Saint Clotilde

Catholic Saint

st.Clotilde-Queen of the Franks

Feast Day : June 3

Patronage: adopted children; brides; disappointing children; exiles; parents of large families; queens; those who have suffered the death of children; the lame; widows; women with iniquitous husbands

Also known as: Clothilde of France, Clotilda

Clotilde was born at Lyons, France, about 474, the daughter of King Chilperic of Burgundy. She married the Salian Frankish king Clovis I in 493, who used their alliance as a means of strengthening his position with the Romanized Celts. Clovis had already defeated several minor Frankish kings in Gaul and the Rhineland and established himself as the sole Frankish king and founder of the Merovingian Dynasty. Although not a Christian himself, Clovis allowed his Catholic Christian wife to baptize their children. His tolerance of Catholic Christianity angered other Germanic tribes, who were either pagans or Arians. In 496, while fighting the Alemanni tribes, Clovis prayed to “Clotilde’s God” and promised to convert if victorious in battle. On Christmas Day of 496, Bishop St. Remigius (St. Remy) of Reims baptized Clovis I, supposedly with about 3,000 of his followers. Clovis and Queen Clotilde chose Paris as their capital city, where the monarchs founded the Church of the Apostles, later known as St. Genevieve. Upon Clovis’s death in 511, Clotilde was extremely wealthy but powerless to control her rebellious children.

Clovis I had divided his kingdom among his four sons Theodoric I, Clodomir, Childebert I and Clothaire I but each desired the others’ kingdoms. Clodomir was murdered, and Clotilde took his three sons under her care. Nevertheless, her son Clothaire murdered two of the boys, his own nephews. Clotilde secreted the youngest, five-year-old Clodoaldus, to a monastery at Versailles, where he grew to become St. Cloud. Her daughter, also named Clotilde, was forced to marry the Arian Visigoth king Amalaric, who treated her cruelly. Childebert murdered Amalaric to avenge his sister, but Clotilde II died on her way back to Paris. Mortified at her children’s sins and unable to change their ways, Queen Clotilde went to Tours, where she lived the rest of her life near the tomb of St. Martin of Tours, spending her time in prayer, penance and service to the sick and the poor. Historians attribute the founding of churches at Laon, Andelys and Rouen to Clotilde. She died at Tours in 545.