Today June 6 2023 is the 413th anniversary of the founding of the Order of the Visitation in Annecy France by St Francis de Sales and St Jane de Chantal.
On June 6, 1610, François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal founded the Order of the Visitation in Annecy. It is to “give God souls of prayer, however interior they may be found worthy to serve His Divine Majesty in spirit and truth.” This interior life, hidden with Christ in God, is modulated so as to be within the reach of women of fragile health without excluding the most robust. All are called to “go to the perfection of divine love.”
The foundation took place in the small house of the Gallery (currently rue de la Providence). It was here that Jeanne de Chantal and her first companions, Marie-Jacqueline Favre and Jeanne-Charlotte de Bréchard made their vows on June 6, 1611. Then the house becoming too small, because of the influx of vocations, they settle in the Nicollin house, near the lake, against the city walls. They converted it into a monastery which became the “first monastery of the Visitation”, with a “well-shaped church” consecrated by Saint Francis de Sales in 1617.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, this church proved too small for the many pilgrims rushing to venerate the relics of the founders of the Visitation who rest there: it was rebuilt around 1645.
The community was dissolved by the French Revolution in March 1793. The church was delivered to secular uses until the end of the nineteenth century, then bought and restored by the Canon of Quincy. Today it is the church of the Italian Catholic Mission. It is currently called “Church of St. Francis of Sales”. You can still see the location of the first tombs of the Founders.
After the Revolution, it was impossible to buy these buildings and Monseigneur de Thiollaz, who became Bishop of Annecy in 1822, acquired land on the outskirts of the city to house the Visitandines who wanted to reconstitute their community. A new monastery was built in 1824. The church was completed in 1826. The relics of the saints were transported there on 21 and 23 August, in the presence of King Charles Felix of Savoy, Queen Marie-Christine and 100,000 people.
But the site, then in the countryside, quickly found itself in the middle of the city. The municipality wanted to acquire the property of the Visitation to build a new district. The community was therefore expropriated in the early twentieth century. The monastery and church were demolished. The current post office and Stalingrad Square mark the site of the former Visitation.
So the community built the current monastery on the slope of the Semnoz and settled there on August 2, 1911.