Heart Speaks to Heart: The Salesian Spiritual Tradition

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 96 BOOK REVIEW HEART SPEAKS TO HEART: THE SALESIAN SPIRITUAL TRADITION BY WENDY WRIGHT Heart Speaks to Heart: The Salesian Spiritual Tradition. By Wendy Wright. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. Pages 160. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 1-57075506 -x. This book's title—Heart Speaks to Heart—is sure to attract the attention of Newmanists who will immediately recognize the phrase as John Henry Newman’s cardinalatial motto—one that he derived from St. Francis de Sales. Newmanists may begin reading this book in search of resonances between Newman's spirituality and that of Francis de Sales. If such is their quest, they are going to be disappointed;Wright limits her presentation to the history of religious communities that explicitly identify themselves as Salesian. Clearly the book is a labor of love for Wright, yet the book does not give its readers as much insight into and feel for the Salesian tradition as the volume on Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal in the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series: Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal: Letters of Spiritual Direction, to which Wright contributed. Making the Paulist volume so much more helpful are both the introductions and the ample selection of letters by both Francis and Jane.Wright’s Heart Speaks to Heart tends to be repetitive of certain phrases, such as“heart speaking to heart”and“live Jesus”without concretizing them very well. There are no references to Newman in Wright’s book. Surprisingly, there is only one indexed reference to Francis de Sales in Ian Ker’s John Henry Newman: A Biography: On arriving in Rome a week or so later he [Newman] wrote to Birmingham to ask one of the community to check if the words ‘cor ad cor loquitur’ (‘heart speaks to heart’) were to be found in the Vulgate version of the Bible or in Thomas à Kempis. He had forgotten that he had already quoted the saying from St Francis de Sales in the Idea of a University. It was, of course, to be the motto on his cardinal’s coat of arms (719). In the first part of Newman’s Idea of a University, there is apparently only one reference to Francis de Sales, that at the very end of Discourse VIII, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion” (http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/ discourse8.html, 211): Such are some of the lineaments of the ethical character, which the cultivated intellect will form, apart from religious principle.They are seen within the pale of the Church and without it, in holy men, and in profligate; they form the beau-ideal of the world; they partly assist and partly distort the development of the Catholic.They may subserve the education of a St. 97 Francis de Sales or a Cardinal Pole; they may be the limits of the contemplation of a Shaftsbury or a Gibbon. Basil and Julian were fellowstudents at the school ofAthens;and one became the saint and Doctor of the Church, the other her scoffing and relentless foe. In the essay on “University Preaching,” Newman twice quoted Francis de Sales; the first citation is a short comment (http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/ article6.html, 406): So far is clear at once, that the preacher's object is the spiritual good of his hearers. “Finis prædicanti sit,” says St. Francis de Sales; “ut vitam (justitiæ) habeant homines, et abundantius habeant.” [The purpose of the preacher should be that men have {the} life (of justice) and have it more abundantly.] Newman’s second reference to Francis de Sales is more ample (ibid., 410): It is this earnestness, in the supernatural order, which is the eloquence of saints; and not of saints only, but of all Christian preachers, according to the measure of their faith and love. As the case would be with one who has actually seen what he relates,the herald of tidings of the invisible world also will be, from the nature of the case, whether vehement or calm, sad or exulting, always simple, grave, emphatic, and peremptory; and all this, not because he has proposed to himself to be so,but because certain...