Saint Jane Frances de Chantal

Saint Jane Frances de Chantal was a wife, a mother and a widow before she became a nun. Together with Saint Francis de Sales she founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, whose nuns are known as Visitandines. The Church commemorates her on August 12.

She was born in 1572 in Dijon, in Burgundy, into a noble family. Her mother died when Jane was eighteen months old, and her father, a high-ranking magistrate, took charge of her upbringing. In 1592 she married Baron Christophe de Rabutin-Chantal and went to live with him at the castle of Bourbilly. She put the neglected estate in order and never sent away empty-handed the poor who knocked at the gate. Six children were born of the marriage, four of whom survived.

In 1601, after not quite nine years of marriage, her husband was killed while hunting by a friend’s accidental shot. Jane took the loss so hard that people feared for her life. She made a vow of chastity and turned down one suitor after another. For a long time she could not forgive the man who had fired the fatal shot, and forgiveness came only with time. For seven years she lived with her children at Monthelon in the house of her father-in-law, who had threatened otherwise to disinherit his grandchildren, and she patiently bore the humiliations inflicted by the servant who ruled his household.

During Lent of 1604 she heard Saint Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, preach in Dijon and placed herself under his spiritual direction. He showed her a path to holiness without an excess of devotions and penances, in the faithful fulfillment of everyday duties. In a letter of October 14, 1604, he wrote to her that one must “do all through love, nothing through constraint.” A new religious order was born of their spiritual friendship. Once she had secured her children’s future, she moved to Annecy in Savoy, where the first community of the Visitation was founded on June 6, 1610. It also received widows and women of frail health, unable to bear the harsh penances of the religious orders of the time.

In time the community accepted enclosure and the Rule of Saint Augustine. After the death of Francis de Sales in 1622, Jane led the order herself, and Saint Vincent de Paul became her spiritual director. She visited the monasteries and wrote thousands of letters; when she died, the order had more than eighty houses. Despite her reputation for holiness, she long struggled with doubts and spiritual darkness. In 1986 in Annecy, John Paul II recalled that she had known the difficulty of forgiveness and that her faith had gone through severe trials many times. The Visitation nuns came to Poland in 1654, brought to Warsaw by Queen Marie Louise Gonzaga.

She died on December 13, 1641, in Moulins, during a journey to the monasteries of the order. Her body rests in the Basilica of the Visitation in Annecy, beside the body of Saint Francis de Sales. Pope Benedict XIV beatified her in 1751, and Clement XIII canonized her on July 16, 1767, in St. Peter’s Basilica.