- Our Lady of Knock (1879). (Historical)
- St. Jane Frances de Chantal (1641). Founder or Foundress, Religious, Widow. (Traditional) Co-Founded the Visitation Order
- St. Pius X (1914). Pope. (Current) to re-establish all things in Christ
AT the age of sixteen, Jane Frances de Frémyot, already a motherless child, was placed under the care of a worldly-minded governess. In this crisis, she offered herself to the Mother of God, and secured Mary’s protection for life. When a Protestant sought her hand, she steadily refused to marry “an enemy of God and His Church,” and shortly afterwards, as the loving and beloved wife of the Baron de Chantal, made her house the pattern of a Christian home. But God had marked her for something higher than domestic sanctity. Two children and a dearly-loved sister died, and, in the full tide of prosperity, her husband’s life was taken by the innocent hand of a friend. For seven years the sorrows of her widowhood were increased by ill-usage from servants and inferiors, and the cruel importunities of friends, who urged her to marry again. Harassed almost to despair by their entreaties, she branded on her heart the name of Jesus, and in the end left her beloved home and children to live for God alone. It was on the 19th of March, 1609, that Madame de Chantal bade farewell to her family and relations. Pale, and with tears in her eyes, she passed round the large room, sweetly and humbly taking leave of each. Her son, a boy of fifteen, used every entreaty, every endearment, to induce his mother not to leave them, and at last passionately flung himself across the door of the room. In an agony of distress, she passed on over the body of her son to the embrace of her aged and disconsolate father. The anguish of that parting reached its height when, kneeling at the feet of the venerable old man, she sought and obtained his last blessing, promising to repay in her new home his sacrifice by her prayers. Well might St. Francis call her “the valiant woman.” She was to found with St. Francis de Sales a great Order. Sickness, opposition, want, beset her, and the death of children, friends, and of St. Francis himself followed, while eighty-seven houses of the Visitation rose under her hand. Nine long years of interior desolation completed the work of God’s grace; and in her seventieth year, St. Vincent of Paul saw, at the moment of her death, her soul ascend, as a ball of fire, to heaven.
REFLECTION: Profit by the successive trials of life to gain the strength and courage of St. Jane Frances, and they will become stepping-stones from earth to heaven.
WORD OF THE DAY
IDEALISM. In the philosophy of Plato it is the theory that the visible things of this world are merely copies of the perfect realities of another, supersensible world of the spirit. In St. Augustine and the Scholastics it is the doctrine that the ideal of exemplar according to which everything is made is the idea in the mind of God. In modern philosophy idealism is the theory that denies reality to the external, physical world and attributes real existence only to things as they are in the mind. In its extreme form it is pure subjectivism, denying existence to anything outside the mind of the thinking person.
Modern Catholic Dictionary, Fr. John Hardon SJ (Get the real one at Eternal Life — don’t accept an abridged or edited version of this masterpiece!)
