Feast day: February 17

The Seven Holy Founders of the Servites

Founders · 13th century

Patron of —

Seven wealthy Florentine merchants who together left their businesses to live in poverty and prayer, founding the Servite Order devoted to the Sorrows of Mary.

In thirteenth-century Florence — a city grown rich, worldly, and torn by faction — seven young men of noble families belonged to a confraternity devoted to the Blessed Virgin. On the feast of the Assumption in 1233, according to their tradition, Mary appeared to them and called them to leave the world and give themselves wholly to God.

Acting together, they withdrew from the city to a house on its edge, and then, finding even that too frequented, climbed to the lonely heights of Monte Senario, some eleven miles north of Florence, to live as hermits in poverty and prayer.

There the Order of the Servants of Mary — the Servites — was born. The seven adopted a common rule, took a black habit, and centred their devotion on the sorrows of the Mother of God at the foot of the Cross. The new community grew quickly and spread across Italy and beyond.

Of the seven, only the last, St. Alexis Falconieri, lived to see their foundation formally recognized as a religious order; he died, very old, in 1310. The Church honours them not as individuals but as a single company — a friendship that became a religious family. They were canonized together in 1888.

Seven friends gave up their fortunes on the same day to found a religious order — and were canonized together as a single feast.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/13736a.htm