St. Colette of Corbie

St. Colette of Corbie was born Nicolette Boellet in 1381 at Corbie in Picardy, France. Her parents were older and childless for many years before her birth, and they named her in gratitude to St. Nicholas. After their death, she entered the Franciscan Third Order and eventually lived as a recluse attached to Corbie Abbey.

For eight years Colette lived enclosed in prayer and penance. Her solitude was interrupted by a mission she did not seek. Tradition says St. Francis appeared to her and commanded her to restore the Poor Clares to the original austerity of poverty. At first she resisted, but the call became unmistakable. With the help of the Franciscan Henry de Beaume and the approval of Church authorities, she left her enclosure and began the difficult work of reform.

The fifteenth century was troubled by war, laxity, and division, including the Western Schism. Colette traveled through France, Burgundy, Savoy, and Flanders, founding or reforming monasteries of Poor Clares. The reform associated with her became known as the Colettine Poor Clares, marked by strict poverty, enclosure, penitence, and fidelity to the Franciscan spirit.

Her life was also marked by mystical gifts. Accounts speak of visions, prophecy, healings, multiplication of food, and spiritual discernment. She was sought for counsel by princes, clergy, and ordinary people, yet remained deeply poor and penitential. Her patronage of expectant mothers and sick children comes from traditions of favors granted through her intercession and her concern for vulnerable life.

Colette died at Ghent on 6 March 1447. She was canonized by Pope Pius VII in 1807. Her reforming work endured because it was not merely administrative. She carried into monasteries a living memory of St. Clare’s poverty and St. Francis’s evangelical simplicity. In an age of confusion, she restored houses where women could seek Christ in prayer, penance, silence, and joyful surrender to the Gospel.

Her reform was demanding because it restored a concrete form of poverty. Monasteries needed buildings and discipline, but Colette insisted that dependence on Providence remain real. She traveled, negotiated with rulers and churchmen, founded houses, and endured the difficulties that come whenever reform touches possessions and habits. Her relationship with St. Vincent Ferrer also places her within a network of saints who tried to heal a wounded Church during the Western Schism.