Seven rich merchants gave everything away and walked out of Florence

FLORENCE, Tuscany, September 8, 1233 AD — Seven men walked out of Florence this week. They are not going back to their shops. They were merchants, men who made their living buying and selling. All seven came from old, rich Florentine families. Before they went, they left their families what those families needed. Everything else they gave away to the poor.

They are St. Bonfilius Monaldi, St. Bonajunta Manetti, St. Manettus dell’Antella, St. Amideus Amidei, St. Hugh Uguccioni, St. Sosthenes Sostegni and St. Alexis Falconieri. They were not all the same kind of man. Some had never married. Some were married men, and some had lost their wives.

Why they walked out

Three weeks ago, on August 15, the seven were at the prayers of their group, the Laudesi (the Praisers of Mary). That day was the feast of the Assumption. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to them there. She told them to leave the world and give themselves completely to the things that last for ever. They took the plan to Bishop Ardingo of Florence, and he told them to go ahead. Then they put on a plain black habit.

The city they were leaving lives on cloth. Florence is the leading city in Italy for wool. Most of all, it dyes and finishes the cloth that goes out of it. For years the seven had also belonged to an old Florentine guild dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was very old, and it had many holy men and women in it. People called it the Major Guild of Our Blessed Lady.

Eleven miles north

Their first stop was hardly out of the city at all. It was La Camarzia, a suburb just beyond the walls, next door to the convent of the Friars Minor. It did not leave them as far from other people as they wanted, so they kept going.

Monte Senario is eleven miles north of Florence. The seven climbed all the way to the top. There they built a small house. They live in it together, and they have already started letting others join them.

The next year Bishop Ardingo gave them the land on the mountain to keep. They wanted to be poor and away from the world. They built a small church there in honour of Mary and put their little rooms around it. They spent their days praying and thinking about the sufferings of Jesus and Mary. In 1239 AD they made the sorrows of Mary, standing under the Cross, the main devotion of their order.

The last one left

St. Alexis Falconieri outlived the other six. He died at Florence in 1310 AD, aged a hundred and ten. One friar joined the order while St. Alexis was still alive. He heard the story of the founding from him and wrote it down in the order’s records, the Monumenta (Records). “When I entered this order I found only one of the seven still alive, Brother Alexis, whom our Lady was pleased to preserve from death down to our own time so that we might listen to his account of the founding of the order,” the friar wrote. Of the seven together he wrote: “They were like seven stars joined together to form a constellation.”

All seven are buried in one tomb on the mountain they climbed this week. Pope Leo XIII put them into the catalogue of the saints together in 1888 AD.