January 24 is the feast of St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), bishop of Geneva and Doctor of the Church. Born in the Savoyard castle of Sales, he was ordained priest at a time when Geneva was the citadel of Calvinism and the Catholic see of Geneva was administered from Annecy, in the duchy of Savoy. As bishop from 1602, he resided at Annecy and worked for the reconversion of the Chablais, the part of his diocese that had gone over to the Reformed faith.
His Introduction to the Devout Life (1609), written for a laywoman, was the first manual of the spiritual life addressed to the laity — not to monks or nuns — and became one of the most widely read Catholic books of the 17th century. His Treatise on the Love of God (1616) is the mystical counterpart. With St. Jane Frances de Chantal he founded the Order of the Visitation at Annecy in 1610, an order of sisters without enclosure, designed for widows and the less robust, dedicated to the "little virtue" of the Visitation: humility, simplicity, and gentleness.
Francis died at Lyon in 1622, while visiting the Visitation monastery there. His body was translated to the Basilica of the Visitation at Annecy, where it lies with the body of Jane Frances de Chantal in the chapel of the relics. He was beatified in 1661, canonized in 1665, and proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI in 1923 — the patron of the Catholic press and of the deaf, the latter because of his work of catechesis through the printed tracts he slipped under doors in the Chablais.
