Father Francis de Sales tells the Pope he found Beza's heart a stone

ANNECY, Savoy, 1597 AD — On April 21, 1597 AD, Father Francis de Sales, the future St. Francis de Sales, wrote from Annecy to Pope Clement VIII. The Pope had given him an errand: to find Theodore Beza, the most famous of the Calvinist ministers, at Geneva, and learn whether he could be won back to the Catholic Church. After months of trying, the young priest had talked with Beza alone on Easter Tuesday. He told the Pope that he had found the old man unmoved, and that at Beza’s age there was no time to lose.

Father Francis de Sales was twenty-nine. Since September 1594 AD he had been working to bring the Chablais back to the Catholic faith. The Chablais is the province on the south shore of Lake Geneva, beside the city. Bern’s armies overran it in 1536 AD, banned Catholic worship and banished the priests who would not give up their faith. When Father Francis de Sales arrived, fewer than a hundred Catholics were left among several thousand people. He preached from Thonon, its chief town, and wrote leaflets setting out the Catholic faith.

He was also provost of Geneva’s cathedral, the senior priest of its chapter. Neither he nor his bishop could live in the city, because Geneva was the stronghold of Calvinism. The diocese was run from Annecy, in Savoy.

Beza, born in 1519 AD, had gone to Geneva and become John Calvin’s assistant and then, in 1564 AD, his successor. In 1596 AD many people were saying that he was ready to return to the Church, and Father Francis de Sales and Father Esprit de Beaume, a Capuchin preacher, began to hope it was true. Father Esprit was going to Rome, and the two priests agreed that he would put the matter to the Pope in person. Pope Clement VIII then charged Father Francis de Sales to learn from Beza, face to face, what he really thought.

Father Francis de Sales went into Geneva again and again through the first three months of 1597 AD, “giving one piece of business or another as my reason”, as he wrote to the Pope. He called at Beza’s house each time and never once found him alone.

On Easter Tuesday, April 8, he came into the city carrying five consecrated hosts from Thonon. They were for Catholics living in Geneva who could not leave it, and he carried them in the silver pyx he used to take Communion to the sick. At his inn he gave Communion to a servant girl with half of one of the hosts, then went on to Beza’s house. This time he found Beza alone and, he told the Pope, “at first at least, easy enough to approach”.

The Abbé Hamon, his nineteenth-century biographer, gives this account of the conversation. Father Francis de Sales asked Beza: “Sir, can one be saved in the Roman Church?” Beza stood silent, then went into his study and paced there for about a quarter of an hour. He came back pale and said that one could, and that the Roman Church was without doubt “the mother Church”.

Father Francis de Sales asked why, then, the Calvinists had shed so much blood in France. Beza answered that the Roman Church had abuses to reform, among them its teaching that good works are necessary for salvation. Father Francis de Sales replied from the Gospel of St. Matthew, where the condemned are sent into the fire for the food they did not give the hungry. Beza went red and broke into insults against Catholics. Then he apologized and asked his visitor to come back often. They had talked for three hours.

In his letter, Father Francis de Sales summed up those three hours for the Pope in one sentence: “But at last, as I was leaving, after I had tried every way of drawing his real mind out of him and had moved every stone I could, I found his heart a stone: unmoved until now, or at any rate not properly moved; an old man grown old in evil days.”

Father Francis de Sales went on, “as far as I can guess from his words”: “if the way to meet him were open a little more often and more safely, he might perhaps be brought back to the Lord’s sheepfold; but in a man of eighty there is danger in delay.”

Two of his phrases come from Scripture. The stone heart is Ezekiel’s, where God promises, “I will take away the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh.” “Grown old in evil days” is how the young Daniel addressed one of the two elders who had falsely accused Susanna.

Father Francis de Sales went back to Beza. Later that year he offered Beza, in the Pope’s name, a pension of four thousand gold crowns a year and twice the value of everything in his house if he would leave Geneva. Beza sent him away: “Go, sir; I am too old and too deaf to be able to hear such words.”