POPE FRANCIS RELEASES NEW APOSTOLIC LETTER “TOTUM AMORIS EST”
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022, the Supreme Pontiff, Pope Francis released a message on St. Francis de Sales, a Saint who teaches us that “devotion to God is meant for everyone, in every situation.”
The pope’s Apostolic Letter, titled Totum Amoris Est, translated as “Everything Pertains to Love,” was published to mark the 400th anniversary of St. Francis de Sales’ death in 1622.
The title comes from the preface of the Swiss Saint’s book “Treatise on the Love of God,” in which he wrote that “In Holy Church, everything pertains to love, lives in love, is done for love and comes from love.”
St. Francis de Sales was born to a noble family at Chateau de Sales in the Kingdom of Savoy near Geneva, Switzerland on August 21, 1567. He was a Bishop and Doctor of the Church.
St. Francis taught against the protestant heresies and laid the groundwork for the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on what is now called the universal call to holiness. It reaffirms the teaching of Jesus and the early Church that every Baptized Christian is called to sanctity, no matter what their career or state in life. In every career and state in life, Christians can become more and more like Jesus Christ. That is, after all, what holiness really means.
Below is the full Apostolic letter.
APOSTOLIC LETTER TOTUM AMORIS EST OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS
ON THE FOURTH CENTENARY OF THE DEATH
OF SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES
“EVERYTHING PERTAINS TO LOVE”. [1] These words summarize the spiritual legacy left to us by Saint Francis de Sales, who died four centuries ago, on 28 December 1622, in Lyon. Slightly more than fifty years of age, he had been the “exiled” Bishop and Prince of Geneva for some two decades, and had come to Lyon on what was to be his last diplomatic mission. The Duke of Savoy had asked him to accompany Cardinal Maurice of Savoy to Avignon, where they were to pay homage to the young King Louis XIII, then returning to Paris through the Rhône valley following a victorious military campaign in the south of France. Exhausted and in poor health, Francis had undertaken the journey in a pure spirit of service. “Were it not most helpful to them for me to make this trip, I would surely have many good reasons to excuse myself. Yet if I can be of help, alive or dead, I will not refuse, but go or let myself be dragged there”. [2] That was his temperament. Upon his arrival in Lyon, he stayed at the monastery of the Visitation Sisters, in the gardener’s lodge, so as not to be a burden and to be free to meet with anyone who so desired.
Long disenchanted by the “fleeting glories of the court”, [3] he spent those final days exercising his pastoral ministry amid a flurry of appointments: confessions, conversations, conferences, sermons, and, of course, letters of spiritual friendship. The deepest reason for such a way of life, completely centred on God, had become clearer to him over time. He explained it with simplicity and precision in his celebrated Treatise on the Love of God: “At the very thought of God, one immediately feels a certain delightful emotion of the heart, which testifies that God is God of the human heart”. [4] These words are a perfect synthesis of his thought. 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. We discover that faith is no blind emotion, but primarily an attitude of the heart, whereby we entrust ourselves to a truth that appeals to our consciousness as a “sweet emotion” and awakens in response, as he was wont to say, an enduring benevolence towards all of creation.
In this light, we can understand why Saint Francis de Sales felt that there was no better place to find God, and to help others to find him, than in the hearts of the women and men of his time. He had learned this, from his earliest years, by developing a keen insight both into himself and into the human heart.
Francis’ profound sense of God’s presence amid the events of daily life was evident in those last days in Lyon. He shared with his Visitation Sisters how he wished to be remembered by them: “I said everything in just two words, when I told you to refuse nothing and to desire nothing; I have nothing more to say to you”. [5] This was no mere voluntarism, “a will lacking humility”, [6] the subtle temptation along the path to holiness that confuses it with self-justification, the worship of the human will and its powers, and results in “a self-centred and elitist complacency, bereft of true love”. [7] Still less was it a matter of pure quietism, a passive and emotionless abandonment to a doctrine stripped of the flesh and history. [8] Instead, it was the fruit of his contemplation of the life of the incarnate Son. On 26 December, the saint spoke to the Sisters from the heart of the Christmas mystery: “Do you see the baby Jesus in the crib? He accepts all the discomforts of that season, the bitter cold and everything that the Father lets happen to him. He does not refuse the small consolations that his Mother gives him; we are not told that he ever reached out for his Mother’s breast, but left everything to her care and concern. So too, we ourselves should neither desire nor refuse anything, but accept all that God sends us, the bitter cold and the discomforts of the season”. [9] We are struck by how Francis recognized the importance of concern for the human dimension. At the school of the incarnation, he had learned to interpret history and to approach life with confidence and trust.
The criterion of love
By experience, Francis had come to realize that desire is at the root of all true spiritual life, but also the cause of its debasement. Drawing abundantly from the spiritual tradition that had preceded him, he recognized the importance of constantly testing desire through the exercise of discernment. He found the ultimate criterion for this assessment in love. In that final conference in Lyon, on the feast of Saint Stephen, two days before his death, he had said: “It is love that grants perfection to our works. I will tell you much more. Take a person who suffers martyrdom for God with an ounce of love; that person merits much, since he could give nothing greater than his own life. Yet another person who has only suffered a scratch with two ounces of love will have much more merit, because it is charity and love that give value to our works”. [10]
With remarkable realism, Francis went on to speak of the complex relationship between contemplation and action: “You know, or you should know, that contemplation is in itself better than activity and the active life; nonetheless, if one finds greater union [with God] in the active life, then that is better. If a Sister in the kitchen holding a pan over the fire has greater love and charity than another Sister, that material fire will not hold her back but instead help her to become more pleasing to God. It frequently happens that people are united to God as much in activity as in solitude; in the end, it always comes back to the question of where the greatest love is to be found”. [11] This, then, is the truly important thing, more important than any kind of useless rigidity or self-absorption: to keep asking at every moment, in every decision, in every situation in life, where the greatest love is to be found. Not by chance, Saint John Paul II would call Francis de Sales the “Doctor of Divine Love”, [12] not simply because he had written a weighty Treatise on that subject, but first and foremost because he was an outstanding witness to that love. His writings were no theory concocted behind a desk, far from the concerns of ordinary people. His teachings were the fruit of a great sensitivity to experience. He merely translated into doctrine what, enlightened by the Spirit, he had experienced and learned in the course of his remarkably innovative pastoral activity. We find it summed up in the Preface to the Treatise on the Love of God: “In Holy Church, everything pertains to love, lives in love, is done for love and comes from love”. [13]
not only a civil, honest and Christian life, but a superhuman, spiritual, devout and ecstatic life, a life that in any case is beyond and above our natural condition”. [48] Here we arrive at the central, luminous pages of the Treatise, where that “ecstasy” is presented as the joyous exuberance of a Christian life that transcends the mediocrity of mere conformity. “Not to steal, lie, or swear in vain; to love and honour one’s father; not to kill: this is to live in accord with natural reason. But to forsake all our goods, to love poverty, to call her and consider her a most delightful mistress, to consider reproach, persecution and martyrdom as happiness and blessing, to preserve absolute chastity, to live in the world contrary to all the wisdom of the world and against the tide of this life by habitual resignation, renunciation and acts of self-abnegation: this is not to live in ourselves, but above and beyond ourselves. And because no one can go out of and above himself in this manner unless the eternal Father draw him, it follows that this kind of life is a perpetual rapture and a continual ecstasy of action and operation”. [49]
A life, in other words, that rediscovers the wellsprings of joy and avoids the temptation of self-centredness. For “the great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless”. [50]
To his description of “the ecstasy of work and life”, Saint Francis adds two important clarifications that remain valid for us today. The first offers a practical criterion for discerning the authenticity of this style of life, while the second concerns its deepest source. As the criterion of discernment, he states that while, on the one hand, this ecstasy entails genuine self-renunciation, on the other it does not mean fleeing from life. We should constantly remind ourselves of this, lest we risk straying from the right path. In a word, those who think they are rising to God, yet fail to love their neighbour, are deceiving both themselves and others.
Here we find the same criterion that Francis used to measure true devotion. “If you see a person who in prayer has raptures that exalt him above himself to God, and yet has no ecstasy of life, that is, he does not lead a life elevated and joined to God, above all by means of constant charity, believe me, Theotimus, all his raptures are exceedingly dubious and dangerous”. His conclusion is incisive: “Being above ourselves in prayer, but beneath ourselves in life and action, being angelic in meditation, but brutish in conversation, is a true sign that such raptures and ecstasies are nothing other than diversions and deceits of the evil spirit”. [51] In essence, this is what Paul already pointed out to the Corinthians in his “hymn to charity”: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing” ( 1 Cor 13:2-3).
For Saint Francis de Sales, then, while the Christian life is never without ecstasy, ecstasy is inauthentic apart from a truly Christian life. Indeed, life without ecstasy risks being reduced to blind obedience, a Gospel bereft of joy. On the other hand, ecstasy without life easily falls prey to the illusions and deceptions of the Evil one. The great polarities of the Christian life cannot be resolved and eliminated. If anything, each preserves the authenticity of the other. Truth, then, does not exist without justice, pleasure without responsibility, spontaneity without law, and vice versa.
As for the deepest source of this ecstasy, Saint Francis astutely traces it to the love made manifest by the incarnate Son. If indeed “love is the first act and principle of our devout or spiritual life, through which we live, feel, and are moved” and “the spiritual life is such as our affective movements are”, then it becomes clear that “a heart without affection has no love”, and that “a heart that has love is not without affection”. [52] The source of this love that attracts the heart is the life of Jesus Christ. “Nothing sways the human heart as much as love”, and this is most evident in the fact that “Jesus Christ died for us; he gave us life through his death. We live only because he died, and died for us, as ours and in us”. [53]
These words are profoundly moving; they reveal not only a clear and insightful understanding of the relationship between God and humanity, but also the deep bond of affection between Francis de Sales and the Lord Jesus. The ecstasy of life and action is no abstract reality, but shines forth in the charity of Christ that culminates on the cross. That love, far from mortifying our existence, makes it radiate with extraordinary brightness.
For this reason, Saint Francis de Sales could eloquently describe Calvary as “the mountain of lovers”. [54] For there and there alone, do we come to realize that “it is not possible to have life without love, or love without the death of the Redeemer. Except there, everything is either eternal death or eternal love, and the whole of Christian wisdom consists in knowing how to choose well between them”. [55] Francis could thus conclude his Treatise by appealing to a sermon of Saint Augustine on charity: “What is more steadfast than charity, not in requiting injuries, but in taking no account of them? Concerned not with passing things, but with eternity? Since it has an unshakable trust in the promises of the future life, charity can tolerate all things in this present life. It can endure whatever it must here below, because it hopes in the promises of the world to come. Truly, charity never fails. Cultivate it then, and thinking holy thoughts, bring forth fruits of justice. And if you should discover anything else in praise of charity beyond what I have said here, let it become evident in your life”. [56]
All this was supremely evident in the life of the saintly Bishop of Annecy, and now, once more, it is entrusted to each of us. May the celebration of the fourth centenary of his death help us to venerate Saint Francis de Sales with devotion, and through his intercession may the Lord bestow the abundant gifts of the Spirit upon the journey of his holy and faithful People.
Rome, Saint John Lateran, 28 December 2022
FRANCIS
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[1] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, Preface: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 336.
[2] ID., Lett. 2103: À Monsieur Sylvestre de Saluces de la Mente, Abbé d’Hautecombe (3 November 1622), in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, XXVI, Annecy, 1932, 490-491.
[3] ID., Lett. 1961: À une Dame (19 December 1622), in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, XX ( Lettres, X: 1621-1622), Annecy, 1918, 395.
[4] ID., Traité de l’amour de Dieu, I, 15: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 395.
[5] ID., Entretiens spirituels, Dernier entretien [21]: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 1319.
[6] Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (19 March 2018), 49: AAS 110 (2018), 1124.
[7] Ibid., 57: AAS 110 (2018), 1127.
[8] Cf. ibid., Nos. 37-39: AAS 110 (2018), 1121-1122.
[9] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Entretiens spirituels, Dernier entretien [21]: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 1319.
[10] Ibid., 1308.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Letter to the Right Reverend Yves Boivineau, Bishop of Annecy, on the Fourth Centenary of the Episcopal Ordination of Saint Francis de Sales, 23 November 2002, 3: Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, XXV/2 (2002), 767.
[13] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, Préface, ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 336.
[14] BENEDICT XVI, Catechesis, 2 March 2011: Insegnamenti VII/1 (2011), 270.
[15] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Fragments d’écrits intimes, 3: Acte d’abandon heroïque, in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, XXII ( Opuscules, I), Annecy, 1925, 41.
[16] Cf. Address to the International Theological Commission (29 November 2019): L’Osservatore Romano, 30 November 2019, p. 8.
[17] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Lett. 165: À Sa Sainteté Clément VIII (end of October, 1602), in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, XII ( Lettres, II: 1599-1604), Annecy, 1902, 128.
[18] H. BREMOND, L’humanisme dévôt: 1580-1660, in Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France: depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, I, Jérôme Millon, Grenoble, 2006, 131.
[19] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Lett. 168: Aux religieuses du monastère des ‹‹Filles-Dieu›› (22 November 1602), in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, XII ( Lettres, II: 1599-1604), Annecy, 1902, 105.
[20] BENEDICT XVI, Catechesis, 2 March 2011: Insegnamenti, VII/1 (2011), 272.
[21] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Lett. 1869: À M. Pierre Jay (1620 or 1621), in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, XX ( Lettres, X: 1621-1622) Annecy, 1918, 219.
[22] Ibid.
[23] ID., Traité de l’amour de Dieu, Préface: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 339.
[24] Ibid., 347.
[25] Ibid., 338-339.
[26] Cf. Address to Bishops, Priests, Religious, Seminarians and Catechists, Bratislava, 13 September 2021, L’Osservatore Romano, 13 September 2021, pp. 11-12.
[27] Cf. ibid.
[28] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, II, 12: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 444.
[29] “I led them with cords of human kindness [Vulgate: in funiculis Adam], with bands of love; I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them”.
[30] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, II, 12: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 444.
[31] Ibid., II, 12: 444-445.
[32] Ibid., II, 9: 434.
[33] Ibid., II, 12: 446.
[34] Let Us Dream. The Path to a Better Future. In conversation with Austen Ivereigh, New York, 2020, 4.
[35] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Introduction à la vie dévote, I, 1: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 31.
[36] Ibid.: 31-32.
[37] Ibid.: 32.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid.: 33.
[41] Ibid., Preface: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 23.
[42] Apostolic Epistle Sabaudiae Gemma on the Fourth Centenary of the Birth of Saint Francis de Sales, Doctor of the Church (29 January 1967): AAS 59 (1967), 119.
[43] SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 11.
[44] Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, 11: AAS 110 (2018), 1114.
[45] Ibid.
[46] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, VII, 6: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 682.
[47] Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013), 6: AAS 105 (2013), 1021-1022
[48] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, VII, 6: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 682-683.
[49] Ibid.: 683.
[50] Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 2: AAS 105 (2013), 1019-1020.
[51] SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, VII, 7: ed. RAVIER-DEVOS, Paris, 1969, 685.
[52] Ibid.: 684.
[53] Ibid., VII, 8: 687, 688.
[54] Ibid., XII, 13: 971.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Sermons, 350, 3: PL 39, 1535.
