St. Jane Frances de Chantal (1572-1641)
Wife, widow, single mother, religious foundress
Canonization: July 16, 1767
Feast day: August 12
“When all else has forsaken us, it is then that we are least forsaken by God.”
Since at least from the time of her canonization, St. Jane Frances de Chantal has been held up as a model for living her baptismal call to holiness in no fewer than three states of life: marriage and family life, widowhood and single motherhood, and consecrated life.
Jane was born in Dijon in 1572, the second child of Bénigne Frémyot, president of the Senate of Dijon, and Marguerite de Berbisey, who died giving birth to Jane’s younger brother André. The children were brought up under the care of their father, assisted by an aunt. In 1592, Jane’s father arranged for her marriage to the young baron, Christophe de Rabutin-Chantal.
Jane’s marriage to Christophe was not only a happy one, but a love match. As idyllic as this may seem, Jane’s marriage commitment was not untested. Described as “very gallant until his marriage,” Christophe still had moments of weakness, fathering a child outside his marriage to Jane. Nothing is known about the circumstances, except the child’s name: Claudine. This episode reveals the true measure of Jane’s love and magnanimity as a wife. Christophe accepted responsibility for his paternity, and Jane gave him forgiveness and understanding. She then took Claudine into her home and her heart, rearing her with her own children and later providing for her marriage and taking a lasting interest in her children.
Jane and Christophe’s marriage was short-lived; Christophe died after a hunting accident in 1601. To safeguard her children’s inheritance, Jane then went to live with her irascible father-in-law, his tyrannical housekeeper-mistress, and their children at Monthelon, France. Though this situation deeply distressed Jane, she was gracious to the mistress, even educating her children.
In 1604, Jane's father invited her to attend the series of Lenten sermons preached in Dijon by Francis de Sales, the bishop of Geneva resident in exile in Annecy. This was a turning point in Jane's life. In due course, Jane placed herself under the spiritual direction of Francis, who urged her to find God in the loving fulfillment of her duties in life, which included the care and education of her children, managing an estate and its staff, and carrying out charitable works of mercy, particularly feeding the hungry and visiting the sick. Jane is thus a good model for those who often find themselves forced to juggle many responsibilities at once. Holiness is attainable in the busyness of everyday tasks.
Having arranged for her children’s future, Jane co-founded with Francis the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary in Annecy on June 6, 1610, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. One of the major new orders of early modern Catholicism, the Visitation counted thirteen monasteries by the time of Francis’s death in 1622 and another seventy-four by Jane’s death in 1641, for a total of eighty-seven. With Francis’s death, the full weight of the Visitation’s continuing expansion and solidifying the place of Salesian Spirituality in the world fell squarely upon Jane’s shoulders.
Jane’s “different walks of life” are not neatly separated one from the other, but are fluid and porous, and, in fact, one of them is overarching and links them all together: her motherhood. She was a mother to her children, her younger brother André, and to the Visitation. Mother Françoise-Madeleine de Chaugy, Jane’s secretary and biographer, reports that “Mother” was the title that pleased her most. Jane was, and remained to the end of her days, a mother, a “mom,” which encompasses her whole vocation and everything that she wanted to be for the Visitation.
