St. Francis de Sales

Who they were

Francis was a Savoyard aristocrat trained for law who became instead the Bishop of Geneva, a see he could not even enter, Geneva being Calvin's city. He governed from exile in Annecy. Assigned as a young priest to the hostile Chablais region, he pioneered something genuinely new: when no one would come to hear him, he wrote. Short, clear leaflets, slipped under doors and pasted on walls, patiently, for four years. It worked, and it is why journalists and writers have him as patron.

His Introduction to the Devout Life, spiritual counsel written for laypeople in ordinary jobs, was revolutionary for saying holiness was not the clergy's private property, and it has never been out of print in four centuries. He personally catechized a deaf man using signs he devised, which gave the deaf their patron. The famous gentleness was built rather than born. He admitted to a ferocious natural temper, mastered over decades.

Why people turn to St. Francis de Sales

Writers on deadline, journalists under pressure to be first instead of right, and, his quietest constituency, people at war with their own temper, who take real hope from a Doctor of the Church who had one.

How to ask their intercession

Before you write, ask for clarity and charity in the same sentence, which was his signature combination. Parents of deaf children and Deaf Catholics have a particular claim on him.