St. Jean Frances de Chantal
Born: January 28, 1572
Died: December 13, 1641
Feast Day: August 12
Patron of: forgotten people, widows, and parents who are separated from their children
Be careful when you pray for tolerance, people say, because God might give you plenty of opportunities to practice it.
Jean Francese de Chantal must have been praying overtime.
Born in 1572 to a wealthy French family, Jean, a beautiful, intelligent, and strong-willed young woman, was married off at 20 to a local nobleman. While the Baron went off to fight for the King, Jean quite capably supervised the castle and surrounding farms, as well as fed the hungry and tended the sick—all with great efficiency and a sense of humor. In a famine year, she winked when some of the poor, having already received their share, walked around the castle and got in line again. (She remembered, she said, how God had listened to her requests on the second and even third time around.) She also would spirit prisoners out of the castle cell, give them a bed, and return them to the cell before the Baron returned.
After eight years and six children, Jean’s marriage ended in tragedy. Her husband was accidentally shot by a companion on a hunting trip. The Baron readily forgave his friend before his death nine days later. But Jean could not be so forgiving: Wild with grief, she reproached the hapless friend and spent months after the death in sleepless misery, questioning God and her own faith.
This battle to accept God’s will was to continue her whole life. Her circumstances went from bad to worse. Her father-in-law, a brilliant old man whose nickname was “Guy the Terrible,” insisted she and the children enter the household or he would disinherit them. So for seven years Jean found herself under the thumb of the old man and his equally domineering housekeeper, who openly resented her presence.
During this time she met the French Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, who was later to become her spiritual director and close friend. “In Madame Chantal I have found,” he once said, “the valiant woman whom Solomon had difficulty finding in Jerusalem.”
De Sales found a project that would match Jean’s energy and her deep spirituality: the foundation of a new religious order, the Congregation of the Visitation, for women who wanted religious life but who were not strong enough for the rigors of more strict orders. Some of the women who joined were enough to try the patience of a saint: many young women “felt that their high birth gave them the right to reject any irksome discipline. Many of the widows were irritatingly self-centered,” writes James Bently in A Calendar of Saints. But Jean found herself up to the task. “Hell is full of the talented, but Heaven of the energetic,” she wrote.
Never a stranger to grief, Jean saw five of her children die before her, as well as losing a son-in-law, a grandchild, and a friend Francis de Sales. She spoke often about a “martyrdom of love.” As for any comparison to “real martyrs,” she wrote, “We should not worry about equality, but I do believe that the martyrdom of love cannot be relegated to a second place, for ‘love is as strong as death.’ The martyrs of love suffer infinitely more in remaining in this life so as to serve God, than if they died a thousand times over.” Perhaps this is especially true, having lived a long life in the home of “Guy the Terrible.”
Image:Wikimedia Commons
