Saint Colette of Corbie

Saint Colette of Corbie, called Coleta Boylet in the Roman Martyrology, was a French Poor Clare who in the fifteenth century restored to many monasteries of the Order of Saint Clare their original poverty and spirit of penance. Before that she had lived for several years as an anchoress in a cell beside a church. The Martyrology commemorates her on March 6.

She was born on January 13, 1381, at Corbie in Picardy, the daughter of Robert, a carpenter at the Benedictine abbey there. Her mother, it is reported, was already about sixty years old, and the birth of the child was attributed to the intercession of Saint Nicholas. Hence the name Nicolette, from which the diminutive Colette comes.

At the age of eighteen she lost her parents and came under the care of the abbot of Corbie. The property she inherited, as Pius XII recalled, she sold, and she gave the money to the poor. She tried life among the Beguines, with the Benedictine nuns, and with the Poor Clares, but nowhere did she find what she was looking for. On the advice of a Franciscan, Father Pinet, she entered the Third Order of Saint Francis.

In 1402 she had herself walled up in a cell beside the church at Corbie. She prayed, did penance, and sewed liturgical vestments and clothes for the poor. The Martyrology speaks of three years of this very austere life. During that time the conviction grew in her that God was calling her to renew the Order of Saint Clare. In 1406 she left the cell.

The Great Western Schism was then under way, and the Church in the West was divided between rival popes. Colette went to Nice, to Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna), the pope of the Avignon obedience, who was then recognized in France as the legitimate pope and whom the Church counts among the antipopes. It was he who in 1406 received her vows according to the Rule of Saint Clare and authorized her to found new monasteries and to reform existing ones.

She was supported by her confessor, the Franciscan Henry of Baume. In 1410 she took over an almost abandoned monastery of Poor Clares in Besançon, the first house of her reform. Others followed: in France, Burgundy, Savoy, and Flanders, and also in Heidelberg. The sources speak of seventeen monasteries founded during her lifetime; others she brought back to their original austerity. A dozen or so houses of Friars Minor also accepted the reform. Her constitutions were approved in 1434 by the minister general of the Franciscans, William of Casale, and in 1458 by Pope Pius II.

She died on March 6, 1447, in the monastery at Ghent in Flanders. At the end of the eighteenth century, when Emperor Joseph II was suppressing monasteries, the Poor Clares moved her body to Poligny in eastern France. In 1740, during the pontificate of Clement XII, she was beatified, and on May 24, 1807, Pius VII canonized her in the Vatican Basilica. On the five hundredth anniversary of her death, Pius XII wrote that Colette teaches the interior life, without which outward activity remains barren. The Poor Clares of her reform, known as Colettines, today have about 140 monasteries around the world.