to saints. To combat this view, de Sales preached to his audience in the Chablais about how best to know Jesus Christ; he said there were “two doors” to knowing God, scripture and tradition.28 He portrayed Protestant interpretations of scripture as dangerous. De Sales equated ambiguities in questions of faith to demons, and claimed his adversaries used sophisms to mislead.29 Both confessions embraced ideas about the use of rhetoric in their sermons, but they equally accused each other of using such techniques in order to manipulate their audiences.30 According to de Sales, it was Protestants who offered interpretations of scripture that caused controversies and disputes. In an effort to demonstrate that questioning established interpretations of scripture was a disruptive practice, de Sales claimed that men like John Oecolampadius, Andreas Karlstadt, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin were following in the footsteps of John Hus and John Wycliffe, who were mistaken and whose ideas were without foundation.31 Tying leaders of the Reformation to earlier [138] disorder and instability would have resonated with the Chablais population, who had seen so much warfare and disruption since the Bernese had introduced Protestant ideas into the villages in 1535 and 1536.32 Gifted preachers like de Sales tied local realities to more global religious concerns.
Much of de Sales’s energy in his missionary work was put into challenging the Reformed view of the Lord’s Supper and convincing his audience of the Catholic view. De Sales described the experience of the Catholic interpretation using vivid imagery that he asserted was confirmed in the teachings of the gospels and by Paul’s epistles. In contrast, he claimed the Calvinists’ Last Supper resembled the fruit of the Dead Sea.33 As a result of continued challenges to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist from the Reformed ministers and in conjunction with the forthcoming Forty Hours Devotions, de Sales gave a series of sermons on the Eucharist in July 1597. These sermons were composed and preached in the Chablais during the same period that de Sales continued his dispute with Reformed minister Louis Viret. These sermon accounts are very straightforward, presenting a rather legalistic de Sales attempting to prove the case of the Catholic interpretation of the Eucharist. He addressed those in his audience as “my dear brothers” presumably to increase a sense of familiarity.34 In an effort to portray the Reformed followers as outsiders, de Sales equated their actions to those committed by the persecutors of the first Christians. De Sales claimed his adversaries accused Catholics of cannibalism just as enemies of the early Christians had done. He argued that the current accusers were people who were “baptized, nourished, and instructed in the Church of God, who have seen the Eucharist a thousand times and participated in it a hundred times.” And after this connection with the Catholic Church, they separated themselves into sects. He asked, “[was] there an affront of heresy more arrogant than this one?”35 De Sales portrayed the Protestant leaders in both his sermons and pamphlets as haughty individuals who abandoned their faith for something new and unstable. Catholic polemists associated with the diocese of Geneva frequently used the image of a lofty intellectual who offers his own interpretations of scripture and discounts long-standing Christian practices.36 For example, in his response to la [139] Faye’s Brief Traitté, de Sales addressed Calvin and Beza directly, reminding the Protestant leaders that they were baptized in the Catholic Church surrounded by what they now called idols, yet still held those baptisms to be valid.37 While de Sales compared the Reformed faith to previous heresies, he rarely called the Reformed followers heretics directly, since he did not want to offend anyone in his audience. Sermons designed to bring about religious conversion were a tricky balance between condemning the other system of belief while not alienating an audience comprised of its members.
The second sermon in the series on the Eucharist focused on the dispute over how Jesus could be physically present in the Eucharist. De Sales used the story of Jesus returning to his disciples on the day of his resurrection and challenged the interpretations of specific reformers, including Oecolampadius, Calvin, and Peter Martyr, whom he said all claimed Jesus came through an open window or door. De Sales tried to demonstrate how the Reformers reduced the power of Jesus by limiting how and where his physical presence could exist.38 Again mentioning the teachings of Peter Martyr and Calvin, de Sales asserted that they discounted the word of God as shown in Matthew 19:26, “Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’” De Sales concluded that he had proven his point that “our savior is in the Eucharist without occupying place there.”39 De Sales reviewed the main Protestant positions on the Lord’s Supper, citing Luther, Calvin, and Peter Martyr, and then offered his demonstration of inconsistencies in their interpretations.40 Using biblical examples that would be well known to his audience, de Sales wondered why it was so hard for his adversaries to believe that substances could change when Jesus changed water into wine and Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt. In citing Matthew 4:3, he claimed that even the devil acknowledged the possibility of transubstantiation when he challenged Jesus to change stones into bread.41 In these three sermons, de Sales was the lawyer convincing his jury of his version of the truth, asserting that when “all measures are considered you will judge in favor of the Catholics.” He consistently raised names and summarized the positions of those who had challenged Catholicism before [140] dismissing them as being mistaken and their ideas without foundation.42 De Sales offered his Reformed listeners a straightforward tutorial with the goal of persuading them to join the Catholic side.
Despite differences, both Catholics and Protestants relied on the preaching of sermons to convey their messages. De Sales’s Protestant audience in the Chablais would have been accustomed to listening to sermons that addressed biblical stories and points of religious doctrine. Despite this mutual reliance on sermons, by the end of the sixteenth century, sermons could serve very different purposes for Reformed and Catholic preachers, at least for those living in and around Geneva. There was little angry or hostile language in the sermons de Sales preached during the mission in the Chablais, since he was trying to convince his listeners to join him; rather, his tone was that of a patient teacher explaining to a student his or her error. In contrast, Theodore Beza’s Sermons sur l’histoire de la passion, composed for presentation during Lent in Geneva and first published in French in 1592, took a decidedly different tone, especially when speaking about his confessional rivals.43 Presumably, if people were not part of the Reformed church by the 1590s, they were reprobate in the eyes of Geneva.44 Beza stated in his opening letter that the purpose of his sermons was for the edification of fellow Reformed brethren. There is nothing evangelical about Beza’s sermons, and while he defended his faith throughout, he offered no openings for those loyal to Rome to embrace the Reformed faith. He vilified the papacy, Rome, the episcopal hierarchy (especially bishops), and religious houses; however Beza, like de Sales, rarely targeted lay people, preferring to call them duped victims or members of an ignorant flock. Beza attacked the apostolic succession of the bishop of Rome, canons, rituals, sacraments etc. and of course referred to Rome as Babylon.45 Beza did not travel down any new paths in his criticism of the Catholic institutions, rather he reminded his readers of the oft-cited reasons why the Protestant Reformation began.
When offering the Reformed view of Christ’s passion, Beza repeatedly attacked the episcopal system of church organization. John Calvin had established a church leadership that included lay participation, with the minister as overseer [141] along with a group of elders known as presbyters governing the congregation and maintaining morality. Calvin believed that this structure was a truer representation of the early church than the bishop as sole leader over church membership.46 In retelling the story of Christ’s passion through the accounts of the gospels, Beza repeatedly returned to the theme that the papacy was not unlike the Jewish high priest Caiaphas and his council. He linked Caiaphas and his council with the pope and his hierarchy, equating the rigid ritualism of Catholics with Jewish rites. When discussing the massacres committed against the Reformed populations, Beza referred to Catholics as “you who overtake the malice and cruelty of Caiaphas.”47 Beza was not the only reformer to use the example of Caiaphas to attack the pope. Luther had used the story of Caiaphas in a sermon on the Gospel of John, but Beza’s repeated use of the story placed the image in both a historical/biblical and contemporary context.48 By linking Jewish and Catholic hierarchy, Beza connected together all the groups that denied what he viewed as the true formation of the primitive church, reestablished in Geneva.
In contrast to Beza’s attack on rigid religious hierarchy, de Sales made efforts in his sermons to justify the episcopal structure of the Catholic Church. In a sermon given on the Festival of St. Peter in June 1593, probably at the request of Bishop Claude de Granier, de Sales said that the Catholic Church was a monarchy that needed a lieutenant general and that that particular officer on earth was Saint Peter and his successors. Heretics did not want a head of the church, and in leaving Catholicism, they had divided themselves into sects; Catholics recognized the pope as the common father while schismatics did not.49 With this characterization, de Sales countered the Protestants’ attacks on the apostolic succession of the pope and portrayed his opponents as disorderly. In linking the Catholic hierarchy with the organization of monarchy, de Sales connected the episcopal system with established orderly practices of society and again pushed reformers into categories of innovation, instability, and even sedition. De Sales also raised the possibility that reformers like Luther and Calvin acted in imitation of the devil as false prophets who only claimed to speak the true word of God and scripture. According to de Sales, all Christians claimed some sort of legitimacy of succession or mediation, but only Catholics demonstrated “legitimate succession” through Peter.50 The themes [142] of legitimacy and historical continuity were central to de Sales’s affirmation of the Catholic confession, while illegitimacy and discontinuity were key charges he leveled against his Reformed rivals in Geneva.
Even when de Sales was preaching to a Catholic audience during the period of the mission, his Protestant project was never far from his mind. In a sermon for the feast day of the Trinity, given on 21 May 1595 in Annecy, he preached on the centrality of the Holy Trinity, saying that Catholics must celebrate the feast day of the Trinity “in these miserable times.”51 He drew the Reformed Church into his sermon, linking them with the disorder and disruption of the time, not just in his community but also elsewhere in Christendom. De Sales told his audience to “think of our adversaries being content to knock over the church,” and asked whether the Trinitarians from the Calvinist school were still in Transylvania. Transylvania was in the unusual situation of allowing four faiths—Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, and anti-Trinitarian—to hold services in the region.52 De Sales said the Protestant debate over the Trinity had “infected the holy doctrine,” and blamed leaders of Geneva for stirring up the debate over the doctrine, even mentioning Michael Servetus and Valentine Gentile in the same breath as Guillaume Farel, Pierre Viret, John Calvin, and Theodore Beza.53 While both Catholic and Reformed leaders condemned anti-Trinitarians, with Servetus being executed in Geneva and Gentile in Berne, de Sales linked Reformed theology with the “radical” ideas about the Trinity because it was the reformers’ innovations that had stirred up dangerous exploration of religious doctrine in the first place. The introduction of Reformed ideas had brought increased disruption to the lives of those living around Geneva, and de Sales hoped to remind his audience of this fact and associate Catholicism with communal stability.
In the end, the mission, coupled with the economic and political policies of the duke of Savoy, Charles-Emmanuel I, pushed the Reformed churches out of the duchy of Chablais. The combination of baroque celebrations like the Forty Hours Devotion and powerful preaching from de Sales and his Capuchin companions focusing on the tangible symbols of Catholicism brought about the conversion of many villagers. Those who resisted the Catholic call faced political and economic policies that threatened their positions in their communities and their financial livelihood.54 Confronted with the dual pressure of church and state, the [143] majority of the population chose to embrace the Catholic faith, at least in the duchy of Chablais. By the first decade of the seventeenth century, most open Protestant worship had disappeared in the territory.55
After he became bishop in 1602, de Sales continued to preach and engaged his rivals from the pulpit long after he had left the mission in the Chablais. When his audience was composed of Catholics who lived near Protestants, as was the case in his sermon in Thonon for the Feast of the Ascension in 1607, de Sales reminded the audience why “the heretics” were extreme in their views and inconsistent in their biblical interpretations. In reference to contemporary heretics, de Sales said that they could find two truths in the scripture but “they cannot understand the existence of two substances,” bread and body/wine and blood.56 In a sermon preached in Turin, capital of Savoy and home to Duke Charles-Emmanuel I, in February 1613 on the feast of the purification of Mary, de Sales reminded his audience that they should avoid speaking “with enemies of the state, with heretics, or with men of corrupt morals,” or they were at risk of being corrupted like Eve was by the serpent.57 Obviously, preventing interactions in biconfessional communities was nearly impossible, but both Catholics and Protestants in the Alpine region surrounding Geneva wanted their followers to be mindful of the dangers that casual interaction with their confessional rivals could cause. In efforts to highlight these differences, Calvin and the Reformed faith remained de Sales’s “other” in his sermons. While he incorporated additional leaders of the Reformation into his polemics, de Sales referred to Calvin most often. This continued reminder is not surprising considering that de Sales administered and cultivated the diocese of Geneva while it was in exile from its historic center. In a sermon preached in Grenoble during Lent of 1617, after he had been bishop for fifteen years, de Sales warned his listeners, “The tempter conducts himself in the fashion of the heretics. He cites scripture. All the fathers observe that it is common for the heretics to cite good words in a bad way.”58 De Sales noted that in his Institutes of the Christian Religions (1559), Calvin ridiculed Catholics for wanting [144] to imitate Christ, but de Sales noted that if children did not imitate their parents, they would never learn to walk or talk.59 The Reformed tradition saw imitation as potential idolatry, but for de Sales, the positive models of Christ and the saints remained a core example for emulation, while bad models (such as Protestant neighbors) should be avoided.
Messages of pastoral care remained at the core of de Sales’s episcopate. He was very much a product of his environment, of the Savoy, of his Jesuit training, and of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. The life and career of de Sales are an important context for his spiritual and theological beliefs. De Sales’s polemical language portrayed the Protestants as outsiders who disrupted Christendom and brought dangerous innovation to religion and society. Despite his reputation for gentleness, his early works remind us that de Sales was an ardent Counter-Reformation leader. While the audience of de Sales’s sermons may have changed after he became bishop, his experiences as a missionary in the duchy of Chablais fundamentally shaped his views of and interactions with members of the Reformed faith and influenced the course of his diocesan administration. As pamphleteers and preachers like de Sales recounted various encounters and different points of belief, they reaffirmed their faith and built upon an established body of confessional literature. The polemical nature of de Sales’s early writings and sermons, in conjunction with works produced contemporaneously by supporters and rivals, demonstrates an important dialogue that crossed back and forth across the confessional divide and reveals how post-Tridentine Catholic leaders of biconfessional dioceses saw highlighting religious difference as a key episcopal duty.
Works Cited
Printed Primary Sources
Avully, Antoine de Saint-Michel, seignuer d’. Copie de la lettre du seigneur d’Avully: Touchant la dispute des ministres avec le R. P. Cherubin, prescheur de l’Ordre des Capucins. Lyon, 1598.
Beze, Theodore. Sermons sur l’histoire de la passion. [Geneva], Le Preux, 1592. Meeter Center-IDC: KPFA-117 Microfiche.
Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, translated by Henry Joseph Schroeder. St. Louis: B. Herder Books Co., 1941. Reprint, Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1978.
de Sales, Charles-Auguste. Histoire du Bien-Heureux François de Sales. 6th ed. 2 vols. Paris: Libraire de Louis Vives, 1879.
de Sales, Francis. Œuvres de Saint François de Sales. 26 vols. Annecy: J. Nierat, 1892–1932.
——— . The Catholic Controversy: St. Francis de Sales’ Defense of the Faith. Translated by Henry Benedict Mackey, OSB. Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1989.
——— . Sermon Texts on Saint Joseph by Francis de Sales. Edited by Joseph F. Chorpenning, OSFS. Toronto: Peregrina Publishing Co., 1999.
——— . Treatise on the Love of God. Translated by Henry Benedict Mackey, OSB. N.p.: Burns and Oates, 1884. Reprint, Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1997.
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