St. Jane Frances de Chantal

Who Jane Frances de Chantal Was

Jane was the daughter of Bénigne Frémyot, president of the parlement of Burgundy, a senior legal and administrative office in Dijon. Her mother died when she was still an infant, and her father raised her. She married Christophe de Rabutin, Baron de Chantal, in 1592, at the age of twenty.

The marriage was happy and the household was in trouble when she arrived. She took over the running of the estate at Bourbilly, restored its finances, and organised relief for the poor of the district during years of famine. She had six or seven children of whom four survived: a son, Celse-Bénigne, and three daughters. Her granddaughter through Celse-Bénigne was Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, the Marquise de Sévigné, whose letters are one of the monuments of French literature.

She spent the second half of her life travelling France founding convents, negotiating with bishops and city councils, and writing letters of direction to the women in them. A very large body of her correspondence survives, and it is the main source for her interior life.

The Courageous Widow

St. Jane Frances de Chantal (1572 to 1641) was a French noblewoman, wife, and mother. Her happy marriage to the Baron de Chantal ended when he was accidentally shot during a hunting party in 1601 by a kinsman, and died of the wound about nine days later. She was left a widow with four young children at the age of twenty-eight, and she struggled for years with grief and with forgiveness. The traditional accounts say that she made herself forgive the man who had fired the shot and later stood as godmother to one of his children.

She was a strong, capable woman who managed her family's estates, but her heart longed for a deeper dedication to God.

Her own account of the forgiveness is worth having straight, because it is not sentimental. She said that she could forgive with her will long before she could stop shaking when she met the man, and that she went on forcing herself to greet him. That is the Christian teaching on forgiveness working in a real person: an act of the will, repeated, ahead of the feelings, which follow later or not at all.

The Years at Monthelon

The years between her widowhood and her meeting with Francis de Sales are often skipped, and they are the ones that formed her. To protect her children's inheritance she moved with them to Monthelon, the household of her father-in-law, an elderly and difficult man who had threatened to disinherit them if she stayed away, and whose household was effectively run by a servant who resented her.

She stayed for several years. She ran the house, taught catechism to the local children, nursed the sick in the village, and made a private vow of chastity. She also fell into the hands of a spiritual director who bound her by vow to obey him and to consult no one else, which left her worse off than before. It is the reason she recognised the value of what she later received, and a reason the Church's own guidance insists that a director who forbids you to consult anyone else has disqualified himself.

Spiritual Friendship

She met St. Francis de Sales when he preached a Lenten mission in Dijon in 1604. He became her spiritual director, and their correspondence is one of the great treasures of Christian literature. He guided her away from excessive austerities to a spirituality of gentle love and acceptance of God's will.

Francis was bishop of Geneva, resident at Annecy because the city of Geneva itself was in Calvinist hands, and he was already known for Introduction to the Devout Life, a book written to show that a serious interior life is available to people with households and jobs. Our page on St. Francis de Sales covers him in full.

He released her from the vow of blind obedience to her previous director and gave her a rule she could actually keep. His counsel to her was consistently to do less and mean it: to prefer patience with her own faults to violent penances, to keep her duties to her children ahead of her devotions, and to go at the pace of her state in life. The letters between them run for eighteen years and are read today as a model of what direction between a priest and a laywoman should look like, including its boundaries.

Founding the Visitation

Together with St. Francis, she founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary at Annecy on 6 June 1610. The order was designed to be less physically rigorous than others, open to older women, widows and those in poor health, focusing on the interior virtues of humility and charity rather than on external penance.

Despite many personal tragedies, including the deaths of her children and of her spiritual father, she persevered, establishing eighty-six houses by her death, on the usual count.

Two features of the original design were unusual enough to cause trouble. The community was open to women whom the reformed orders of the day would not accept, on grounds of age or health, and it was intended that the sisters should go out to visit the sick and the poor in their homes, which is where the name comes from, taken from Mary's journey to visit Elizabeth (Luke 1:39 to 56).

Leaving her family to make the foundation cost her severely. The best-known incident of her life is her departure from Dijon, when her fifteen-year-old son Celse-Bénigne lay across the threshold of the house to stop her leaving, and she stepped over him and went. Accounts of it have been told for centuries as a demonstration of resolve, and it reads more honestly as a description of a genuine conflict of duties that she resolved one way and that cost her for the rest of her life. She had arranged for her children's care and continued to write to them.

The Cloister Question

The original plan did not survive contact with Church authority. When the Visitation sought to expand to Lyon, the archbishop there, Denis-Simon de Marquemont, objected that women religious going out to visit houses was contrary to the discipline in force since the Council of Trent, which required enclosure for communities of women.

Francis de Sales argued the case and then accepted the ruling. In 1618 the Visitation was erected as a formal religious order under papal approval, with solemn vows and enclosure, and the visiting of the sick outside the walls ended.

Jane accepted it and built the order under the new terms. What survived from the original vision was the part she and Francis cared about most, which was that the community remained open to women the austere orders turned away, and that the interior programme stayed gentle. What was lost was the external ministry, and it took another two centuries and several other founders before communities of active, uncloistered women were generally accepted in the Church. Saint Vincent de Paul and Saint Louise de Marillac found a way around the same rule in 1633 by declining to constitute the Daughters of Charity as a religious order at all.

Grief, Plague and the Long Darkness

The second half of her life was a series of losses. Francis de Sales died in 1622, and she lost the man who had guided her for eighteen years. Her son Celse-Bénigne, who had become a soldier, was killed in action in 1627 fighting the English on the Île de Ré. One of her daughters and a daughter-in-law died. Plague swept through Annecy and the surrounding country repeatedly, and she directed the sisters to help the sick and stayed in the town rather than leaving.

Alongside all of this she carried, for something like forty years, a persistent interior darkness: temptations against faith, a sense of being abandoned, and an inability to feel anything in prayer. She disclosed it in her letters, and she kept going. Her counsel to sisters in the same condition was to hold on and to do the next duty, and to treat dryness as a state to be endured rather than a verdict on the soul.

The Church's own teaching on this is that spiritual dryness is a normal stage of a serious prayer life rather than a sign of failure, and the Catechism treats the struggle and the perceived silence of God as an ordinary difficulty of prayer to be met with perseverance. Jane is the standing example of what that looks like across decades.

Her Spirituality: The Little Virtues

What she and Francis de Sales taught is often summarised as the little virtues, and the list is deliberately unimpressive: patience, gentleness with oneself and others, simplicity, humility, obedience, and the acceptance of God's will in what actually happens rather than in what one has planned.

Three points give it its edge.

The first is that gentleness applies to yourself. Both of them warned that harshness toward one's own failures is a form of pride, since it is really irritation at not being better than one is. The instruction was to get up and continue without a scene.

The second is that the will matters more than the feelings. Jane's forgiveness of her husband's killer, her forty years of dryness in prayer, and her perseverance through bereavement all rest on the same principle, which is that a decision held is worth more than an emotion enjoyed.

The third is that the duty in front of you outranks the devotion you would prefer. That is the point of Francis's whole approach in Introduction to the Devout Life, and it is the reason this school of spirituality has always travelled well among lay people.

Quotable Wisdom

"Hold your eyes on God and leave the doing to Him. That is all the doing you have to worry about."

Her counsel in her letters ran the same way. She told sisters in dryness to hold on and to do the next duty, to be gentle with their own failures, and to treat the absence of feeling as a condition to be endured.

Scripture supplies the pattern she worked from. Paul tells the Philippians to have no anxiety about anything, and instead to make their requests known to God, with the promise that the peace of God will guard their hearts and minds (Philippians 4:6 to 7). Peter tells his readers to cast all their anxieties on God because he cares for them (1 Peter 5:7). Christ tells his disciples that today's trouble is enough for today (Matthew 6:34).

Feast Day, Canonisation and Patronage

Feast day

Her memorial in the current General Roman Calendar is 12 August. Before the 1969 revision it was kept on 21 August, and the 1969 calendar placed it on 12 December, next to the date of her death. It was moved to 12 August in a later revision.

Canonisation

She was beatified by Benedict XIV in 1751 and canonised by Clement XIII in 1767.

Relics and the order

She died at Moulins on 13 December 1641 while returning from Paris, and her body was brought to Annecy. Her remains rest in the Basilica of the Visitation there, beside those of Francis de Sales. The Visitation order continues today as a contemplative community of nuns.

Patronage

She is commonly invoked by widows, by parents separated from their children, by people struggling with in-laws, and by those who feel forgotten. Patronages of this kind grow out of devotional custom over centuries rather than from a formal decree, and each of these is a plain reading of her life.

What to Take From St. Jane Frances de Chantal

• Forgive with your will and let the feelings follow. She greeted the man who shot her husband for years before she could do it without shaking. That is what forgiveness looks like in practice.
• Get real direction, and be suspicious of a director who isolates you. Her first director bound her to consult no one else. Her second undid it. A guide who forbids you other counsel has disqualified himself.
• Be gentle with yourself. Harshness at your own failures is usually wounded pride. Get up and go on.
• Dryness is not a verdict. She had forty years of it and founded eighty-six houses in the middle of it. Feeling nothing in prayer says nothing about the state of your soul.
• Do the duty in front of you today. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and the small obedience available this afternoon is the one that counts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Jane Frances de Chantal?

Jane Frances de Chantal was a French noblewoman born at Dijon in 1572, the daughter of the president of the parlement of Burgundy. She married the Baron de Chantal in 1592 and was widowed at twenty-eight with four young children when he died of a hunting accident in 1601. Under the direction of Saint Francis de Sales she founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary at Annecy in 1610, and she died at Moulins on 13 December 1641.

What is the Order of the Visitation?

The Visitation of Holy Mary was founded at Annecy on 6 June 1610 by Jane Frances de Chantal and Francis de Sales. It was designed for women whom the austere reformed orders would not accept, including widows, older women and those in poor health, and it emphasised interior virtues such as humility and gentleness rather than severe bodily penance. Its name comes from Mary's journey to visit Elizabeth in Luke 1. It continues today as a contemplative order of nuns.

Why did the Visitation become an enclosed order?

The original plan was that the sisters would go out to visit the sick and the poor in their homes. When the order sought to expand to Lyon, the archbishop objected that this conflicted with the discipline requiring enclosure for communities of women, in force since the Council of Trent. Francis de Sales argued the case and then accepted the ruling, and in 1618 the Visitation was erected as a formal religious order with solemn vows and papal enclosure. Jane accepted the change and built the order under the new terms.

Did St. Jane Frances de Chantal really step over her son?

The incident is recorded in the traditional accounts of her life. When she left Dijon to make the foundation at Annecy, her teenage son Celse-Bénigne lay across the threshold of the house to prevent her going, and she stepped over him. She had arranged for her children's care and continued to write to them. The episode is best read as a genuine conflict of duties that cost her a great deal rather than as a display of coldness.

What was her spiritual friendship with St. Francis de Sales?

They met when he preached a Lenten mission at Dijon in 1604, and he became her spiritual director for the next eighteen years, until his death in 1622. He released her from a vow of blind obedience imposed by an earlier director, steered her away from severe penances, and taught a spirituality of gentleness, patience and acceptance of God's will. Their surviving correspondence is read as a model of direction and of its proper boundaries.

When is St. Jane Frances de Chantal's feast day?

Her memorial in the current General Roman Calendar is 12 August. Before the 1969 revision it was kept on 21 August, and the 1969 calendar placed it on 12 December, next to the date of her death. She was beatified in 1751 and canonised in 1767, and her remains rest in the Basilica of the Visitation at Annecy beside those of Francis de Sales.