“Pope Francis commissioned some 3 million young people to join forces and form what could be called Missionaries Without Borders.
“Where does Jesus send us?” he asked World Youth Day pilgrims July 28. “There are no borders, no limits: He sends us to everyone.” (Catholic News Service, Cindy Wooten)
And Saint Francis de Sales, founder of the Visitation Order of Holy Mary, was a Missionary in his 20’s, as a young priest, whose Mission to the Chablais area(France and Switzerland) resulted in one of the most remarkable conversion stories in Catholic history!
St. Francis makes an excellent intercessor and model for today’s youth, who have been directly commissioned by our Holy Father.
What was his young missionary experience like?
St. Francis volunteered to reevangelize the Chablais region of France, south of Geneva. There were some 72,000 souls who were now Calvinists, their ancestors having left Catholicism 60 years before. It was a hopeless looking mission of reaching people who would not listen to Catholic preaching for fear of reprisals.
St. Francis’ first few months saw mostly failure, as he spent a very cold winter tramping of the countryside, receiving a frigid welcome and sometimes sleeping in haylofts at night. So he resorted to writing pamphlets which he posted on walls and slipped under doors. By this method he was able to reach the souls he was after, such that at the end of four years almost the entire population had returned to the ancient Catholic Faith. Truly, the conversion of the Chablais is truly one of the most remarkable conversion stories in Catholic history.*
The pamphlets that St. Francis de Sales wrote are currently gathered together in a book called “The Catholic Controversy” http://archive.org/details/catholiccontrove00sain
*(Source: http://www.stfrancisdesales.com/stfrancis.htm)
Young people of today, pray to St. Francis de Sales, once a young missionary, to intercede for your missionary efforts in spreading the Gospel in our world.!
Read: Mission according to St. Francis de Sales, based on his mission to the Chablais, by JEAN-LUC LEROUX, O.S.F.S.
http://web1.desales.edu/assets/salesian/library/Leroux-Mission.pdf