At first, the founder had not a religious order in mind; he wished to form a congregation without external vows, where the cloister should be observed only during the year of novitiate, after which the sisters should be free to go out by turns to visit the sick and poor.

[3] De Sales invited Jane de Chantal to join him in establishing a new type of religious life, one open to older women and those of delicate constitution, that would stress the hidden, inner virtues of humility, obedience, poverty, even-tempered charity, and patience, and founded on the example of Mary in her journey of mercy to her cousin Elizabeth.

[2] The special charism of the Visitation Order is an interior discipline expressed primarily through the practice of two virtues: humility and gentleness.

[7] The Order of the Visitation has been present in Portugal since 1784, maintaining today three monasteries: in Braga, in Vila das Aves and in Batalha.

The Sisters of the Visitation in Portugal produce and distribute the emblems of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (like devotional scapulars) as Margaret Mary Alacoque did in the past.

After a brief sojourn in Spain three of the Sisters made a second attempt to cross from Porto and without further encounters with pirates arrived in Falmouth on 29 January 1804.

Following the partitions, the order was robbed multiple times by foreign armies and it suffered under sanctions imposed by the occupying powers.

The nuns were officially enclosed the same year, 1654, however soon after, they would have to leave their cloister twice due to threats from hostile armies - this would happen again some centuries later, when the sisters were driven out to house Napoleonic soldiers.

The oldest of the Visitationist convents was also involved in the Warsaw Uprising, when the sisters voluntarily opened their cloister to guests and sheltered the vulnerable civilian population.

[13] The convent in Kraków attributes its conception to a miracle performed by Francis of Sales, who answered the prayer of bishop and founder Jan Małachowski when the latter was drowning in the frozen Vistula river.

In Kraków too, the sisters were heavily involved with girls' education, which was the only reason the convent was not forced to disband under Austrian occupation.

Like its sister convents, the Visitandines of Jasło managed a pension for women and girls, although its capacity as a school was not formally recognised; their educational activity ceased with the outbreak of World War I.

The Visitandines returned to the ruins in the 1950s and the slow process of rebuilding begun; in 1966, the church was consecrated again as part of the wider celebrations of 1000-year anniversary of Catholicism in Poland.

The monasteries of the First Federation live the purely contemplative life, observing papal enclosure, with solemn vows, and have retained the traditional habit of the order.

On May 10, 1998, seven Visitandine nuns of the First Monastery of Madrid, Spain, martyred during the Spanish Revolution of 1936, were beatified in Rome by Pope John Paul II.

In early 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, as religious persecution intensified, most of the community moved to Oronoz, leaving a group of six nuns in the charge of Sr Maria Gabriela de Hinojosa.

Maria Cecilia, who had run when she felt the sister next to her fall, surrendered shortly after and was shot five days later at the cemetery wall in Vallecas on the outskirts of Madrid.