Today we celebrate one of the two great wellsprings of Salesian spirituality in the person of Jane Frances de Chantal: wife, mother, widow, founder, administrator, negotiator and friend.
In his preface to the book The Spirit of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal as Shown by Her Letters (Sisters of the Visitation, Harrow-on-the-Hill. Longmans, Green and Company: London, 1922), his Eminence Francis Cardinal Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster, observed that letters can provide the reader with a great deal more insight into a person’s character when compared with a mere compilation of places, persons and events.
He wrote: “All this is strikingly verified in the case of Saint Jane Frances. She was a Mother whose care and solicitude for her children accompanied her cloistered life and gave to it special anxieties. In the spiritual order she was the Mother of a great religious institute, marvelously multiplied within the span of her own life; she was, consequently, in daily and indeed more than hourly contact with a multitude of women of varied rank and education, all, it is true, vowed to strive after a life of perfection, but each with her own particular disposition, often far from perfect in some respect or another. Then she had (even while fulfilling the part of Mary” to be occupied about “many things,” and, as her letters show, not without trouble concerning them. Ladies of generous disposition – but wayward in their generosity – often needed to be humored in the interest of her foundations. Spiritual advisors – duly appointed or self-constituted – sometimes needed very tactful management. Even ecclesiastical authorities – not gifted with the sound sense and supernatural illumination of St. Francis de Sales – required humble resistance when after his death they sought unwisely to improve the work entrusted to St. Jane’s vigilant and filial care. There is indeed scarcely a contingency in the perplexing interplay of human aim, motive and infirmity that confronts everyone to whom God entrusts a public work which will not find in these letters some guidance and enlightenment.”
His Eminence’s conclusion? “Saint Jane Frances de Chantal was a woman of exceptional strength of character and of remarkable experience in dealing with other people, as well as a great Saint living in close union with – and in entire dependence upon – the Divine Will.”
The Father has entrusted to each of us something of God’s great ‘public work,’ i.e., the challenge to “Live Jesus:” to accept the gift of God’s love in our own lives and to share the gift of God’s love in our relationships with others. Let us imitate the example of Jane de Chantal as we go about this work each and every day by displaying (1) exceptional strength of character, and (2) a remarkable ability to deal with other people.
Fr Michael Murray OSFS