Much is heard today about the “new Evangelization”, in effect, the re-evangelization of a Catholic Christian population that has basically lost or fails to practice, its faith.
St. Francis de Sales had a high regard for missionaries, who are the core witnesses of Jesus Christ in every generation, and those witnesses by baptism truly are each one of us who are baptized.
St. Francis de Sales knew that evangelization and missionary work can only come from a heart filled with zeal.
He said, “The heart that is taken and pressed with a desire of praising the divine goodness more than it is able, after many endeavours goes oftentimes out of itself, to invite all creatures to help it in its design.”
In speaking of his own patron, St Francis of Assisi, De Sales wote, “ the great S. Francis sang the canticle of the sun, and a hundred other excellent benedictions, to invoke creatures to help his heart, all fainting because he could not satisfy himself in the praises of the dear Saviour of his soul.”
And one deeply in love with God may protest that love , as De Sales goes on, “So the heavenly spouse perceiving herself almost to faint away amid the violent efforts she made to bless and magnify the well-beloved king of her heart, Ah! she cried out to her companions, this divine spouse has led me by contemplation into his wine-cellar, making me taste the incomparable delights of the perfections of his excellence, and I have so steeped and holily inebriated myself in the holy complacency which I have taken in this abyss of beauty, that my soul languishes, wounded with a lovingly mortal desire, which urges me everlastingly to praise so exalted a goodness.
Ah! come, I beseech you, to the assistance of my poor heart, which is upon the point of falling down dead. For pity sustain it, and stay me up with flowers; strengthen me and compass me about with apples, or I fall lifeless.”
And so St. Francis de Sales concludes about missionaries, evangelists and the like: “It is this divine passion that brings forth so many discourses, sends through all hazards a Xavier, a Berzees, an Anthony, that multitude of Jesuits, Capuchins, and religious and ecclesiastics of all kinds, to the Indies, Japan, Maranon, that the holy name of Jesus may be known, acknowledged, and adored throughout those immense nations.
It is this holy passion which causes so many books of piety to be written, so many churches, altars, pious houses to be erected, and in a word which makes many of God’s servants watch, labour, and die amid the flames of zeal which consume and spend them.”
Source: Treatise on the Love of God, Book 5, Chapter 9, St. Francis de Sales