St. Francis de Sales: Hermit Connections

St. Francis de Sales is full of surprises! Toward the end of his life (short-lived by our standards, as he died at age 55), he instituted two Orders in addition to the Visitation, already founded. One of these was the Hermits of Mont Voiron.

Twenty-five years earlier, a few men had devoted themselves to living the eremitic life, to help serve pilgrims who came to a shrine of the Black Virgin. They lived the life without a rule. St. Francis de Sales decided they should have a rule, so he engendered some on the little community.

With hermits, St. Francis de Sales had strict views compared to the more accommodating rule of the Visitation sisters. The hermits had many fasts, no meat, slept on palliasses, rose in the middle of the night and the only relaxation being 3/4 hour recreation each day. For the pilgrimage center, he added the regulation that pilgrims were not to eat or drink within 200 feet of the shrine.

The Hermits of Mont Voiron remained as a religious institution into the second half of the 1700's.

When Bishop Francois de Sales' brother, Jean-Francois, was made coadjutor of the Diocese, St. Francis made a plan for his own retirement. He would become a hermit!

He chose the ancient hermitage of Satin-Germain, up the hill from the Benedictine monastery of Talloires, halfway down the lake of Annecy on the eastern side. On an autumn day in 1621, he and Jean-Francois went to the old hermitage to consecrate a new altar and open the tomb of Saint-Germain, to venerate his relics and inpsect the cells he had made for his retirement. He was going to be accompanied in this hermit life by his nephew, son of his brother Louis--Charles-Auguste, who he would tutor.

St. Francis said, "How beautiful this place is. Here great and beautiful thoughts will come thick and fast like the snow which falls in winter. When we settle down here we shall serve God with the breviary, the rosary, and the pen. Here I shall have the leisure to write out, for God's glory and the instruction of souls, all that has been turning round in my mind for thirty years--all that I have made use of in my sermons, instructions and personal meditations. I have plenty of notes and I hope that God will inspire me."

In all his life, this seemed to be the only time in which St. Francis desired something for himself. But the hermit life was not to be, not on this earth. He died two years later after being immediately called upon for other travels and ecclesial duties after this visit to his future hermitage. He died one year later, Dec. 28, 1622.