According to the old adage, “Behind every man, there’s a great woman.” That’s often especially true in the spiritual realm. Which brings us to St. Clotilde, who is honored in the French liturgical calendar on June 3.

She was the wife of Clovis, King of the Franks, who thereby managed to Christianize those tribes and bring them into union with Rome. Yes, Christianity was known in France — e.g., St. Hilary of Poitiers, a bishop, precedes Clotilde by about 125 years. But France is a complicated country, its original Gauls from Roman times later having to accommodate Frankish tribes that would come to dominate it. And, after the fall of Rome, the evangelization of northern European tribes became ever more pressing.

Clovis was a pagan. Clotilde was an orthodox Catholic. Arianism, condemned at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople I, still had influential advocates in elite circles. Upon her marriage to Clovis, she intended to convert him to orthodox Catholicism and build better ties with the papacy.

A good Catholic woman, Clotilde prayed for her stubborn husband, who was content to remain in paganism. She had her children baptized (though the death of their firstborn, in an era of infant mortality, supplied Clovis a further excuse to avoid the bath of Baptism). But, in 496, Clovis prevailed in a battle against another Germanic tribe and, like Constantine at Ponte Milvio almost 200 years earlier, Clovis attributed his victory to Christianity. On Christmas Day that year, he was baptized at Reims and he brought his people with him.

Clotilde and Clovis together had three sons and a daughter; Clovis also had a son from an earlier marriage. When Clovis died in 511, the four boys divided Clovis’ realm among them. Family disputes led to arguments and warfare among the sons and with more extended family, which Clotilde unsuccessfully tried to reconcile. 

History likes to repeat itself. Three hundred years later, a Frank named Charlemagne would unify his peoples in the faith as Holy Roman Emperor, crowned by the Pope himself on Christmas Day in A.D. 800. Upon his death, his three sons would also divide his realm three ways. The west would more quickly become what we call France. The east would remain a patchwork of states as the Holy Roman Empire, not unifying into “Germany” for another millennium. The middle would be the places the two sides fought over, e.g., the Low Countries or Alsace-Lorraine.

On Clovis’ death and as her sons assumed more and more public (and fratricidal) roles, Clotilde retired to Tours, where she spent a religious and penitential life devotedly living by the tomb of St. Martin of Tours. It’s said her prayers and pleas one night to stop another internecine battle resulted in an unexpected storm arising that kept the two sides apart. She died June 3, 545, and is buried in the Church of St. Genvieve in Paris.

St. Clotilde is depicted in this family scene, “Clovis et sa famille” (Clovis and His Family) from a 14th-15th-century illustrated manuscript. This is the era of the great “chronicles” of national histories, and the illustration comes from Les Grandes Chroniques de France (The Great Chronicles of France), a manuscript begun under King Louis IX in 1250 and supplemented for the next two centuries. The Chronique traces French history from the Frankish ascendancy (even though it tries to connect the Franks to the ancient Trojans) up to the time of the document. As a medieval manuscript dealing with such important matters, it was lavishly illuminated.

Clotilde seems the tallest figure in the picture, occupying center stage. The king is a bit off to the side. One might think that a little unusual, given the supposedly “patriarchal” bent of Catholic religious art, but methinks it says something about a woman’s influence on her family. The three little princes, in crowns, are brought up on the left. The illumination abides by standard medieval artistic conventions, including something of a flatness lacking well-developed three-dimensionality. Consider the possible distortion it causes in contrast to the natural function of the eye: Clovis stands closer to the viewer but Clotilde is bigger. That either means she was a really tall lady or the optics are off: things further away get smaller, not larger. The inscription is in Old French. For a similar take on the family — Clotilde dividing up the kingdom (in a different manuscript) — see here.

June is traditionally associated in the United States with marriage. We are suffering a marriage crisis: all sorts of other “arrangements” — cohabitation, civil unions, civil marriages, hook-ups, etc. — compete with sacramental marriage. Even many Catholics ignore the significance of sacramental marriage, insisting they need no “license” to prove “love is love.” Mixed marriages proliferate, not just with other Christians but outside of Christianity where at least baptism links people. Such mixed marriages often lead to religious indifference, at best a gauzy kind of ecumenical “spirituality” that doesn’t plumb very deep. Even when people commit to marriage, they do so later than ever and treat their vows not as binding commitments but as poetry, not to be taken seriously by divorce courts.

Contrast that to St. Clotilde.

If you come to think about it, Clotilde probably would have understood a lot about our times (except the degree to which some Catholics willingly accommodate them). She had a pagan husband who resisted conversion and — let’s be honest — it probably wasn’t out of deep convictions about the divinity of Nerthus, Fricco or Thor. It was because Christianity is hard. Catholicism makes demands. Judaism and Christianity preach a God who demands moral conversion, not ritual placating. 

Clotilde, in a mixed marriage, remained faithful to God. That is Job One for all of us. She prayed for her husband and no doubt “nagged” him about religion, ensuring the matter remained on the domestic agenda. And eventually it paid off: Clovis was baptized and brought his people with him. And as Catholics who today enter mixed marriages or marriages with non-Christians, Clotilde ensured that her children were raised Catholic. 

Do Catholic women today want to be St. Clotilde?

She wasn’t always successful: her boys weren’t particularly good at the “love thy brother” part. Neither are we. But she persisted, doing what she could, recognizing God comes first. And not doubting his graces.

Both Judaism and Catholicism have traditionally warned against the threats of religious indifferentism that experience demonstrates many mixed marriages bring. St. Paul warns against them, in part by reminding us that the marriage of Christians is a sacrament, a symbol of Christ’s union with his Church (Ephesians 5:31-32). But he also understood the milieu in which he lived: sometimes one spouse would convert but the other wouldn’t. This enables him to distinguish between a sacramental marriage (one that involves Christians) and a non-sacramental one and to formulate the “Pauline Privilege.” If a Christian-pagan marriage results in the pagan party refusing to live in peace with the Christian, the Church — on Scriptural warrant — allows them to separate and the Christian to remarry (1 Corinthians 7:12-16). 

But Paul was not looking to promote separations but “peace.” Only if the non-Christian abandons the marriage should they separate. If the non-Christian would live peaceably with the Christian, they should stay together. Why? Paul’s answer is clear: “How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?” (v. 16). The Christian can bring holiness and salvation not just to himself but to his spouse: “The unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband” (v. 14). 

Paul’s letter and Clotilde’s life remind us of a truth that has been obscured about marriage. Marriage is not just an “estate,” a civil contract arranging and regulating things like money, property, children, and their inheritance/division. It is first and foremost part of God’s plan of salvation by which two people work out each other’s salvation. In Clotilde’s case, it affected not just Clovis but a whole people. Yes, behind every man — often especially in spiritual matters — there is a great woman.

[For additional/background reading, see here and here.]