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WELLSPRINGS
The Essential Good News Saint Francis - Saint Clare, Saint Colette,
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St Colette - Faith in the Future
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Colette
lived in, what some have called, the most hideous selection of time
and space in history: the Hundred Year War in France. The English
came, robbing, pillaging and taking hostages, needing to be bought
off. The French came to drive out the English; they, too, lived
off the land. The Strippers of the Wheat: the marauding private
war bands came, fighting their own vendettas, torturing, burning,
raping; indiscriminately hiring themselves to either side and exacting
tribute. The crops failed, the plague came. So many died there were
none left to bury the dead. The Church was in fragments; it was
the age of the "Babylonian Captivity." There was one Pope in Avignon
and one in Italy. Yet the well-nigh atheistic illuminators of the
fat, millionaire Duc de Berry's Books of Hours mainly depict rose
gardens, hunting dogs and banquets, all under the signs of the Zodiac
in a fallacious chivalric bubble.
St Clare and St Francis seem almost like legends; myths of a sunrise age, compared with Colette. Colette was diamond grit in the wheels of history. She was born in 1381, at Corbie, a village near the River Somme; (one of the battlegrounds of the First World War.) Unlike Clare and Francis, who came from wealthy, aristocratic and merchant families, Colette was the child of a peasant artisan, a stone mason who worked on Corbie's Benedictine Abbey. Colette had arrived very late in her parents' lives. According to her contemporary biographers, Andre de Vaux and Perrine de Balme, her mother was 60 when she was born after prayer to the heavenly patron of children, St Nicholas. Life for the Future In a series of visions Colette
saw, as it were, the whole corrupt social fabric of her age, collapsing
into destruction like leaves swept into a furnace. There was nothing
exaggerated in her visions. She could almost have seen the reality
by looking out of the window. Then she saw St Francis come before
the Lord, and kneeling down, he begged, Lord, give me this woman
for the reform of my Order". For the Franciscan Order, too, had
been part of Colette's vision of a destroyed world. To Colette's
horror the Lord graciously bowed his head in assent.  New
DawnThe first house she reformed was Besançon. In her travels she had picked up a number of followers. Together they now began to recreate the Gospel way of life of the original Poor Clares. Miraculously, she had somehow obtained a copy of the Rule of St Clare. The original Rule had been buried with St Clare in 1253 and was only unearthed at the end of the 19th Century. The Poor Clare sisters had been forced by a manipulative manoeuvre of St Bonaventure, ten years after Clare's death, to adopt the rule of Pope Urban IV, if they wished for the continued support of the Friars. But Colette restored Clare's own rule. Though relatively few of her letters survived the sacking of the French and Belgium Colettine houses during the French Revolution, it is known that she corresponded with Paula Monaldi and Caediia Coppolla who were working for the reform of the Clares in Italy, and with St Bernardine and St John of Capistrano who were founding the reformed Friars, as well as with Cardinal Giuliano Gesarini, the Cardinal Legate of the Council of Basle which was convened to reduce the multiplicity of Popes. The Cardinal (the letters are still extant) was touchingly anxious that she would think of him as her son and humbly sent an alms to buy her and her sisters woollen underwear. No one who encountered Colette were left unchanged. She numbered both Armagnacs and Burgundians among her benefactors. She crossed battlefields and negotiated peace. Re-forming the scarred face The women who followed Colette came from every level of society. Even as she had seen in her visions the brokenness that extended across every strata of life, so she was to see its mending in those who came to join her; peasant women who had been her childhood companions in Corbie, and princesses from the Bourbon House of Naples. When she selected abbesses for the houses of her reform that sprang up from Besançon, social class did not influence her. .... She reformed the Friars, and until later rearrangements of the Order of Friars Minor in there were branches of that order that held the title Colettari. She did not achieve her ends by haranguing anyone. When invited to speak to the (very unreformed) friars of Dole, she knelt humbly on the floor and prayed - and she remained in prayer, never saying a word. .... Blanche of Geneva, the great lady who had helped to start Colette's reform, had asked to be buried in whatever community Colette happened to be at the time. So they buried her at Poligny. Colette had also intended to be buried there (and had prophesied it), but the weariness of a long life devoted to her sisters, travelling from house to house, wore her out finally at Ghent, in Belgium. She died there on 6th March 1447. However, God uses even political chaos to fulfil the words of his saints. During the French Revolution the monastery at Ghent was in danger, and Colette's relics were sent for safety to Poligny, in Savoy, where they are cherished and venerated to this day.
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