St. Colette of Corbie

Colette of Corbie was born in 1381 in Corbie, in the Picardy region of northern France, into a humble working-class family. Her father, Robert Boellet, was a carpenter at the famous Benedictine abbey of Corbie, and her mother was a woman of deep piety. Orphaned or partly orphaned in her youth (historical sources differ on the exact circumstances), she was raised by relatives and later placed in the care of the Benedictine nuns of Corbie. From an early age she showed a marked attraction to prayer, fasting, and solitude, and by her teenage years she was drawn to a life of strict penance and contemplation. She joined the Third Order of St. Francis as a young woman, but her desire for a more austere life led her to seek a hermitage rather than a conventional religious house. At the age of twenty-one, Colette obtained permission to be walled into a small cell adjoining the church of the Franciscan convent at Corbie, where she lived as an anchoress for three years. During this period of enclosure she experienced a vision of St. Francis of Assisi, who, according to tradition, commanded her to restore the Order of Poor Ladies (Poor Clares) to its original primitive rule, which by the early fifteenth century had been considerably relaxed. She also reported visions of St. Clare herself, who instructed her about the original austerities. After receiving endorsement from the Avignon antipope Benedict XIII, Colette was commissioned to undertake this reform, and she was eventually professed as a Poor Clare herself, taking the habit from Raymond of Capua, the Dominican Master General. Between 1406 and 1447, Colette founded seventeen new convents of Poor Clares across France, the Low Countries, and Savoy, and reformed numerous older houses that had drifted away from the original rule. These included the great convent of Longchamp near Paris, as well as houses in Ghent, Besançon, Lyon, and other cities. Her reform emphasized radical poverty, strict enclosure, perpetual silence, fasting, and the literal observance of the rule as St. Francis and St. Clare had originally written it. She traveled on foot, in poor clothing, often sleeping on the ground and begging for alms, even though she was now the superior of her own convent at Le Pommier. Her reputation for holiness drew extraordinary crowds, and many miracles were attributed to her both during her lifetime and after her death. In her later years Colette suffered from ill health, including a long and painful illness in her final years that she bore with great patience. She died on March 6, 1447, at Ghent, in the convent she had founded there. She was canonized by Pope Pius VII in 1807, more than three centuries after her death, having been previously beatified by Clement XI in 1740. Because of her long association with the care of pregnant women and her reputation for healing sick children, she is traditionally invoked as the patron of expectant mothers and sick children. Her feast day is March 6.

Colette's legacy within the Franciscan family is significant: the Colettine reform produced a distinct branch of the Poor Clares, sometimes called the Colettines, that still exists today in several countries. Her convents became known for a severity of observance that even alarmed some of her contemporaries, and she required papal intervention to keep certain communities from imposing still harsher rules. She also served as an advisor to several bishops and to King Charles VII of France, who is said to have consulted her on political as well as spiritual matters. Her body was said to remain incorrupt for some time after her death, and relics are still venerated in a number of European churches.

Some details of Colette's early life remain uncertain, particularly the circumstances of her parents' deaths and the exact sequence of her visions. Her confessors wrote accounts of her life shortly after her death, and later hagiographers sometimes embellished these. What is firmly established is that she was a woman of considerable practical ability as well as spiritual intensity: she negotiated with popes and kings, managed substantial building projects, and maintained correspondence with religious houses across Europe. She is remembered as one of the most successful female religious reformers of the late Middle Ages.