3 JUNE – SAINT CLOTILDE (Queen)

Clotilde, the daughter of Cilperic, king of Burgundy, was born in Lyons in 474. After the murder of her parents she was brought up by her uncle Gondebaud, king of Burgundy, who gave her in marriage to Clovis I, the first Christian king of the Franks who was then a pagan. Having given birth to their first son, she had him baptised and was given the name of Ingomer. He died while still wearing the white robe of baptism, and Clovis bitterly complained to Clotilde that the death of his son was due to the vengeance of the gods of his fathers, irritated at this contempt offered to their divinity. But Clotilde said. “I give thanks to the Almighty Creator of all things, that He has not "judged me unworthy to give birth to a son whom He has deigned to admit to share His kingdom.”

Having given birth to a second son, she wished that he also should be baptised, and the name of Clodomir was given to him. The child having fallen ill, the king declared that the fate of the brother was to befall this son also, but he was cured by the prayers of Clotilde who persevered in exhorting Clovis to reject idolatry and adore the One God in three Persons. Clovis persisted in his paganism until, being on an expedition against the Alamani at Soissons, and one day seeing his army waver, he remembered the counsels of Clotilde and implored the help of Christ, who granted him victory. At her request Saint Remigius instructed Clovis in the Christian faith, and baptised him, anointing him likewise with the sacred chrism.

After the death of Clovis, Clotilde settled at Tours where she passed the rest of her life at the tomb of Saint Martin, giving herself up to watching, alms and other works of piety, exercising her munificence on churches and monasteries. Clodomir having been killed in the war of Burgundy, she brought up her grandchildren Theobald, Gontaire and Clodoald. Clotilde died in 545 and was buried alongside her husband in Paris in the Basilica of Saint Peter, later renamed in honour of Saint Genevieve. Whenever Paris suffered any calamity it was the custom to carry her body in procession with every demonstration of piety. During the French Revolution the relics of the saints were profaned, but the bones of Saint Clotilde were hidden by pious persons. When peace was restored to the Church her holy relics were placed in a new shrine and deposited in the Church of Saints Leu-et-Gilles in Paris.

Dom Prosper Gueranger:

At this Season in which the Office of the Time is leading us to consider the early developments of Holy Church, Eternal Wisdom so arranges, now as ever, that the feasts of the Saints should complete the teachings of the moveable Cycle. The Paraclete, who has but just come down on us, is to fill the whole Earth (Wisdom i. 7). The Man-God has sent Him expressly to win over the whole Earth and to secure all time to His Church. Now, it is by subjecting kingdoms to the faith that He is to form Christ’s Empire. It is by working so that the Church may assimilate all nations to herself that He gives growth and continuance to the Bride. See, therefore, how at this season in which He has but just taken possession of the world anew. His co-operators in this His work of conquest shine out on every side in the heavens of the holy Liturgy. But the West, more than all the rest, concurs in forming the magnificent constellation that is mingling its radiant splendour with the Pentecostal fires. Indeed, what could better show the Omnipotence of the Spirit of Christ than the establishment of this Latin Christendom in these distant lands of the West? Let us then fix our delighted gaze on those two incomparable luminaries, the Princes of the Apostles, directing their rapid course from the East, speeding on our horizon up to the glorious zenith which, in a month’s time, they will attain. Yesterday, John the Beloved Disciple shed on Gaul his last and long enduring rays. Some few days previously, it was a Pope Eleutherius or a Monk Augustine who with joint action, though parted by centuries, bore the light of salvation to the far West — to the home of the Britons and of the Anglo-Saxons. The day after tomorrow Boniface will shed his luminous beams on Germany.

But today what star is this rising in such silvery beauty on the land of the Franks? The city of Lyons, prepared by the blood of martyrs for this her second glory, saw this new light make growth in her midst. Across a distance of three centuries these rays are blended with those of Blandina. Like Blandina too, Clotilde is a mother, and the maternity of a slave giving birth in her spotless virginity to Gaulish martyrs had already prepared the birth of the Franks to Christ. Clotilde had not, like Blandina, to shed her blood, but other pangs cruelly wrung her breast while she was yet so young, and served to mature her soul for the grand destinies reserved by God for the privileged children of sorrow. The violent death of her father, Chilperic, dethroned by a fratricide usurper, the sight of her brothers massacred and of her mother drowned in the Rhone, her long captivity in the Arian court of the murderer who brought heresy with him to the throne of the Burgundians, developed in her the same heroism that had upheld Blandina in the amphitheatre amid the anguish of her spiritual childbirth — a heroism that would make this niece of Gondebaud become likewise the mother of a whole nation to Christ. Let us then unite these two names in one common homage, and prostrate at the feet of the Eternal Father from Whom descends all paternity on Earth and in Heaven (Ephesians iii. 15), let us adore these ways of His all filled with tenderness and love in our regard.

God drew the visible universe out of nothingness, solely to manifest His goodness. So in like manner has He willed that man, coming from His Hands, without power as yet to recognise his Creator, should recognise at least a mother’s tender love, the first sensible ray, as it were, of Infinite Love. Irresistible is this ray, sublime in its gentleness, exquisite in its purity, giving to the mother a facility belonging only to her to complete in the soul of her child, the entire reproduction of the Divine Ideal that is to be impressed on Him. Now this she does by education. Today’s feast reveals how yet more sublime, more potent, more extensive, is maternity in the order of grace, than it is in that of nature. For when God, coming down among us, was pleased to take Flesh of a Daughter of Adam, maternity was raised in Her to the extreme limit that separates the endowments of a simple creature from the Divine Attributes.

Thus rising above the heavens, maternity at the same time embraced the world, bringing all mankind together into close union, without distinction of nation or family, in the one filiation of that Virgin-Mother. The New Adam, the perfect model of our race and our first-born (Matthew i. 26; Hebrews i. 6), willed to have us for His brethren in all fullness, brethren in Mary as in God (Romans viii. 29; Hebrews ii. 11-12). The Mother of God was then proclaimed Mother of men on Calvary. From the summit of the Cross the Man-God replaced on the brow of Mary that diadem of Eve broken by the fall beside the fatal tree. Constituted sole Mother of the living by this noble investiture (Genesis iii; John xix. 26-27), our Lady entered once again into communication with the privileges of the Father, our Father who is in Heaven. Not only was she by nature like Him, Mother of His Son, but just as all paternity flows down here below from the Eternal Father, and borrows thence super-eminent dignity, so too all maternity was nothing from that moment but an out-flow of Mary’s, and that in the truest sense — yes, a delegation of Her love, and a communication of Her august privilege by which she brings forth men to God, whose sons they are to be.

Good reason, therefore, have Christian mothers to glory in their maternity, for in that does their greatness consist. Their dignity has increased to a degree through Mary that nature could never have dreamed of. But, at the same time, under the aegis of Mary, not less real is the maternity of holy Virgins, not only in God’s eyes, but often manifested to their own: the wife too, prepared by a special call from God and by suffering is sometimes like Clotilde, endowed with a fecundity of a spiritual order a thousand times more prolific than that of Earth. Happy the fruits of this supernatural maternity which under the favour of Mary is fraught with so much greatness! Happy the nations on whom by divine munificence a mother has been bestowed! History tells how the founders of Empires have ever had the terrible prerogative of impressing on nations the distinctive character, disastrous or beneficial, which through length of ages continues to be theirs. How often does not that want of counterpoise to the preponderance of power make itself only too evident in the impetus given rather to destroy than to build up! And wherefore? Because ancient Empires never had a mother: for this noble title cannot be applied to those women who, under the name of heroines, have transmitted their names to posterity merely inasmuch as they rivalled the ambition and pomp of conquerors. To Christian times was it reserved to behold introduced into a people’s life this element of Maternity, more salutary, more efficacious in its humble gentleness than that which springs from the talents or vices, from the power or genius of their first Princes.

Even among Christians the sanctity demanded by this sublime maternity in the creature who is invested with it, makes it the exclusive property of the Catholic Church, alone holy, and of the nations that are in this Church: Empires originating in schism or heresy can have no claim to it. Brought down to a level with pagan nations in this respect, they may indeed, like them, excel in riches or in might, yes, even be called from on High to the sinister honour of being the Scourge used by God against His disobedient children. But an immense void must necessarily remain and be felt in their whole social formation and life, springing directly from Earth — sons of their own works, as is boasted nowadays, never have they benefited of the prayers, of the tears of a mother. Never has her smile lighted their first steps, soothed their childhood. Therefore, according to our Latin Poet, never will they be admitted to the divine table, nor to the intimacy of a true alliance with Heaven (Virgil). Never will true civilisation, true culture, make progress in their hands.

On the other side, believing nations are to the Church God’s kingdom, exactly what are to them the several families that, by being brought together under one social bond of unity, make up each nation. Their vocation (essentially of a supernatural order) requires in them a plenitude of life, for the development of which are exerted Divine Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love. But although nature has here the honour of furnishing us with the requisite terms and points of comparison, her process and power are so immensely surpassed at these divine heights that she can here no longer present but a feeble image, almost faulty, because so incomplete. Among baptised nations, baptised, that is, in fidelity to Christ and submission to His Vicar, France may more particularly make this cry of the royal Psalmist her own: “Lord, you have foreseen all my ways, and, long beforehand, have fixed my destiny. Your knowledge, in the work of my formation, is become wonderful to me! You have possessed my reins, my whole being with all its aspirations, all its thoughts, belongs wholly to you. For you have received me in your arms as your own work, even from my mother’s womb. My bone is not hidden from you, which you have made in secret in the womb of my mother. You who know the imperfection of my first origin” (Psalms cxxxviii.).

Time was needed to subdue the savage instincts of the warriors of Clovis, and to fit his sword to the noble destiny that awaited it in the hand of a Charlemagne, or of a Saint Louis. With good reason has it been said that the honour of this labour is due to the bishops and the monks. But to be more accurate and to prove a deeper insight of the ways used by Divine Providence, it were well, perhaps, to pass less lightly over the woman’s part, for such indeed there was in the work of conversion, and of education, which made the Frankish nation become the eldest son of the Church. Clotilde it was who led the Franks to the Baptistery of Rheims and presented to Remigius, the proud Sicambrian transformed, far less by the exhortations of the holy bishop, than by the force of prayer, the prayer of that strong woman elected by God to bear away this rich spoil from the camp of Hell. What manly energy, what devotedness to God, are displayed in every measure taken by this noble daughter of the Burgundians’ dethroned King, who while held beneath the suspicious eye of the usurper, the murderer of her family, awaits in the silence of prayer and in the exercise of charity! Heaven’s appointed hour: and when, at last, the moment comes, taking counsel of none save the Holy Ghost and her own heart, how nobly does she dart forward to conquer to Christ her betrothed, though yet a stranger to her, outdoing in valour in this instance all the warriors of her escort! Strength and beauty (Proverbs xxxi.) were indeed her covering, her adornment on her bridal day, and the heart of Clovis soon learnt that the conquests reserved to his bride far out-stripped in importance the booty he had until then seized by force of arms.

Clotilde, on the other hand, found her work already prepared on the banks of the Seine. For fifty years space had Genevieve been busy defending Paris against the pagan hordes, and only awaiting the baptism of the King of the Franks in order to open to him the city gates. Still, when on that Christmas night Clotilde gave birth to the eldest son of Holy Church in Mary’s name, the great work was far from being completed. This new-born people had yet by the slow process of a laborious education to be fashioned into the most Christian nation. This chosen one of God and Our Lady does not fall short of the maternal task. But still what anguish of heart to be endured, what tears yet to be shed over these sons of hers, whose violence, peculiar to the race, seems simply indomitable, and the very exuberance of whose rich nature yields them up to the fury of passions, urging them blindly on to crimes the most atrocious! Her grandchildren inveigled from her side and caught in the perfidious trap laid for them by their faithless uncles, are massacred. Fratricidal wars carry devastation over the whole of that territory of ancient Gaul, purged by her from paganism and heresy. Finally, another pang, but one of a more glorious kind, seems given as a compensation for the bitterness of intestine strife — her cherished daughter, Clotilde the younger, dies worn out by ill usage endured for her faith at the hand of her Arian husband. Surely all this must have shown clearly enough to the Queen of the Franks that if she was chosen by Heaven to be their mother, she was to have all the pangs, as well as the honour that title involves. Thus does Christ ever deal with His own when they have earned His confidence.

Clotilde well understood this: already a widow and deprived by death of the aid of Genevieve likewise, she had long ago retired to Tours, near to the sepulchre of the Thaumaturgus of the Gauls. There, in the secret of prayer and in the heroism of her childhood’s faith, she continued, aided by Saint Martin, the preparation of this new people for its mighty destinies. An immense work was this, and one to which no single lifetime could suffice! But though Clotilde was not to witness the desired transformation accomplished, her life was not to close until she had pressed to her heart, at Tours, her illustrious daughter-in-law Radegonde, and having by this last embrace invested her with her own sublime maternity, she sent her to Poitiers, there to continue, at the tomb of Saint Hilary, this great work of intercession. Then when at length, Radegonde herself having ended her task of suffering and love, must likewise quit this Earth, Bathilde will presently come forward, consummating the work in that remarkable seventh century, the period when the Frank, at last ready for his mission, is betrothed to Holy Church and dubbed a Knight of God!

Clotilde, Radegonde, Bathilde, all three of them, Mothers of France, bear a striking resemblance to one another. All three are prepared from the early dawn of life to the devotedness their grand mission would require by the like trials, captivity, slavery and massacre or loss of their own relatives: all three bring to the throne nothing but a dauntless love of Christ, the King, and a desire of seeing Him rule the people. All three set aside the queenly diadem as soon as may be in order to be able, prostrate before God in retirement and penitence, to attain more surely the one object of their maternal and royal ambition. Heiresses of Abraham in very deed, they found in his faith (Romans iv. 18; Hebrews xi. 11) the fecundity which made them to be mothers of those countless multitudes which the soil, watered by their tears, produced for Heaven. Even in these weakened times of ours, there is still a goodly throng ever passing from the land of the Franks to their true Home yonder, there to join the happy bands of the combatants of better days. At the sight of this ever increasing group of sons joyously pressing round their thrones, the hearts of Clotilde, Radegonde, and Bathilde, overflowing with love, give utterance in one united cry to this word of the Prophet: “Who has begotten these? I was barren and brought not forth, led away, and captive: and who has brought up these? I was destitute and alone: and these where were they?” Then the Lord answering, said: “As I live, you will be clothed with all these as with an ornament, and as a bride you will put them about you. For your deserts, and your desolate places, and the land of your destruction will now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants. The children of your barrenness will still say in your ear: “the place is too strait for me, make me more room to dwell in.” And Kings will be your nursing fathers, and Queens your nurses. And you will know that I am the Lord, for they will not be confounded that wait for Him” (Isaias xlix. 18-23).

GREAT is your glory on Earth and in Heaven, Clotilde, Mother of nations! Not only have you given to Holy Church that people of France, surnamed the most Christian, but England and Spain also claim their descent from you (in the pedigree of Faith, that is) by Bertha and Ingonda, your noble grand-daughters. Ingonda, more fortunate than your daughter Clotilde, succeeded, by the help of Saint Leander of Seville, in bringing back to the true faith her husband Hermenegilde, and even leading him to the crown of martyrdom. Bertha, Queen of Kent, welcomed Augustine to Saxon shores and through her influence was Ethelbert brought from the darkness of paganism to Baptism and the aureola of sanctity: realising thus that word of the Apostle, that the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife (1 Corinthians vii. 14).

Since those early days, in how many other parts of Europe, and on how many other more distant shores, have not the sons of your own nation, that nation of which you was Mother, propagated that light of faith which they received of you: whether brandishing the sword in defence of the right which belongs to Holy Church, the Bride of the Man-God, to teach freely and everywhere the Word of Truth: or whether, becoming themselves Missionaries and Apostles, carrying the same to infidel nations, far beyond reach of any possible protection, and at the expense of their sweat and of their blood? Happy you to be first in bringing forth to Christ the King a nation pure from every stain of heresy and vowed to holy Church from the first moment of her new birth! Rightly indeed the Church of Sainte-Marie at Rheims was the one selected on that Christmas Day 496 for this birth to God of the Frankish nation in which Our Lady, in a proportionate manner, gave you to share her own Motherhood of our race.

There especially lies our motive of confidence in recurring to you, Clotilde, in our intercessory prayer this day. Alas, how many of your sons are far from being what they should be, having such a Mother as you! But when Our Lady gave you a share in her own maternal rights, she necessarily at the same moment communicated to you also her own tender compassion for beguiled children deaf to their Mother’s voice. Take pity on these unfortunate sons, led so very far astray by strange doctrines (Hebrews viii. 9). The Christian monarchy founded by you is no more. You built it on the recognised rights of God in His Christ and in the Vicar of His Christ. Princes with short-sighted views of self interest, traitors to the mission they had received to maintain your work, imagined they were performing marvels when they allowed maxims to be spread in your France proclaiming the independence of civil power in respect of that of Holy Church. And now, by a just retribution, society has proclaimed its independence in respect of Princes! But at the same time, the infatuated populace has really no other idea but that of being its own Sovereign, and intoxicated by this false liberty which it dreams to have acquired, it goes so far as to contemn even the supreme dominion of the Creator Himself. The rights of man have usurped the rights of God as the basis of social compact, a newfangled gospel that France, now in misled proselytism, is fain to carry over the whole world in place of the true Gospel so loved of yore!

In that unhappy country poisoned by a lying philosophy, such is the excess of delirium that many who deplore the apostasy of the mass of the population and wish to remain themselves Christians, imagine they can do so, while at the same time maintaining the destructive principle of Liberalism, the very essence of revolution: let Christ have Heaven and souls, say they, but let man have Earth, together with full right of governing it as he thinks best, or as suits him best. While they fall on their adoring knees before the Divinity of our Lord Jesus in the sanctuary of their own conscience, they search the Scriptures and are too blind to see there expressed how the Man-God is and must be King of the whole Earth. In learned theses they inform us that they have probed the very depths of history and find in it nothing that can contradict their arguments. If indeed they must admit that the government of a Clovis or a Charlemagne, or a Saint Louis, do not correspond in everything to their political axioms, we must, they say, make allowances for those primitive ages: a nation cannot be expected to come in a day to the perfect age attained at last by the law of progress! Alas! Have pity, dear Mother of France, on the ravings of these poor sons of yours! Arouse once more in that noble land the faith of the Franks! Oh may the God of Clotilde, the Lord of hosts, the King of nations, show Himself once more leading on your sons to victory in the name that won for Clovis the field of Tolbiac: JESUS CHRIST!

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:

At Arezzo in Tuscany, during the persecution of Decius under the governor Tiburtius, the holy martyrs Pergentinus and Laurentinus, brothers who, while yet children, were put to the sword after they had endured cruel torments and performed many miracles.

At Constantinople, the holy martyrs Lucillian and four boys, Claudius, Hypatius, Paul and Denis. Lucillian, formerly a pagan priest, but now a Christian, was cast into a furnace with them after undergoing many torments, but the flames being extinguished by the rain, all escaped uninjured. Finally, under the governor Silvanus they terminated their career. Lucillian by crucifixion, the children by decapitation.

In the same city, St. Paula, virgin and martyr, who was arrested while gathering the blood of the martyrs just mentioned, beaten with rods, and thrown into the fire from which she was delivered. Finally, when St. Lucillian had been crucified, she was decapitated.

At Cordova in Spain, blessed Isaac, a monk, who died by the sword for the faith of Christ.

At Carthage, St. Caecilius, the priest who converted St. Cyprian to the faith of Christ.

In the diocese of Orleans, St. Lifard, priest and confessor.

At Lucca in Tuscany, St. Davinus, confessor.

At Anagni, St. Oliva, virgin.

And in other places, many other holy martyrs, confessors and virgins. 

Thanks be to God.