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.