Did you know that St. Vincent de Paul was the spiritual director of Visitation’s Foundress, St. Jane de Chantal, for 20 years, after St. Francis de Sales, our co-founder, went to his eternal reward?
St. Vincent admired the profound holiness of his directee, St. Jane.
In her book, St Chantal, A Study in Vocation, E.K. Sanders writes:
“For twenty years she(St. Jane) had been in communication with Vincent de Paul, and in her last visit to Paris had once more sought spiritual consolation from him. The two were in deep sympathy, and the Foundress of the Visitation had brought about the settlement of the Mission priests at Annecy. Her death was a calamity to St Vincent, and he wrote of her out of the fullness of his heart :
“It seemed to me at all times that she was full of every sort of virtue, and particularly of faith, although throughout her life she was beset by the temptation of doubt ; also that she had supreme confidence in God, and was wise, moderate,tolerant, and firm to a most unusual degree ; and that the spirit of humility, austerity, and obedience, and zeal for the perfecting of her Order and the salvation of souls possessed her absolutely.
“ I have never observed any faults in her, and always the practice of every sort of virtue ; and yet, although she seemed to possess the peace and quietness of spirit natural to souls that have advanced far in the devout life, she underwent such intense inward suffering that she has told me many times in speech and writing that her mind being full of temptation and horror, it was a continual effort with her to withhold her thoughts from the vision of herself because she could not bear what seemed like a glimpse of hell.
” In spite of this anguish she never lost her outward calm nor slackened, either in those practices of the Christian and of the Religious that God required of her, or in the immense care that she devoted to her Order. Therefore I believe her to have been one of the holiest souls that I have ever known.”