Feb. 17 is the Optional Memorial of the Seven Founders of the Servite Order.

My guess is that, compared to the average saint’s day on the calendar, this one is a bit exotic. For one, it’s anonymous: “seven founders.” For another, I’ll guess lots of Catholics don’t know who the Servites are. Let us help.

First, let’s give them names. The “seven founders” were Buonfiglio dei Monaldi (Bonfilius), Giovanni di Buonagiunta (Bonajuncta), Bartolomeo degli Amidei (Amideus), Ricovero dei Lippi-Ugguccioni (Hugh), Benedetto dell’ Antella (Manettus), Gherardino di Sostegno (Sosteneus) and Alessio de’ Falconieri (Alexius). They were members of seven wealthy families — mostly cloth merchants — from Florence, Italy, who lived in the 1200s.

These seven men banded together to found a lay confraternity devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, especially in her sorrows connected to Jesus’ Passion, and to do penance. On the feast of the Assumption 1233, while praying together, they all had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, calling them to dedicate themselves to religious life. Each thought the vision his own but as they compared notes, they realized they’d all been called to the same thing.

They went off to a Franciscan house and then further on into seclusion during which, in April 1244, they received a further vision of Our Lady who gave them their distinctive black habit, the Rule of St. Augustine for their order, and asked them to found the order of the Servants of Mary.

The Servites, like other new religious orders of that time in the Middle Ages, were mendicants, i.e., they begged for their support while taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. As was typical of other mendicant orders, they were public-facing, i.e., they went out into the world actively rather than remaining primarily contemplative in their abbeys or cloisters.

The sanctification of souls is the Servites’ primary work, one accomplished through parish work, parish missions, preaching, etc. The Servites inspired both contemplative and active female branches as well as a lay third order. They are responsible for the Marianum, the premier faculty devoted to Mariology (the branch of theology that studies the Blessed Virgin) in Rome.

The new congregation exploded and quickly spread through Europe, eventually acquiring the status of an order. Papal approval for the congregation first came in 1249. They officially arrived in America in 1870, spreading out from their initial base in Wisconsin, though a Servite began working among German-speaking Catholics in New York in the 1850s. The “Grotto,” the National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother, is under their care in Portland, Oregon.

The 18th-century painter Agostino Masucci captured the Seven Founders in his oil painting from around 1728 now held by the Art Institute of Chicago. Some call it Baroque, others Rococo: it has elements of both. The color choices and contrasts are typical of those styles. The Blessed Virgin, properly, is the largest figure in the painting though, unlike typical Baroque painting, the other figures are not particularly physically robust and big.

Two dimensions come together in the painting: the eternal, centered around the Blessed Virgin Mary, accompanied by various angels, who encounter her willing servants, and the temporal, the seven founders in their black habits. Note their faces: they either look at Our Lady or close their eyes in mystical contemplation. None looks at his peers. Arguably, one can say that “if the Blessed Virgin is in front of you, that is going to be the focus of your attention,” but it also points to the comment made above that each experienced their first encounter as his own, which they only subsequently realized was common.

Is this their first (August 1233) or second (April 1244) vision? Hard to say: they received their habit in their second vision but we might allow artistic license to identify their future purpose even in their first vision, their positive response — their fiat — that made the rest possible.

The feast has settled on Feb. 17 after being at other places on the calendar because it is the dies natalis of founder St. Alexis Falconieri. In the Servites’ own calendar, each founder (who are all canonized) is also honored in his own right. And is it just coincidental that there were seven holy founders, while the Church also has traditionally honored the “Seven Sorrows” of Our Lady (even though the latter were revealed to St. Bridget of Sweden more than half a century after the Servites began)?

For further reading, see here, here and here.