Saint Felix of Valois

However, the reputation that these virtues and wonders brought to Saint Felix decided him to move away to seek calm and solitude. The divorce that occurred between Rao ul, h Raoul Father of Felix, Count of Valois. is father, and Countess Ele anor, hi Éléonore Mother of Felix. s mother, whom he repudiated to marry, to her detriment, Princess Alix-Petronilla, second daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine, was no small motive in confirming him in his purpose; this unjust action of Raoul, which caused so much pain to Eleanor, drew the thunderbolts of excommunication upon the person of the Count, her husband, compelled the legates sent expressly from Rome to place all his lands and domains under interdict, and gave rise to cruel wars in the State. These sad events, these troubles, these divisions, and so many human interests on all sides, contributed not a little to the holy young man's resolution to abandon the world and all he could claim there, to go and seek a place of asylum where he would think only of the business of his salvation; he therefore abandoned to Theobald, Count of Champagne, his uncle and brother of Eleanor, the care of the reconciliation that needed to be managed between his father and his mother, and left, following the counsel of the Holy Spirit, his people, his homeland, and his father's house to set himself on the path to heaven.

Remembering that he had been told several times that he had been offered to God at Clairvaux by the hands of Saint Bernar saint Bernard Abbot of Clairvaux and spiritual master of Raoul. d, he went to that abbey to renew and ratify this first consecration. As soon as he was in this holy community, he forgot in a moment all the affairs of the world; he believed he was in heaven, seeing himself in a house where they lived like angels. Nothing seemed difficult to him; he easily copied everything he saw that was edifying in others: the austerities, the fasts, the penances, the vigils, the work, everything seemed easy to him; the millet and oat bread that was presented to him, the boiled beech leaves that were given to him as a stew, the vegetables, the wild roots, and all other similar things were delicious dishes for him. He found there Henry, son of Louis the Fat and Alix of Savoy, who would one day govern the Church of Beauvais and later that of Reims. The examples of this prince, like those of Saint Bernard, excited his admiration and fueled his zeal.

When Felix noticed the esteem in which he was held, he wanted to escape the temptations of vanity and retire into a solitude inaccessible to praise, where his life, his name, and his memory would remain buried in eternal oblivion. He opened up about his plans to Saint Bernard, who approved of them.

To better conceal his design, Felix went to the court of his uncle Thibaud, Count of Champagne. He was received there with the honors due to his rank, and, after a short stay, he expressed the intention of visiting Italy. Thibaud saw in this only a means to perfect his nephew's education and provided him with an escort to accomplish his excursion.

As soon as Felix had crossed the Alps, he thought of realizing the project that had guided his steps. Everywhere he inquired about the way of life led in the monasteries, the regularity that flourished there, and the holy persons who edified them by their virtues. Having learned that a pious anchorite had confined his existence to the middle of the Alps and was practicing a superhuman perfection in that solitude, he suddenly felt in his soul a mysterious attraction for this way of life, and resolved to become the disciple of the holy anchorite, without anyone being able to suspect the place of his voluntary exile. He took advantage of an excursion to slip away from the sight of his retinue and plunge into the forest. When his servants noticed his absence, they began to search for him; their prolonged attempts remaining fruitless, they believed that their master had perished in some ravine and spread the rumor of his death.

The young Count of Valois, having managed to find the hermit's cave, explained to him his design to bury his name and his existence in oblivion. Encouraged by the holy man to realize his humble projects, the son of Raoul and Eleanor changed his name from Hugh to th at of Félix Co-founder of the Trinitarian Order. Felix, which he chose to express the happiness he felt in henceforth dedicating himself entirely to the service of the Lord.

Following the example of the model he had chosen, Felix prolonged his prayers and meditations during the night, and devoted himself to austerities that revived in him the traditions of the Thebaid; he mortified his spirit even more than his flesh and submitted all his inclinations to the divine will. He obeyed with the docility of a child his companion, who sometimes tested him with impossible orders. Nothing could alter the patience and sweetness of Felix; a delicious peace became the reward for his self-denial and his perpetual immolation.

Such great virtues, sustained with such fidelity, prompted the venerable hermit to have his disciple take holy orders. When Felix had received the character of the priesthood, he began again to afflict his body with new mortifications; he took almost no food; his obedience to his superior was so great that the latter, full of admiration, treated Felix as his brother and often asked him for advice concerning the interior life. This holy old man, knowing that he was going to die, shared this news with his dear disciple, and gave him his final advice to follow his vocation with fidelity; he left him his cell and his desert as an inheritance, and finally expired in his arms.

Some time later, following the attraction of grace, our Saint returned to France, where his long absence, the alteration of his features, and the change of clothing prevented him from being recognized. He built himself a small cell in the diocese of Meaux, in the middle of a forest that was then dreadful and impassable, filled with ferocious beasts and almost inaccessible to men due to its location; he built a small oratory there. This place, which was later called Cerfroid, was very inconvenient; one had to go and fetch water half a league away; this difficulty did not astonish this pious solitary, accustomed to work, and this lair of ferocious beasts became a paradise for him; he led an entirely angelic life there; he seemed to live only by miracle; he sometimes spent weeks without taking anything; some wild roots or a few pieces of brown bread that were brought to him from the villages made up all his food. He spent his nights and days in prayer and in the contemplation of our holiest mysteries. In the secret of the profound silence of this lovely solitude, God gave Felix the first ideas of the Order of the Redemption of Captives, of which He wished to make him a founder with Saint John of Mat ha; he had, on this saint Jean de Matha Co-founder of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Captives with Felix. occasion, a vision that prepared him for this great design. Being near the fountain where he went every day to take his small refreshment, he perceived a stag that came to cool itself in the current of its waters and that carried between its antlers a red and blue cross; he could not penetrate this mystery at that moment, and he only knew the secret of it later.

When God began to reveal His designs to Felix in his solitude, He also instructed John of Matha, who, obeying a secret voice, came to seek Felix in his desert. As they had received from heaven the same impressions regarding the institution of the Order of the Redemption of Captives, they no longer doubted that God was the author of this design and that they should remain together to lay the first foundations of this institute.

They first deemed it appropriate to draft Rules in writing that they could follow with fidelity: they sang the divine office together with angelic modesty; they took almost no rest during the night; they had only one meal a day; their food was a piece of bread that they went to eat on the edge of the fountain of which we have spoken. They remained for three years in this place in the exercise of the most heroic and austere virtues, miraculously healing all the sick in the surrounding area; they nevertheless prayed to Our Lord, with a great abundance of tears, to transfer to others this distinguished gift which attracted too many people and too much reputation to them: they preferred the unknown and hidden life to these great and brilliant actions. It was a thing worthy of admiration and great edification to see these two holy anchorites attribute to one another this great power to heal the sick.

Divine Providence sent them several disciples who, generously abandoning goods, parents, homeland, pleasures, honors, and fortune, came to place themselves under the discipline of these venerable masters in the way of salvation. They recognized so well the vanity of the grandeurs and delights of the world, by comparing them to the solidity and the true pleasures that they found by their own experience in the silence of the forests, that they were strengthened in a very short time in their holy vocation. The rules and the example that the two holy anchorites gave them were the two most powerful means that led them to the perfection to which they aspired.

God inspired these two famous solitaries to go to Rome to consult the sovereign Pontiff on their design. Docile to the voice of heaven, they Rome Birthplace of Maximian. abandoned their disciples to the care of Divine Wisdom, and departed, although the season was beginning to be unpleasant. A few days after their arrival in Rome, the Pope approved their institute, as we have said in the life of Saint John of Matha, on February 8th.

After such happy successes, they returned to France and went to console the dear disciples they had left at Cerfroid, under the care of Providence alone. They immediately worked to perfect the rules and constitutions they had already begun. John of Matha returned shortly after to Rome to have the Rule confirmed, after having entirely perfected it, so that Felix of Valois remained the sole superior of Cerfroid; it was then that he worked to give great growth to the Order, of which he had been declared Patriarch by the Vicar of Jesus Christ. A great number of good subjects came to present themselves to be under his wise guidance; several persons of quality and his close relatives gave him everything he needed for the construction of the necessary buildings. He was the counselor of the whole country and the bodily and spiritual physician of all the afflicted; he miraculously healed all the sick and gave consoling and salutary advice to all those who consulted him about their troubles.

All of hell rose up against this nascent Order. The demons first attacked the holy Patriarch through an infinity of assaults they launched against him; sometimes by inspiring in him feelings of vainglory and complacency regarding the great progress he was making in his Order; and at other times, they wanted to overcome him by open force, by burdening him, even externally, with an infinity of blows, and by troubling his disciples and his new religious with an infinity of bad impressions and malicious and diabolical suggestions that all tended to make these innocent solitaries leave the desert, and to persuade them to return to the world; but Felix, always fortunate in the assaults, and always victorious in the harsh combats, did not lose any of those whom heaven had entrusted to him, and remained until his death the most humble of all men.

Although this holy Patriarch was obliged to throw himself by necessity, and against all his inclinations, into an infinity of cares and external labors to which the buildings of his monasteries engaged him every day, it was nevertheless a spectacle worthy of great admiration to see the continual modesty and the entirely angelic recollection in which he knew how to keep himself. It was enough to see him to be touched with devotion, and several have confessed that his mere external demeanor and the very look of his venerable face had operated in them great feelings of conversion. Nothing could make him lose his hours of prayer; and if necessity interrupted this sweet exercise, which was all his delight, during the day, he knew how to amply compensate for it during the night; he quite often spent the time from evening until Matins adoring, praying, and groaning before Christ at the foot of the great altar of the church where the Blessed Sacrament reposed, and, after Matins, he would retire to a chapel of the Blessed Virgin, to spend the rest of the night there in other similar exercises of piety and penance.

He had a very singular devotion to the Mother of God; he had her honored under the title of Our Lady of the Remedy, to indicate that we must address ourselves to her to obtain the healing of our ills: a Confraternity of Our Lady was later erected under this name, which was uni Notre-Dame du Remède Marian title promoted by Felix for the healing of ailments. ted to that of the Holy Trinity.

Saint Felix, having learned by revelation that his death was approaching, shared this with his disciples. He had but one desire on earth: to see Father John of Matha once more before he died. God did not disapprove of this innocent wish; He even let him know that he would see him, and Felix declared in advance to his disciples that Father John of Matha would soon arrive: the event proved his prediction: Father de Matha, against all appearances, arrived and brought unspeakable joy to the houses of the Order already established in France. Felix conferred with him for the last time on all the affairs of the Order. John of Matha recounted to him all the blessings that God had bestowed upon the houses he had established in Spain and Italy, and he told him with what happy success he had carried out several redemptions on the Barbary Coast, in Tunis, in Algiers, and in the kingdom of Valencia. Felix, for his part, shared with John of Matha the progress of the Order in France, the monasteries that had been founded, the upcoming arrangements for establishing new ones, and the alms he held in trust to go and perform redemptions in the lands of the infidels, as well as the regular observance and other things necessary to maintain the Order and foster its growth.

His holy friend having departed for Italy, Felix was struck by a fever which made it clear that his hour was not far off, being as aged and as consumed by labors and austerities as he was. He was favored with several ecstasies during his illness; he received the holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction with sentiments of an entirely angelic devotion, and he entered into a rapture after having received these last aids of the Church; upon returning from it, he uttered a few more words animated by the fire of a seraphic love, which revealed the ardor with which his heart had just been inflamed; finally, his voice faded, and, lifting his eyes to heaven, where his heart already was, he rendered his spirit to God while giving a kiss of love to the image of Jesus Christ on the cross. It was the 4th of November in the year 1212. His face immediately appeared all surrounded by light. His body exhaled an odor so sweet that it surpassed that of the most exquisite perfumes. The death of this great servant of God was not unknown to Saint John of Matha: no sooner had Felix of Valois passed away than he appeared to him all surrounded by glory and light.

[APPENDIX: CULT AND RELICS.]

Felix was buried in the church of Cerfroid, a locality that was part of the diocese of Meaux, and which, since the Concordat, belongs to the Church of Soissons. His tomb became a highly frequented place of pilgrimage. He was invoked especially for children suffering from languor; he was specially honored by the Church of Meaux as early as the year 1219.

Except for this exception, the cult of Saint Felix of Valois was for a long time only a prerogative of the Order of the Trinitarians. It was not until May 1, 1262, that the honors of solemn canonization were rend Urbain IV Pope who canonized Felix in 1262. ered to him by Urban IV, whose original bull, dated October 4, 1263, was lost in the course of the following ages. Thus, when the Trinitarians, in the 17th century, requested the inscription of the name of their founders in the Roman Breviary, they could only produce equivalent proofs, by showing that John of Matha and Felix of Valois had enjoyed the honors of the cult from time immemorial, and that they had been qualified as saints by several popes, notably in a bull of Urban VI II. Louis Louis XIV King of France during the ministry of Olier. XIV intervened with his powerful solicitation, and the Sacred Congregation of Rites, in 1671, inscribed the name of Saint Felix on November 4 in the Roman Martyrology.

Later, it was noticed that the feast of Saint Felix of Valois was always superseded by that of Saint Charles Borromeo, which coincided with it; and in 1679, it was moved to November 29.

Vain searches were made at Cerfroid in 1705 to find the burial place of Saint Felix of Valois. A small relic is kept in the current monastery.

The Trinitarians of Saint-Quentin left this city in the middle of the 13th century to settle in Templeux-la-Fosse, in the current deanery of Boisel. Their foundation charter, given by Vermand, Bishop of Noyon, is dated January 29, 1254. It was these religious who, in 1665, took over the direction of the college of Péronne.

In 1866, Father Capella, parish priest of Authie, vicar general of Mgr Massais, apostolic vicar of the Gallas (southern Abyssinia), founded, in the diocese of Amiens, the work of the redemption of slaves, which is annexed to the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and adopted by that of Our Lady of Mercy.

We have used, to compose this biography, the Life of the Saints John of Matha and Felix of Valois, by the Rev. Fr. Ignace Dilloud; and the Hagiography of the diocese of Amiens, by Father Corblot.