Francis de Sales

“Kindness has become a forgotten virtue,” Barry Corey wrote in his book Love Kindness. I concur!  The cause of Christ will suffer if we don’t practice kindness going forward in culture war debates.
Francis de Sales (1567-1622) asked in his Treatise on the Love of God whether it is heretical to make a choice among Jesus’ commands, regarding which ones to observe and which ones to violate.  “Then why,” he asked, “do you violate Jesus’s law of love?”  De Sales was bishop of Geneva when the city was a bastion of Protestants and epicenter of Calvinism during the Reformation.  Protestants and Catholics were taking up arms against each other when De Sales arrived on the scene.  There was no one better suited to defuse the tension.  His demeanor was gentle in dealing with religious differences.  The King of France said of him that he was “not only devout and learned, but at the same time a gentleman, a very rare combination indeed.”  He coined the phrase, “A spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrelful of vinegar.”  He also advised his Catholic colleagues, “When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time.”  De Sales asked Rome for permission to read John Calvin’s writings, otherwise forbidden to Catholics.  He initiated a series of meetings with Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, to promote mutual respect and honest debate.  I don’t mean to suggest he was soft on conviction.  He believed Protestants were in error and fomenting church schism.  Yet his lasting contribution was his passion to remain faithful to Jesus’ law of love.  His prayer leads us into today: