We began our Mystic of the Month series with Mother Mary de Sales Chappuis back in 2012.
We return now with new information about her mystical experiences based on new scholarly research by Joseph F. Chorpenning, OSFS.
Mary Theresa Chappuis was was born at Soyhieres, a little village on the confines of the Swiss Jura, on the sixteenth of June,1793.Like Saint Francis of Sales, whose favored daughter she was one day to be, Teresa was a child of prayer. Teresa was sent to the School of the Visitation at Fribourg in Switzerland
Teresa had long felt an interior desire to consecrate herself to God in the cloister.
On the 21st of November 1814, the generous young girl left the home of her childhood to go where Our Lord called her.She entered the Visitation Monastery of Fribourg, Switzerland. In the following June, Teresa was clothed with the religious habit, and received the name of Sr Mary Francis de Sales. The young novice now commenced that work of interior and exterior formation which is the foundation and basis of all religious perfection. She began by penetrating herself with the spirit of the Directory, a little book composed by St Francis de Sales for spiritual direction.
Father Chorpenning’s article states, “One day, in the Novitiate of Fribourg, Sr. Mary de Sales Chappuis received some great lights from the good God;she already caught a glimpse of the foundation of the Oblates. God enabled her to see that this foundation was one of the fruits of the inner life of the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity, and especially of the Father in relation to the Word. These were sublime things.In what later became known as the Le petit Cahierde Fribourg [Notebook of Fribourg] (written c. 1823-26),the Visitandine novice recorded, under obedience, “the communications that she received from the divine persons,particularly what God still intends to give to the world.”
Sr. Mary de Sales reflects:
Behold, I am being called to be an apostle and to contribute to the work that God will establish in order to communicate His graces and to diffuse His divine charity ever more. The Savior will bring forth merits not yet employed. The treasure of His charity will be lavished on the earth and given in all its fullness to the world.
The novice Sr. Mary de Sales records her experiences in the Notebook of Fribourg under obedience—in her case to the mother superior and the diocesan bishop,Pierre-Tobie Yenni (1774-1845; bishop of Lausanne and Geneva, 1815-45, with residence at Fribourg), who examines and affirms the orthodoxy of what Sr. Mary de Sales writes (see Tilburg edition, 4:125-27).
Mother Chappuis receives the communication “from the divine persons” that “the foundation of the Oblates […]was one of the fruits of the inner life of the three persons of the Blessed Trinity.”
The Lord entrusts her with the mission of being the mediator, messenger, apostle, who is to carry the message of this new Trinitarian initiative in salvation history to Fr. Brisson. Likewise, she is “a collaborator or co-creator with God in this particular mission” (Pocetto 2009, 339).
Mother Chappuis has “absolute assurance” about her mission. She is convinced that this project is “her very\raison d’être” and “the work that the Lord was calling her to from the time she entered the novitiate,” and thus “she speaks [of it] with all of the confidence and certainty of an Old Testament prophet” (Pocetto 2009, 338-39).
Mother Chappuis arrives in Troyes for the first time on 1 June 1826. At that moment, “she understood that Troyes was the place that God had chosen for the accomplishment of His work, that in Troyes God had laid the first stone, and that there the effects of the blessed Trinity were to become manifest.” When Mother Chappuis saw for the first time Brisson, the young priest from Troyes who came to visit her at the Second Monastery of Paris, where she was Superior at the time, she immediately recognized him as the one chosen by God to realize the external projects revealed to her by the Lord.”
The Very Reverend Father Brisson was professor at the Diocesan Seminary of Troyes and confessor to the Visitation Monastery in the same city. For more than thirty years he was daily importuned by the holy Superioress, Mother Mary de Sales Chappuis, who urged him constantly to found a Congregation of priests whose members would live according to the teaching and example of St. Francis de Sales and would guide the souls under their charge by the same and methods of sanctification; whereas, Father Brisson persistently and at times quite forcibly, asserted that he could not be brought to do it. He had sometimes prickings of conscience about the matter for he was too well persuaded of the genuine holiness of Mother Mary de Sales, only he wanted proofs from God that such was His positive will and he asked for such proofs.
Thus, one day when saying Mass he felt constrained to say: “Lord, if there be any truth in all that Mother Maryde Sales tells me, grant that after my Mass she may give me forty francs for Madame X—” The preceding evening Madame X. had confided to him her trouble at not being able to pay her rent and she had asked Fr Brisson to lend her sixty francs. He only had 20 in his possession. He did not mention the matter to anyone. Scarcely had he finished his thanksgiving than he was told Mother Mary de Sales wished to speak with him in the parlor. The “Good Mother” handed him, in silence, through the grating, 20 franc pieces. “We must always do what God tells us,” she said, with tears in her eyes. But he still resisted.
However one day at an unexpected moment when he was indignant at the Good Mother’s insistence, Our Lord Jesus appeared to him, not speaking, but His whole attitude so enlightened Fr Brisson interiorly on this design of the Sacred heart, that he was completely changed. He went to Annecy and there again, a vision was given him, this time of St Jane de Chantal who expressed her satisfaction at the foundation of the Oblate Fathers.
The new Congregation commenced with six members and received its formal approbation in 1875 and the final one in 1897.
Sources:
Excerpted from The Venerable Mother Mary de Sales Chappuis, Brooklyn 1924
The De Sales Oblates:A Retrieval and Contemporizing of St. Francis deSales in 19th-century France
ICSS Newsletter March 2019 No. 35 http://www.franz-von-sales.de/icss_en/index.html