Feast Day: June 16th
About as far south as you can get in France without falling into the Mediterranean, or becoming Spain, is a little town named Fontcouverte. The population only crested 500 souls in the early 2000s, so in large part it looks just as picturesque as it did a few hundred years ago – simple brick homes, their copper-colored tile roofs gleaming as the sun sets, all of it perched on the side of the hill they call “La Vade”, and named after the Fontcalel which flows out from the village.
Probably that little place was as unscathed as one could be amidst the civil war tearing France apart in the late 1500s, but the unity and patriotism and confidence in the monarchy that had swelled in the years after St. Joan of Arc, had been all but shattered now 150 years later by the atrocities committed by Catholics against Protestants and vice versa. It’s true that right as Jean- François was born a truce was finally established as Henry IV secured the throne in 1598 (he, a Protestant, converting to Catholicism in order to do so, then re-establishing Catholicism as the religion of the realm, albeit granting the Huguenots/Protestants religious liberty). Little Jean’s dad had been part of the Catholic League which had fervently fought against King Henry until his conversion, so the family had gained a bit of noble standing from his service in that war. This mean that Jean was blessed with both a rich, and a firmly Catholic, education. He was growing up where many of the Protestants in France had settled, so though the country as a whole was 90% Catholic, his early years were certainly impacted by that disparity of faith all around him, and even if the war was over, the shells of burned churches and stories of murdered priests were not far in his past.
Growing up, he was inspired by the Jesuits who taught in his school, especially the stories of the great Jesuit missionaries like St. Francis Xavier who had died just 50 years before. The age of martyrs, of course, was not over (still isn’t, and never will be as it turns out for anyone who follows a Crucified Savior): Jean de Brébeuf was born just a few years before Jean-François, and Isaac Jogues would be born less than ten years after him, (all of these Jesuits from France). During his decade-plus of formation in the Society of Jesus, our Jean grew rapidly into a tremendous teacher of the faith, besides exemplifying a deep and wholehearted devotion to God as well as a tender heart for the poor and hurting. Surely these were the skills and gifts needed for a world – rapidly expanding – in which so many unknown people had never heard the Gospel. But when he was finally ordained a priest in 1632 his assignment was … to Montpellier, that’d be about 70 miles up the coast from where he was born, and his task … to work with fallen-away Catholics in those areas ravaged by the civil war the century before.
It wasn’t as glamorous as Francis Xavier, and he wasn’t going to come home mutilated or martyred as would Brébeuf and Jogues and so many others. Nope, he was going to hear confessions before and after his morning Mass, visit the prisons and hospitals in the afternoon, try to get people to come to his formation-conferences in the evenings and try amidst the long days to exude kindness and compassion to widows, orphans, and others who had been neglected, or wounded, by the Church in all those horrible years before. He would endure not foreign jungles or horrendous passages across the ocean, just harsh winters and discouraging turnouts. He just went town to town and preached the Gospel – his words were poetic and moving when preaching at Mass, substantial but simple when he taught the faith on other occasions – and he just traveling ahead of his bishop to try and prepare people to hear from their shepherd and help them return to the sacraments after years far from them. His was the life and work of a pretty typical parish priest of today.
And then one day, in front of the Church in Saint-Andé (a bit further south than even Fontcouverte), someone asked everyone who they were waiting for, and they said they were waiting for “the saint.” That’d be ‘Saint’ (not yet canonized, not yet dead) John Francis Regis who was coming for another parish mission. His simple words, sacrificial love, and prayerfulness had made an impact after all! And not like 50 years later either! Eight years after being ordained and beginning his circuit around that diocese he had a premonition that he wasn’t going to live much longer. He put his affairs in order, continued to preach about God’s love, and right after Christmas of 1640, he knew he was in his final hours. He spent December 31st looking on the crucifix and simply prayed “Into thy hands I commend my spirit” before taking his final breath that evening.
– Fr. Dominic is immensely inspired by this “ordinary” saint. Heroic virtue does not mean martyrdom or baptizing thousands; it mostly means consistent prayer, persevering in charity, and enduring the day’s burdens. All of us can manage that!