FRANCIS OF PAOLA (or Paula), ST, founder of the Minims, a religious order in the Catholic Church, was born of humble parentage at Paola in Calabria in 1416, or according to the Bollandists 1438. As a boy he entered a Franciscan friary, but left it and went to live as a hermit in a cave on the seashore near Paola. Soon disciples joined him, and with the bishop’s approval he built a church and monastery. At first they called themselves “Hermits of St Francis”; but the object they proposed to themselves was to go beyond even the strict Franciscans in fasts and bodily austerities of all kinds, in poverty and in humility; and therefore, as the Franciscans were the Minors (minores, less), the new order took the name of Minims (minimi, least). By 1474 a number of houses had been established in southern Italy and Sicily, and the order was recognized and approved by the pope. In 1482 Louis XI. of France, being on his deathbed and hearing the reports of the holiness of Francis, sent to ask him to come and attend him, and at the pope’s command he travelled to Paris. On this occasion Philip de Comines in his Memoirs says: “I never saw any man living so holily, nor out of whose mouth the Holy Ghost did more manifestly speak.” He remained with Louis till his death, and Louis’ successor, Charles VIII., held him in such high esteem that he kept him in Paris, and enabled him to found various houses of his order in France; in Spain and Germany, too, houses were founded during Francis’s lifetime. He never left France, and died in 1507 in the monastery of his order at Plessis-les-Tours.
The Rule was so strict that the popes long hesitated to confirm it in its entirety; not until 1506 was it finally sanctioned. The most special feature is an additional vow to keep a perpetual Lent of the strictest kind, not only flesh meat but fish and all animal products—eggs, milk, butter, cheese, dripping—being forbidden, so that the diet was confined to bread, vegetables, fruit and oil, and water was the only drink. Thus in matter of diet the Minims surpassed in austerity all orders in the West, and probably all permanently organized orders in the East. The strongly ascetical spirit of the Minims manifested itself in the title borne by the superiors of the houses—not abbot (father), or prior, or guardian, or minister, or rector, but corrector; and the general superior is the corrector general. Notwithstanding its extreme severity the order prospered. At the death of the founder it had five provinces—Italy, France, Tours, Germany, Spain. Later there were as many as 450 monasteries, and some missions in India. There never was a Minim house in England or Ireland. It ranks as one of the Mendicant orders. In 1909 there were some twenty monasteries, mostly in Sicily, but one in Rome (S. Andrea delle Fratte), and one in Naples, in Marseilles and in Cracow. There have been Minim nuns (only one convent has survived, till recently at Marseilles) and Minim Tertiaries, in imitation of the Franciscan Tertiaries. The habit of the Minims is black.
See Helyot, Hist. des ordres religieux (1714), vii. c. 56; Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1896), i. § 52; the article “Franz von Paula” in Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexicon (ed. 2), and in Herzog, Realencyklopädie (ed. 3); Catholic Dictionary, art. “Minims.”
(E. C. B.)
FRANCIS (François) OF SALES, ST (1567-1622), bishop of Geneva and doctor of the Church (1877), was born at the castle of Sales, near Annecy, Savoy. His father, also François, comte de Sales, but better known as M. de Boisy, a nobleman and soldier, had been employed in various affairs of state, but in 1560, at the age of thirty-eight, settled down on his ancestral estates and married Françoise de Sionnay, a Savoyard like himself, and an heiress. St Francis, the first child of this union, was born in August 1567 when his mother was in her fifteenth year. M. de Boisy was renowned for his experience and sound judgment, and both parents were distinguished by piety, love of peace, charity to the poor, qualities which early showed themselves in their eldest son.
He received his education first at La Roche, in the Arve valley, then at the college of Annecy, founded by Eustace Chappius, ambassador in England of Charles V., in 1549. At the age of thirteen or fourteen he went to the Jesuit College of Clermont at Paris, where he stayed till the summer of 1588, and where he laid the foundations of his profound knowledge, while perfecting himself in the exercises of a young nobleman and practising a life of exemplary virtue. At this time also he developed an ardent love of France, a country which was politically in antagonism with his own, though so closely linked to it geographically, socially and by language. At the end of 1588 he went to Padua, to take his degree in canon and civil law, a necessary prelude in Savoy at that time to distinction in a civil career. His heart, however, especially from the date of his receiving the tonsure (1578), was already turned towards the Church, and he gave his attention even more to theology, under the great masters Antonio Possevino, S.J., and Gesualdo, afterwards general of the Friars Minor, than to his legal course. “At Padua,” he said to a friend, “I studied law to please my father, and theology to please myself.” In that licentious university Francis found the greatest difficulty in resisting attacks on his virtue, and once at least had to draw his sword to defend his personal safety against a band of ruffians. The gentleness for which he was already renowned was not that of a weak, but of a strong character. He returned to Savoy in 1592, and, while seeking the occasion to overcome his father’s resistance to his resolution of embracing the ecclesiastical profession, took the diploma of advocate to the senate. Meantime, without his knowledge, his friends procured for him the post of provost of the chapter of Geneva, an honour which reconciled M. de Boisy to the sacrifice of more ambitious hopes. After a year of zealous work as preacher and director he was sent by the bishop, Claude de Granier, to try and win back the province of Chablais, which had embraced Calvinism when usurped by Bern in 1535, and had retained it even after its restitution to Savoy in 1564. At first the people refused to listen to him, for he was represented to them as an instrument of Satan, and all who had dealings with him were threatened with the vengeance of the consistory. He therefore wrote out his message on sheets which were passed from hand to hand, and these, with the spectacle of his virtues and disinterestedness, soon produced a strong effect. The sheets just spoken of still exist in the Chigi library at Rome, and were published, though with many alterations, in 1672, under the title of Les Controverses. This must be considered the first work of St Francis.
The re-erection of a wayside cross in Annemasse, at the gates of Geneva, amid an enormous concourse of converts, an event which closed the three years of his apostolate, led to the composition of the Défense ... de la Croix, published in 1600. An illness brought on by toil and privation forced him to leave his work to others for nearly a year, but in August 1598 he returned to his field of labour, and in October of that year practically the whole country was Catholic again. Up to that time preaching and conference had been the only weapons employed. The stories of the use of soldiers to produce simulated conversions are incorrect.[1] Possibly the lamentable events of the campaigns of 1589 in Gex and Chablais have been applied to the period 1594-1598. In October of this last year, however, the duke of Savoy, who came then to assist in person at the great religious feasts which celebrated the return of the country to unity of faith, expatriated such of the leading men as obstinately refused even to listen to the Catholic arguments. He also forbade Calvinist ministers to reside in the Chablais, and substituted Catholic for Huguenot officials. St Francis concurred in these measures, and, three years later, even requested that those who, as he said, “follow their heresy, rather as a party than a religion,” should be ordered either to conform or to leave their country, with leave to sell their goods. His conduct, judged not by a modern standard, but by the ideas of his age, will be found compatible with the highest Christian charity, as that of the duke with sound political prudence. At this time he was nominated to the pope as coadjutor of Geneva,[2] and after a visit to Rome he assisted Bishop de Granier in the administration of the newly converted countries and of the diocese at large.
In 1602 he made his second visit to the French capital, when his transcendent qualities brought him into the closest relations with the court of Henry IV., and made him the spiritual father of that circle of select souls who centred round Madame Acarie. Among the celebrated personages who became his life friends from this time were Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the French Oratorians, Guillaume Duval, the scholar, and the duc de Bellegarde, the latter a special favourite of the king, who begged to be allowed to share the Saint’s friendship. At this time also his gift as a preacher became fully recognized, and de Sanzéa, afterwards bishop of Bethlehem, records that Duval exhorted all his students of the Sorbonne to listen to him and to imitate this, “the true and excellent method of preaching.” His principles are expressed in the admirable letter to André Frémyot of October 1604.
De Granier died in September 1602, and the new bishop entered on the administration of his vast diocese, which, as a contemporary says, “he found brick and left marble.” His first efforts were directed to securing a virtuous and well-instructed clergy, with its consequence of a people worthy of their pastors. All his time was spent in preaching, confessing, visiting the sick, relieving the poor. His zeal was not confined to his diocese. In concert with Jeanne Françoise Frémyot (1572-1641), widow of the baron de Chantal, whose acquaintance he made while preaching through Lent at Dijon in 1604, he founded the order of the Visitation, in favour of “strong souls with weak bodies,” as he said, deterred from entering the orders already existing, by their inability to undertake severe corporal austerities. The institution rapidly spread, counting twenty houses before his death and eighty before that of St Jeanne. The care of his diocese and of his new foundation were not enough for his ardent charity, and in 1609 he published his famous Introduction to a Devout Life, a work which was at once translated into the chief European languages and of which he himself published five editions. In 1616 appeared his Treatise on the Love of God, which teaches that perfection of the spiritual life to which the former work is meant to be the “Introduction.”