Of the 240 homilies and sermons of St. Francis de Sales, more than twenty are in fact dedicated to the Virgin Mary, in which he extols the virtues of our “valiant captainess,” as he calls her in his Sermon for the Annunciation of March 25, 1621. He also speaks of her in the Treatise on the Love of God, to emphasize her Marian privilege: her holiness.
The Immaculate Conception
In Book II of the Treatise on the Love of God, St. Francis de Sales speaks thus of the divine plan for the preservation of the Virgin Mary:
“Thus he first intended for his most holy Mother a favor worthy of the love of a Son who, being all-wise, all-powerful and all-good, was to prepare a Mother for himself according to his will: And therefore he willed that his redemption should be applied to him as a preventive remedy, so that the sin, which flowed from generation to generation, might not come to her. So that she was so excellently redeemed, that though afterwards the torrent of original iniquity came to roll its unfortunate waves upon the conception of this sacred Lady, with as much impetuosity as it would have done on that of the other daughters of Adam, so that when he arrived there, he did not pass by, but stopped short, as the Jordan did of old in the days of Joshua (Joshua iii, 16:17), and for the same respect: for this river held its course in reverence for the passage of the Ark of the Covenant, and original sin withdrew its waters, revering and fearing the presence of the true Tabernacle of the everlasting covenant. »
The Virtues of Mary
The sermons for the Marian feasts allow St. Francis to exalt the virtues that the Virgin Mary demonstrated: that of humility, that “general virtue which spreads over all the others, and from which they derive their splendor”; charity, which in the end “surpassed that of the Seraphim” and merged with humility to become a humility of love; St. Francis explains to us, in fact, that the love of the Virgin Mary “ascended from love to love by a perpetual advancement”; her chastity, her vow of virginity, which serves as a model for consecrated souls:
“Our Lady is also the honor, the prototype and the patron of men and women who live virtuously, and of widows; but yet no one can deny that girls have a certain alliance with it more peculiar than the rest of men, because this resemblance of virginity, which is of sex and condition, brings to it a great capacity and advantage to approach it more closely”;
St. Francis also extols the virtue of the Virgin Mary’s silence; that of his obedience; that of his surrender to the divine will; the one of his love for men…
The Virgin Mary, Mistress of Our Evangelization
All these virtues make the Virgin Mary a model and an active guide for our spiritual life. With her example and motherly help, we can thus live abandonment in Mary. St. Francis de Sales said:
“You know that our glorious Mistress always gives me special help when I speak of Her Divine Motherhood. I beseech her, this sacred Lady, to put her hand in the precious side of her Son to take from it her dearest graces, in order to give them to us in abundance.”
Let us therefore pray to Mary, who unties knots, to “put her hand in the precious side of her Son”, as St. Francis de Sales said, in order to dispense to us the graces we so much need and to become the mistress of our spiritual life.
I.Rolland
Source: Saint Francis de Sales and the Virgin Mary – blog.gingko-editions