THE SACRED HEART AND VISITANDINES PRE- ST. MARGARET MARY
In founding every religious Order, God ordinarily opens to it a source of love for the interior aliment of its divine life and the means of its apostolate. The Visitation was to have its special portion, namely, the sacred deposit of the Heart of Jesus.What clearness, what precision St. Francis de Sales and St. Chantal had, sixty years before, in their intuitive perception of it.
Half a century passed before St. Margaret Mary appeared who was to give sense and meaning to the Founders’ words and presentiments. Yet, Visitandines were already being drawn deeply to the Heart of Jesus.
The annals of the Visitation Monastery of Annecy, our Founding community, record that Sister Anne-Marie Rosset (1593-1667)was the first Visitandine to whom our Divine Lord manifested the treasures of His Sacred Heart. She went one day to the novitiate oratory to kiss, according to her custom in passing, the feet of a large crucifix still preserved there. ” It seemed to me,” she said when relating the fact to the venerable Mother de Chantal, ” that my Jesus stooped toward me, and that my lips, which were on the wound of His foot, were suddenly removed to that of His side. My heart was so forcibly drawn into my Lord’s that I cannot express what I experienced, nor what passed within me during its passage into the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It seemed to me that He said “We will never separate; we will love each other heart to Heart eternally; I receive you as my daughter and my Spouse; I will always have care of you.”
This was in 1614, four years after the foundation.