Saint Jane Frances de Chantal

Religious

Feast Day

August 12

Life

1572–1641

Canonized

1767

Order

Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary (Visitation Sisters, V.H.M.)

Born

Dijon, Burgundy, Kingdom of France

Saint Jane Frances Fremiot was born at Dijon on January 28, 1572, second daughter of Benigne Fremiot, the President of the Burgundian Parlement. After a careful Catholic upbringing, in 1592 she married Baron Christophe de Rabutin-Chantal, a young nobleman, and from this marriage of profound mutual affection she bore six children, of whom four survived infancy. After eight years of marriage her husband was killed in a hunting accident in 1601; the twenty-eight-year-old widow, after a period of intense grief and difficult cohabitation with her elderly father-in-law, undertook a more intensive life of prayer, almsgiving, and care of the poor and sick.

In Lent 1604 she heard the Lenten preaching of Saint Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, at her father's church in Dijon. From this beginning grew their famous spiritual direction and friendship, conducted by personal meetings during Francis's visits to France and by an extensive correspondence (about two thousand of his letters survive, many of them to her). Together they conceived a new community of women religious, with a less strict cloister, designed to admit widows, the elderly, and women of weaker health, who would combine contemplation with simple visits of charity to the sick poor in their homes (whence the name Visitation, recalling the Virgin's visit to Saint Elizabeth).

The first house of the Visitation of Holy Mary opened at Annecy on June 6, 1610, with Jane Frances and three companions; she was the first superior. The original conception of an active institute was modified by Cardinal Marquemont of Lyon and confirmed by Pope Paul V in 1618 to a strict cloistered contemplative order with simple vows; it received papal approval as a religious order with solemn vows in 1626. By the time of Jane Frances's death in 1641, the order had grown to eighty-six monasteries throughout France, Savoy, and Italy.

After the death of Saint Francis de Sales in 1622, Jane Frances continued as superior general and traveled extensively to visit her foundations. She suffered the deaths of her son, her son-in-law, and many close associates with the same trustful submission to God's will that her spiritual director had taught her. She died at the Visitation Monastery of Moulins on December 13, 1641. Pope Benedict XIV beatified her on November 21, 1751; Pope Clement XIII canonized her on July 16, 1767. The General Roman Calendar observes her Memorial on August 12, the date adopted in the post-Vatican II reform; the eve, August 11, is for the Memorial of Saint Clare.