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| Saint Alexis Falconieri in the Saint Alexis Falconieri Chapel, Ixtapan de la Sal, Mexico State, Mexico |
One of the Seven Holy Founders of the Order of the Servants of Mary (c. 1200–1310)
A Man Shaped by Florence
Alexis Falconieri was born around the year 1200 in Florence, that magnificent, restless city on the Arno that was then reaching the first crest of its medieval greatness. The Falconieri were among the city's most prominent mercantile families — wealthy, respected, deeply embedded in the civic and commercial life of a republic that was rapidly becoming one of the financial powerhouses of Europe. To be a Falconieri was to be expected to pursue trade, to accumulate wealth, to build alliances, and to extend the family's influence across the guild networks and banking houses that were reshaping the medieval world.
Florence in 1200 was a city of extraordinary contradictions. It was a place of soaring religious devotion and murderous factional violence simultaneously. The struggles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines — the partisans of papal authority and imperial power respectively — tore families apart and sent rivers of blood through streets that also rang with the bells of a dozen magnificent churches. The city was building, praying, fighting, and trading all at once, with an energy that seemed to know no rest.
It was into this world that Alexis was born, and it was against this world — or at least against one version of it — that the decisive drama of his life would play out.
The Confraternity of the Laudesi and the First Gathering
The story of Alexis Falconieri cannot be separated from the story of six other men, because the meaning of his life was inseparable from theirs. The seven founders of the Servite Order were not solitary mystics who later discovered one another; they were members of a lay confraternity — the Laudesi — a brotherhood of pious laymen devoted to praising the Virgin Mary through song and prayer, a form of organized lay devotion that was flourishing across northern Italy in the early thirteenth century.
The seven men were: Alexis Falconieri, Bonfilius Monaldi, Bartholomew Amidei, Benedict dell'Antella, Gerard Sostegni, John Buonagiunta, and Ricovero (Hugh) Uguccione. All were Florentine. All were men of substance — merchants, guild members, men with social standing and material comfort. They had joined the Laudesi not as an act of rebellion against the world but as an expression of the deep religious hunger that coexisted, in medieval Florence, with commercial ambition.
On the feast of the Assumption of Mary, August 15, 1233, the seven men gathered in prayer and are reported to have experienced, simultaneously, a vision of the Virgin Mary. In this vision, she appeared to them beautiful and luminous, carrying a black habit in one hand and a scroll in the other. The scroll bore the words of a new religious vocation. She invited them to leave the world, to embrace a life of prayer and penance in her service, and to take a rule modeled on that of Saint Augustine.
Whether the vision was identical in each man's experience, or whether it was a shared spiritual conviction expressed later in the devotional language of vision, cannot now be known with certainty. What is certain is that after this encounter all seven men resolved, with a unanimity that was itself extraordinary, to abandon their worldly lives entirely.
Retreat to Monte Senario
With the guidance of their spiritual director, the Bishop of Florence Ardingo, the seven men withdrew first to a simple house near the Florentine city walls, and then to the wilder solitude of Monte Senario, a rocky hill in the Apennines north of the city. The mountain was remote, difficult, and beautiful — the kind of place where the silence was real and the cold genuine. They built rough shelters, fasted rigorously, wore the black habit of the vision, and began the life of prayer and contemplation that would become the foundation of their new order.
It is here that the particular character of Alexis Falconieri becomes most distinctly visible. He was the youngest of the seven — probably in his early to mid-thirties — and in the accounts that survive he emerges as the most consistently committed to absolute simplicity. Where the others eventually received holy orders — becoming priests, accepting positions of authority within the order, traveling on missions of preaching and apostolate — Alexis alone refused ordination to the priesthood for his entire life. He remained throughout his one hundred and ten years a lay brother. He chose the lowest place. He asked to be given the most menial tasks. He was, it was said, the one who begged for food at the doors of nearby farms and villages, carrying a sack, accepting whatever was given or refused with equal equanimity.
This was not an act of false modesty designed to attract admiration. In the spiritual culture of thirteenth-century religious life, it was understood as a radical commitment to the forma pauperis — the form of poverty — that was tearing through the religious landscape of Italy in the wake of Francis of Assisi's revolution. To remain a lay brother was to refuse every ladder of ecclesiastical advancement. It was to say: I am here not to become something but to give something up.
The Order of the Servants of Mary
The Order of Friar Servants of Mary — the Serviti, in Italian; the Servites, in common English usage — received formal approbation from the Holy See in 1304, under Pope Benedict XI, though the process of official recognition had been underway since the mid-thirteenth century. Pope Alexander IV had granted the order his protection in 1256, and the order had grown rapidly through the preaching and missionary efforts of several of the seven founders, most famously Philip Benizi, who though not one of the original seven became the order's most celebrated figure in its early generations.
The Servite charism was and remains distinctive in several ways. The order placed particular emphasis on devotion to the Mater Dolorosa — the Sorrowful Mother, the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross — and developed the devotion of the Seven Sorrows of Mary as a central spiritual practice. The seven sorrows (Simeon's prophecy, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the child Jesus in the Temple, the meeting on the road to Calvary, the crucifixion, the descent from the cross, and the burial) were meditated upon as a rosary-like sequence, and this devotion became one of the great popular spiritual practices of late medieval Catholicism.
Alexis lived through the entire arc of the order's founding, growth, and formal recognition. He outlived all six of his companions. He was present at their deaths — tending them, praying with them, receiving their last words. He buried Bonfilius Monaldi, the last of the other six to die. Having entered the mountain with six brothers, he found himself alone.
A Life of Extraordinary Length
The most remarkable biographical fact about Alexis Falconieri — apart from the vocation that shaped his entire existence — is that he lived to be approximately one hundred and ten years old. He died on February 17, 1310. If his birth date of around 1200 is accurate (and there is reasonable consensus among hagiographers that it is, though precision is impossible), then he lived through more than a century of Florentine, Italian, and European history of almost unparalleled turbulence and transformation.
He was born in the same century as Francis of Assisi and Dominic de GuzmΓ‘n, whose founding of the Franciscan and Dominican orders reshaped Western Christianity. He was a young man during the great age of cathedral building. He lived through the repeated Crusades, the rise of the universities, the development of scholastic theology, the eruption of the Cathar heresy and the Inquisition established to combat it. He watched Florence transform from a prosperous commune into the banking capital of Europe. He was an old man when Dante Alighieri was still a young poet dreaming of Beatrice.
In the accounts of his extreme old age, Alexis is described with an almost luminous simplicity. He could no longer walk; he was carried. He could no longer beg at doors; others begged on his behalf. But he prayed. And he waited. He seems to have understood his extraordinary longevity not as a blessing of comfort but as a continuation of service — a witness, living and breathing, to the founding grace of the order. As long as he lived, one of the seven was still alive. The living memory of Monte Senario had a face and a voice.
In his final years, the accounts suggest that he had long conversations with the young brothers about the origins of the order — what the mountain had been like, what the vision had meant, who each of the other six had been as men. He was, in effect, the order's living archive. He was also, by all accounts, a man of serene and uncomplicated joy. The suffering of his companions' deaths, the hardships of a century of austerity, the physical diminishments of extreme old age — all of it appeared to have been metabolized into something quiet and radiant.
Death and Veneration
Alexis Falconieri died on February 17, 1310, surrounded by the Servite community at Monte Senario. He was the last of the seven founders, and his death marked the close of the founding generation. The other six had died at various points over the preceding decades; only Alexis, through his astonishing longevity, had seen the order not only founded but formally recognized and flourishing.
He was beatified along with his six companions by Pope Clement XI in 1717. All seven were canonized together on January 15, 1888, by Pope Leo XIII in what was one of the more unusual canonizations in modern Church history — seven men, of different characters and gifts, elevated together as a single founding act of holiness. Their shared feast day is February 17.
The canonization of all seven together was itself theologically significant. It was a statement that holiness, in this case, was not individual but communal — that the grace given on Monte Senario was not given to a single great soul but distributed among seven ordinary men who became extraordinary through their fidelity to one another and to a shared vocation.
The Particular Witness of Alexis
Among the seven, Alexis holds a particular place not because he was the most famous or the most theologically accomplished — he was neither — but because of his combination of total simplicity and total perseverance. He wrote nothing. He preached nothing. He governed nothing. He is not associated with miracles of the dramatic kind that populate the lives of many saints. What he did was remain. He chose the lowest place and stayed there for a century. He refused every elevation. He carried his sack. He begged at doors. He prayed. He buried his brothers. He remembered. He waited.
There is in the Christian tradition a kind of holiness that expresses itself through grandeur — the martyr's crown, the doctor's luminous pages, the founder's bold institutional vision. And there is another kind that expresses itself through a quality almost impossible to name: a quality of utter, uncalculating fidelity to a commitment made early and never revisited. Alexis Falconieri belongs to this second category. He is the patron, in a way, of those who do not seek to be remarkable but simply refuse to stop.
He is also, in the story of the Servites, the one who holds everything together across time. Without him, the living thread from the founding vision to the canonized order might have frayed entirely into legend. With him, it remained a human thing — a memory carried in an old man's body, warm and particular and true.
Legacy and the Servite Order Today
The Order of the Servants of Mary continues to exist and minister worldwide, with particular strength in Italy, the United States, Africa, and Latin America. The Servites operate parishes, schools, hospitals, and shrines, and the devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows that the seven founders fostered remains a living current in global Catholic spirituality.
Monte Senario itself is still a Servite sanctuary. The mountain where the seven men built their first rough shelters in the 1230s still receives pilgrims. The stones they walked on are still there. In a sense, Alexis's most lasting act was simply to have walked them for so long.
Born: c. 1200, Florence Died: February 17, 1310, Monte Senario, near Florence Beatified: 1717, by Pope Clement XI Canonized: January 15, 1888, by Pope Leo XIII (with the other six founders) Feast Day: February 17 Order: Order of the Servants of Mary (Servites) Patronage: Associated with the Servite Order; invoked alongside the other six founders
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