Editor’s note: Fr. Thomas Dailey, OSFS, will be a keynote speaker at the Catholic Diocese of Wichita’s 2026 Evangelization + Discipleship + Stewardship Conference, scheduled for Friday and Saturday, April 17-18 at the Church of the Magdalen in Wichita. The theme will be “From the Heart of Jesus: The Source of Every Gift.” The conference is designed to equip pastors, parish and school staff, councils and lay leaders with practical tools and clear structures for evangelization, discipleship, and stewardship in service of the Church’s mission. For more information or to register, click here. The following conversation with Fr. Dailey – which took place in early March – ran in two parts in the March 20 and April 3 editions of the Catholic Advance.
A couple of recurring themes and motifs in your work are the spirituality of St Francis de Sales – hardly a stretch for a Salesian priest – and then also the Sacred Heart of Jesus, right? How would you characterize those emphases, and am I missing any?
No, they’re certainly the primary emphases, and they certainly go together. You know, the tradition of devotion to the Sacred Heart was a key theme for Francis de Sales, and subsequently, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque was a nun in the order that Francis de Sales founded.
How do you describe St. Francis de Sales to people who don’t know much about him? What’s a brief description of his life on Earth and his legacy?
He lived not long after the Protestant Reformation. The beginning of his work had a lot to do with presenting the Catholic faith in its clarity in a sort of ecumenical effort, if you will. That emphasis on presenting the reasonableness of the faith was a first key to his life and his work. He was very well educated, and he tried to educate people in the faith.
The teaching for which he is most well-known is promoting the idea – which is not so foreign to us nowadays, but less so back in the day – that holiness is for everyone. Every single person is called to a life of holiness, but the way of holiness varies depending on what he called a person’s state in life, or vocation. The holiness of a bishop or a nun is not the same as the holiness for a truck driver or journalist, but everyone is called to be holy.
His term for it was to live a devout life. He introduces people to a devout life. That’s his most famous book, The Introduction to the Devout Life, in which he gives advice on how to be holy no matter what else you have to do. In fact, holiness informs everything you do in life. That was his big, big emphasis.
First and foremost, he was a bishop in the Diocese of Geneva. He educated priests and people alike. He was a spiritual director. He was a prolific writer and very well-known preacher. And he founded this religious order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, which kind of embodies and puts forth everything he taught.
The universal call to holiness does seem to be a more prominent mindset in our day, versus what might have been characterized as a layperson’s mere responsibility to “pray, pay, and obey.” There have been eras in which Catholics who were not consecrated religious nor ordained priests might have taken a much more functional – and not relational – mindset toward their faith and what God wanted from them. Can you expand on that contrast?
Sure, that’s the very contrast Francis de Sales was trying to overcome: The idea that real holiness – true holiness – is what the monks, nuns, priests, and bishops do, that idea of holiness as devotion, if I dare put it this way – doing specifically religious things.
For Francis de Sales, holiness was life. It wasn’t simply the pious exercises that we do. Therefore, that applies to everyone, right? You can seek to be a holy journalist by doing what you must to do your journalism work in a holy way, offering it to God, asking for God’s grace to do it well, and in doing it for love of God and love of neighbor.
I think the real contrast is – and I think the division still exists today in people’s minds – that holiness or devotion is one more thing we have to do: “I also have to go to church on Sunday,” for instance. But for Francis de Sales, holiness wasn’t a thing to do. It’s everything.
It’s not what we do, it’s who we are.
Yes. It permeates everything. That mindset of realizing holiness is not one among many actions in our lives, but is the overarching or permeating influence that infuses everything we do. He worked most feverishly at trying to shift that mindset.
Do you have any favorite examples of that?
I’ll give you an example from the saint. It’s from my favorite letter of his. A relatively young mother had written to him for advice. She wanted to live a good life, and she said to him, basically that, she wanted to be holy, but found it very difficult to get to Mass every day, because her seven children were driving her crazy and making daily Mass attendance difficult. He wrote back to her and said, “Madam, you should not go to Mass every day.” Stop and think about that for a second. A bishop is telling someone not to go to Mass! He says, “You become a saint, you become holy, by being the best mother you can be to those seven children and doing that well for the love of God.
An example on the flip side might be when he spoke to the nuns in the order that he had founded. One of the nuns asked him what she should do when she’s in praying in the chapel and the doorbell rings. Does she interrupt her prayer? He said, “No, it’s not interrupting your prayer. You’re praying by answering the door and taking care of whoever is in need there.”
They’re little things, but they make sense to people. And, in the case of the mother, being the best mother one can be is an everyday approach to holiness – not so much in a performance sense, but in a maternal sense, because being a mom is precisely what God wants for her. It recognizes what is practical: feeding and cleaning up after those kids. So, too, the sister getting up to answer the door: despite how mundane those activities seem, they fulfill the will of God.
The Lord is the Word Made Flesh, which elevates the mundanity.
That is exactly right. For Francis de Sales, that was the key. The Lord entered into the fullness of our humanity, and so it’s in and through being human, that we are children of God, that we be holy. It’s not being other than what we are. It’s being who we are and being that for the love of God.
Do you have any favorite stories about your own devotion to and/or connection with St Francis de Sales?
Oh, wow. Well, the funny story is, I entered a religious order with his name on it, and I had never heard of him before.
That is funny.
Since then, I have delved into his life and thought, and never ceased to be amazed at what he says and how he guides people. There was a British historian once who described all of his writings as “inspired common sense,” which I think is a perfect description, because it’s just what I call “everyday holiness.” It’s holiness that is lived in and through the normal everyday things, but it’s also holiness that develops one day, every day, one day at a time.
So how would you end up in the Salesians, if you weren’t familiar with St. Francis de Sales?
I knew some priests in that order. I knew they were teachers, and I believed God was calling me to be a teacher.
What about the Sacred Heart pulled you in as a subject of study?
It’s part of the Salesian tradition. St. Margaret Mary – the “apostle of the Sacred Heart” – was a nun in the Visitation Order that Francis de Sales had founded half a century earlier. It’s fascinating: here is this cloistered nun in the middle of nowhere who starts a worldwide devotion. It’s mind boggling! That, and the Salesian connection, drew me in.
I also did a lot of work with the Visitation Sisters in their Philadelphia monastery. In 2019-2020 they were celebrating the centenary of St. Margaret Mary’s canonization, which set me to writing about the Sacred Heart. And just last year we celebrated the 350th anniversary of the apparitions of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary.
Is it accurate to say that devotion to the Sacred Heart began to spread at a time in which many people focused on God’s sovereignty and perfection. So perhaps there were cultural currents of Calvinism and Jansenism that influenced perspectives about God in the truth of his fearsome majesty without thinking much about his love and mercy.
Yes and no. I believe you are correct, but I don’t think Jansenism and all that went with it is the only reason for the timing. Certainly that was a lot of it. Again, this touches on Francis de Sales’ teaching; he was trying to correct the Jansenist idea that it’s through our efforts, struggle, and militant sense of devotion that must do X, Y, and Z to even possibly considered loved by God. That kind of outlook was prevalent at the time and had been for at least a century. This may be a little too strong, but that is the opposite of the Sacred Heart. The idea of the Sacred Heart is, as Francis de Sales also taught, that God’s love is poured out for us as a gift, a grace.
To be loved by God is not the result of something we do, right? It comes first. It comes even despite what we do. The outpouring of the Sacred Heart comes regardless of what we do. That was the emphasis in the messages to St. Margaret Mary: This heart has so loved the world already, and the response Jesus receives in the Sacred Heart is pretty much indifference. To put it in today’s language, we just don’t get it. Right? We don’t realize or appreciate that God loves us and how much God loves us. First and foremost, God loves us prior to anything that we do. It flips that mentality that is typical, it’s natural-
Maybe especially for an achieving people such as Americans.
We’re activists. We think we have to do stuff, and do it right, in order to succeed. That’s pretty basic. But when it comes to God and holiness, it’s the opposite. God does it for us. All we have to do is respond.
On one hand, our day and age tends to conflate love exclusively with emotions, feelings, passions, whereas a Christian understanding of love places great emphasis on the will: willing the good of the beloved. Yet, the Sacred Heart so vividly portrays the emotional aspect and can call to mind that song, “Love Hurts.” Any thoughts?
Sure. Francis de Sales talked about love, prayer, and devotion beginning with affection. It begins with that passion, that emotion that comes with being touched by love, and realizing the depth of that in the suffering of the Sacred Heart, realizing the giftedness of that in the sense that we don’t deserve to be loved by God. It begins with that emotion, that affection, allowing ourselves to be touched by the love of God, and then – we know this from human experience – when we realize we are loved, we love in return. That’s a sort of natural anthropology, and it’s the same thing with God. When we realize we are loved by God, and that has an affective dimension, then we are more inclined, we are inspired to practice that. And that’s the effective love of God.
That calls to mind how love multiplies in a way different from a zero-sum context. If a husband loves his wife well, it doesn’t mean that he allots her X units of love and has only Y units left over for his children and others.
Yes, and that’s why we say “God is love,” not that “God has love.” If you have something, by definition, you only have a certain amount of it. But God is love and God being eternal, there’s no end to that. There’s no limit to that. It doesn’t run out.
I realize we’re having this conversation several weeks before you come to Wichita, but can you share any thoughts on your remarks and the theme of the Evangelization, Discipleship and Stewardship Conference?
I will be giving two talks. I think the first idea is to focus on stewardship as coming from a heart that cares, like the compassion of Jesus. It’s a sense of a heart – each of ours and the Lord’s – is a heart that cares. That attitude, that experience, that movement of the heart, always comes first. Do I care? Because when I care about anything – not just stewardship – but anything I do, what I care about-
You’re invested.
Right, and so that that attitude, affection, outlook – whatever you want to call it – comes first.
The second talk may look more at the heart that is generous. You know, we tend to think of the Sacred Heart in sacrificial terms. Well, the sacrificial motif is part of a bigger idea of God’s generosity. God’s “benevolence” would be the Salesian term for it. These are really the two terms that Francis de Sales uses for love. It’s complacence – not in a complacent sense that we have nowadays, but that feeling of being pleased by – and then benevolence, the generous doing for others.
Are you at all familiar with our diocese, or know anything about it?
Just from the one time that I was out there about three years ago with Fr. Jarrod Lies at St. Francis of Assisi. I was thoroughly impressed and inspired by the life, spirit, activity and youthfulness of the parish. Certainly the Spirit seems to be alive and at work there, which inspires me to want to come out when Fr. Jarrod invites me to come speak.
Is there anything that we haven’t discussed, anything I haven’t asked the right question to elicit that you want to get into?
It’s a fascinating event, even the idea of the Sacred Heart and stewardship with the theme of “From the Heart of Jesus, the Source of Every Gift.” I had never thought of it, but the Sacred Heart and stewardship do go together. I’m fascinated for the whole conference to see how it plays out.