Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order

Today we remember seven people together, and that is the most remarkable thing about them: not one founder, but seven. They were Florentine merchants, well off, and above all **friends**. The source that tells their story, the *Legenda de Origine Ordinis*, always speaks of them in the plural: the seven men, the seven brothers. They had come together in a confraternity devoted to Our Lady, and from their devotion they took the name that made them known: servants of Saint Mary. In 1233 they took the step: they decided to live together. They settled their homes and their families, left them what they needed and gave everything else to the poor and to the churches. Then they put on a cloak and a tunic of rough cloth and withdrew to a little hut outside Florence. But something happened that they hadn’t expected: people started coming to see them. So many, every day, that they could no longer keep their silence. So they moved farther away, to Monte Senario, eighteen kilometers from the city. The Legenda says that there they built a tabernacle made of humility, held together by their harmony and completed by their good example. From that group came the Order of the Servants of Mary, which soon began taking in others and founding convents. In 1244, in Florence, they became friends with Saint Peter Martyr of Verona. There’s no name day today. But there is an idea worth keeping: seven people who care about each other and decide the same thing together last longer than one person with a brilliant idea.