Visitandines (Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary)

The Visitandines were founded on a distinctive ideal of gentleness and were intended for women the older orders would not take, and they became the cradle of one of the great modern Catholic devotions.

An order for the weak and the widowed

The Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary was founded at Annecy in 1610 by Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal. Its founders intended a congregation marked by humility and gentleness rather than by severe bodily penance, open to women, including widows and those in poor health, whom the austere orders of the day would not receive, and at first the sisters were to combine prayer with visiting the sick, from which the order took its name. The church requirement of enclosure led, as with the Ursulines, to the order becoming a fully enclosed contemplative body rather than an active one.

The Sacred Heart

The Visitandines are remembered above all as the setting of the visions of Margaret Mary Alacoque, a nun of the order at Paray-le-Monial in the seventeenth century, in which she reported that Christ revealed to her his Sacred Heart and asked for its veneration. From those visions grew the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which became one of the most widespread of all modern Catholic devotions, so that an enclosed and deliberately gentle order of contemplative women became the origin of a devotion practised across the whole church. The order continues in its enclosed contemplative form, keeping the spirit of gentleness its founders set at its centre.

Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal designed the Visitation at Annecy in 1610 specifically as a congregation without the severe fasting and physical austerity that excluded widows and women of fragile health from other orders, and their original plan had the sisters actively visiting the sick and the poor in their homes, an outward, charitable mission reflected in the very name Visitation. That founding design did not survive long unaltered.

Archbishop authorities, most decisively in Lyon, judged an active, unenclosed community of women difficult to reconcile with the expectations the post Tridentine church placed on women's religious life, and within roughly the first decade of the congregation's existence the Visitandines were required to accept full monastic enclosure, converting what had begun as an active charitable congregation into a contemplative, cloistered order much closer in practice to older monastic communities than to Francis de Sales's original intention.

The change paralleled what happened to the Ursulines around the same broad period, another active women's foundation reshaped by outside authority into an enclosed form, and it left the Visitation's eventual character, gentle in spirituality, contemplative in daily practice, markedly different from the mission its own founders had first set out to build.