Where is the True Church? The Ultimate Criteria of Saint Francis de Sales

The Doctor of Charity, St Francis de Sales, was intimately involved with the "ecumenism" of his day; the Calvinists would have killed him had they caught him!

From One Peter Five

By Robert Lazu Kmita, PhD

A Non-Ecumenical Tragedy

One of the most subversive tactics of the visible and invisible enemies of Christianity consists in falsifying the Church. In other words, after realizing that the Church of our Savior Christ cannot be destroyed (as Roman persecuting emperors like Nero once intended), the pseudo-prophets then create pseudo-Churches which, though they call themselves “Christian” and “Orthodox,” are not. On a social and cultural level this produces unimaginable confusion in the minds of those who do not know the faith. Concretely, such a situation prevents the recognition of the criteria of authentic discernment. The more one of these pseudo-churches resembles the true Church, the greater the confusion. Moreover, the claims of those belonging to false churches are almost always identical to those made by true Christians: both claim the Savior Christ as their source; both are convinced that they possess the revealed Truth through their interpretation of Holy Scripture, and so on. In such a pluralistic landscape, how can one discern?

I have a friend who, belonging by Baptism to a national schismatic “Orthodox” church of the East, has repeatedly shown me that the Orthodox and the Catholics accuse each other of various heresies and, above all, of causing the schism of 1054. Each side, of course, invokes the authority of its own hierarchy. Each has its own calendar filled with saints. Whom should one believe? Disoriented and confused, though well-disposed toward both sides, my friend almost always ends our conversations with the same admission: that he cannot discern the Truth. Still, it is something that he continues to believe—without hesitation—that Truth does exist. Only that he does not know how to recognize it, how to identify it: shortly, he lacks discernment. Without necessarily taking the side of one camp or the other, he denounces, by his very attitude, the relativism caused by the plurality of contradictory teachings professed by various groups. Until the moment of my own conversion, I too passed through such doubts, which clearly revealed a crisis of faith.

We should not be surprised, then, that faced with the multitude of “Christian” denominations, some no longer believe there is one unique Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Others have completely abandoned even the conviction that Truth itself exists. I must confess that in the last ten to fifteen years I have been (many times!) shocked to hear baptized Catholics exclude all missionary responsibility on the grounds that “there is only one God for everyone—so what does it matter which church you are in?” By invoking such pseudo-arguments, those seduced by appearances attempt to unify all denominations, establishing an ecumenical criterion which ends up—as in the case of Eberhard Jüngel, the main Lutheran adversary of Joseph Ratzinger—justifying the most flagrant contradictions in a vision from which the “hard” truths of Revelation have been eliminated. Beyond the polemics sparked by the plurality of so-called “churches” or by ecumenical relativists who want to unite them all, remains the reality of a confessional landscape which can only deepen the disorientation and confusion of those who do not know the criteria of authentic discernment. Not rarely, such situations give rise to tragedies that trouble us and make us reflect.

Almost twenty years ago I myself witnessed such a sad event. The brother of a fellow student from the Faculty of Philosophy died unexpectedly in a car accident. The distress of his family and of us, his friends, was worsened by something truly terrible: my friend’s brother was not baptized. For he belonged to a neo-Protestant branch of his family, one which does not accept infant baptism. The only consolation was the clear intention the deceased had of being baptized. Indeed, for many years he had declared this desire. You will naturally ask why he postponed fulfilling it. The reason is truly significant: he could not identify the True Church of the Savior Christ.

As I already mentioned, he belonged to a neo-Protestant branch of his family. Yet the family as a whole adhered to at least four different “denominations:” Pentecostals, Baptists, “Orthodox” of the Eastern schismatic churches, and finally, Greek Catholics united with Rome. As you might expect, both the “Orthodox” and the Greek Catholics urged him to be baptized in their respective churches. But neither the Pentecostals nor the Baptists lagged behind in their insistence. Troubled by doubts, my friend’s brother held long discussions now with some, now with others. He wanted to be baptized, but could not answer the inevitable question: which of these is the Church truly founded by the God the Son, Jesus Christ?

For someone who has not received the great gift of being born into a Catholic family, such a situation is far more difficult than one might imagine. Sometimes it takes many years before reaching clarity. For example, in my own case, about five years passed between the time I developed a strong interest in Catholicism and the moment (in the Jubilee year 2000) when I asked to be received into the Catholic Church. At other times, however, those who search never find the true Church—unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam. That was the fate of my friend’s brother.

The Problem of Discernment in Apocalyptic Times

The tragedy of his life and death shows clearly how grave is the confusion—not of tongues, but of beliefs. Usually, those who belong to the Catholic Church assume by principle the identity between their community and the true Church. The same is done by Eastern schismatic Christians who call themselves “Orthodox.” If you ask them, most will say that they are in the true Church. Some will even add—as a well-known Romanian monk does—that in the West there has been no Church since the Great Schism of 1054. Obviously, this claim simply follows from his conviction that the only true church is the “Orthodox” one. If you speak with members of (neo-)Protestant communities, you will hear similar assertions. In short, every denomination’s members claim to belong to the one Church founded by the Savior Christ. Inside one of these communities, the problem is “solved” by ignoring it, since everyone already assumes that his group is the true Church. But what if you are outside and want to become a Christian? How do you discern?

The problem of making the right choice is one of the most important and, at the same time, one of the most challenging. Heresies, sects, and schisms have always existed. But never before have they become so numerous or institutionalized, surviving for centuries and spreading across the world. From this point of view, the situation of the past few centuries—especially after the rise of Lutheranism in the 16th century—has taken on a character unprecedented in history. What was once limited and episodic has now become general and (apparently) permanent. This is why the difficult question of discerning the true Church cannot be avoided: is there a criterion that makes such discernment possible? Of course, every educated Christian will invoke certain elements which, in the end, will lead to an act of “discernment” showing that his own community is the true one. In other words, the judgment is biased and pre-set: in most cases, no one will perform a discernment that concludes his own community is false, will he? Here lies one of the most difficult problems of the “confusion of tongues” in the Christian era. Is it possible to judge from outside the Church? Is there a criterion that allows an outsider to discern the true Church?

Leaving such questions open, since they cannot be properly addressed in an article-length discussion, I must stress that no other blow struck by the devil against the Church has been more powerful than the “invention” of pseudo-churches claiming to possess the Truth. Matters are all the more serious since many of these communities do in fact preserve parts of revealed Truth. Taking account of this apocalyptic situation, Pope Leo XIII, quoting from the anonymous Tractatus de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos (Treatise on the Orthodox Faith Against the Arians), emphasized in his encyclical Satis Cognitum (1896) the gravest danger imaginable:

There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition.[1]

No one is more dangerous than a false prophet convinced he is truly a prophet, or a heretical Christian convinced he holds the right faith. That is why, as we see so clearly today, “Catholic Modernists”o  of every sort have brought about the greatest crisis of faith in history: their negative impact is enormous. The major problem—both with them and with members of any other pseudo-church—is that, just as evil never presents itself as evil but as good, likewise falsehood never presents itself as pure falsehood: evil presents itself as good, and falsehood as Truth. The fallen angel can appear to us as an angel of light, can he not?

“Satan himself transformeth himself into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).

This is why God urges us, through Saint John the Apostle, to “try the spirits if they be of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4: 1). From the history of Christianity we know that few have directly confronted the devil’s deceptions—Saint Anthony the Great, Saint Macarius of Egypt, Padre Pio. Most often, however, he acts not directly but through false prophets. That is why Our Lord Jesus Christ clearly foretold that in the last period of history—that is, in the very time in which we ourselves live—“many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many” (Matthew 24: 11). In such an apocalyptic context, the cultivation of discernment—the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood—is vital.

Doctor of Charity and the Rule of Faith

Fully aware of this absolute necessity, Saint Francis de Sales (1567–1622) dedicated an extraordinary text—published only after his death—to the criterion that makes it possible to discern the true Church. As we would expect, his writing—translated into English under the title The Catholic Controversy[2]—is aimed primarily at the communities that arose from the Reformation: the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The part that interests us in this volume is called “The Rule of Faith.” It sets out the criterion of the act of discernment required of us by God Himself through the word of Saint John, cited above: “try the Spirits.” Yet, Saint Francis adds, “he who caused us to be told that we must prove the spirits would not have done so unless he knew that we had infallible rules to tell the holy from the false spirit.”[3] Thus, according to Saint Francis, it is absolutely certain that “We have such rules, and nobody denies it.”[4]

The great problem is that those who belong to false churches also fabricate rules of their own that seem to prove the truth and authenticity of their communities. Moreover, no member of any community ever works with half-measures: he is convinced that he possesses the whole Truth (and, ironically, this is also believed even by those modern sophists who claim that Truth does not exist or it is unknowable). In order to sweep away all these pseudo-rules, Saint Francis laid out the rule that allows Truth to be established in a sure and indubitable way.

The axiom on which it is based reads as follows:

The Word of God is the true rule of right-believing, as ground and rule are in this case one and the same thing.[5]

We immediately notice that most Christian communities recognize this rule, although they proclaim contradictory “creeds.” Therefore, it is not enough simply to recognize and affirm the absolute primacy of the Word of God. At the same time, one must accept the two sources through which the Word of God is made known to us: Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Both, according to Saint Francis, transmit to us the Word of God. He knew very well, of course, that Tradition precedes the Bible. To recognize without error, in an infallible way, the Word of God that teaches us and conveys the eternal content of Revelation, we need the context of proper interpretation—which can only be the Church itself, the Bride of the Lamb:

Now as God revealed his Word, and spoke, or preached, by the mouth of the Fathers and Prophets, and at last by his own Son, then by the Apostles and Evangelists, whose tongues were but as the pens of scribes writing rapidly, God thus employing men to speak to men; so to propose, apply, and declare this his Word, he employs his visible Spouse as his mouthpiece and the interpreter of his intentions.[6]

This crucial work of the Church is carried out by means of four further criteria of the Rule, whose foundation and axis is the Word of God: (1) the Church as a whole, (2) the Councils, (3) the consent of the Fathers, and (4) the Pope. None of these four “terms” can be missing from the Rule of the one who desires full and error-free knowledge of the revealed Truth.

To strengthen the knowledge of those who seek salvation, God has also given believers two further aids, which Saint Francis of Sales includes in his Rule. The first is the sum of miracles through which the Holy Trinity bears powerful witness to the truth of its teaching. We recall very well how many extraordinary miracles Our Lord Jesus Christ performed in order to prove His divinity.

Finally, the last means available to every human being—creatures endowed with intellect—is the light of natural reason. This, the brilliant Doctor of the Church emphasizes, serves only in a negative sense: for reason cannot in any way deduce or positively speculate so as to attain supernatural Truth on its own, since the teachings of faith far surpass our capacity for knowledge and understanding. This is why we must content ourselves with something far less: namely, the fact that reason can never contradict what Revelation affirms.

For example, a so-called “rational” doctrine such as evolutionism cannot be accepted, since it contradicts several teachings of Revelation transmitted to us by Holy Scripture (monogenesis, original sin, etc.). If we are truly rational and believe in the Truth revealed in the text of Genesis, we will know that any theory claiming that man descends from the monkey (or from any other species) cannot be true (despite the claims of those pseudo-Catholic thinkers who pretend that Revelation can be harmonized with evolutionism).

Finally, here is how Saint Francis de Sales himself sums up his Rule in its entirety:

Here then are eight rules of faith: Scripture, Tradition, the Church, Councils, the Fathers, the Pope, miracles, natural reason. The two first are only a formal rule, the four following are only a rule of application, the seventh is extraordinary, and the eighth negative. Or, he who would reduce all these rules to a single one, would say that the sole and true rule of right-believing is the Word of God preached by the Church of God.[7]

If we reverse the order of the first two criteria—placing Tradition first and then Scripture—we arrive at the complete and precisely ordered image of Saint Francis de Sales’s Rule. As we would expect from a writer of his stature, he also once proposed a metaphorical image of remarkable expressiveness:

God is the painter, our faith the picture, the colours are the Word of God, the brush is the Church. Here then are two ordinary and infallible rules of our belief: the Word of God, which is the fundamental and formal rule; the Church of God, which is the rule of application and explanation.[8]

Although very brief, the initial image is extraordinary. What Saint Francis says is that God, Who created us in His image and likeness (Genesis 1: 26), paints—through the sum of the truths of faith to which we adhere with our minds at the command of the will moved by grace, as Saint Thomas says[9]—an icon of His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. That is what all the baptized must be, as members of the Church: a faithful representation of the Image of the Son of God. The “instrument” with which God paints is the Church itself: where else could we learn the truths of faith? But what do we do when we see a multitude of churches?

Obviously, the first thing is to remain calm and prudent: the fact that many interlocutors claim that what they teach is the Truth, though they contradict one another on fundamental issues, does not mean that we must believe them all. Clearly, Truth is one and unchangeable. But in order to discover it, we must seriously seek out the authentic criterion that allows us to find it. Is this search a rational act? I hasten to recall that, according to Saint Francis de Sales, reason can serve only a negative function. Therefore, we cannot rely on reason to discover the supernatural truths of faith and the true Church. At the same time, we remember one of the most important teachings of Saint Augustine: namely, that the only authentic teacher is God Himself—the Holy Spirit, hidden in the hearts of the baptized (and also guiding those unbaptized who sincerely seek God).

Therefore, under no circumstances can we reduce the search for Truth—as the heretical Catholic priest Georg Hermes (1775–1831) believed—to rationalism. Without a doubt, while not excluding human freedom, we must also recognize that divine grace plays a decisive role in revealing and accepting it. Thus, instead of seeking rational arguments with which we can crush heterodox opponents, it would be far more fruitful to meditate on the “grammar of assent” of Saint Cardinal John Henry Newman. And if we do this in the context of Saint Francis de Sales’s Rule, I am sure not only will we continue this discussion, but we will also rejoice in the unexpected fruits that we will be able to offer to those who are confused and unable to discern.

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[1] Satis Cognitum, Encyclical of Pope Leon XIII on the Unity of the Church: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_29061896_satis-cognitum.html [Accessed: 11 September 2025].

[2] Library of St. Francis De Sales, Works of this Doctor of the Church, Translated into English by the Very Rev. H.B. Canon Mackey, O.S.B., Under the direction of the Right Rev. John Cuthbert Hedley, O.S.B., Bishop of Newport: III. The Catholic Controversy, Edited from the Autograph MSS. at Rome and at Annecy, Third Edition, Revised and Augmented, London: Burns & Oates, Ltd., New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benzinger Brothers, 1909.

[3] Op. cit., p. 83.

[4] Ibidem.

[5] Ibidem.

[6] Op. cit., p. 85.

[7] Op. cit., pp. 86-87.

[8] Op. cit., p. 85.

[9] For many details see my article entitled “What is faith? The Definition of Saint Thomas Aquinas” https://kmitalibrary.substack.com/p/what-is-faith [Accessed: 15 September 2025].