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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
Colette was left an orphan in her
early teens and a ward of the Benedictine Abbot, Raoul de Roye.
Refusing to be married off, she tried her hand at various religious
ensembles, including the Poor Clares. Finally, she settled to be
an anchoress, rather in the style of Julian of Norwich. A cell was
built for her on the side of Corbie Parish Church and in 1402, she
was perpetually enclosed, complete with the solemn ceremony of bricking
up the entrance of her hermitage. But God had other ideas.
....
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.
And Colette refused. The Lord showed her a vision of a great golden
tree from which sprung other trees: she was the first tree and the
nurslings were the houses she was to found. Unimpressed, she pulled
up the trees and threw them out of the window. As she would not
look at him, God took away her ability to see at all. As she refused
to listen, she found herself deprived of the power of hearing. Such
was the struggle that the thought of having to reform the Franciscan
Order wrought in her. In the end, exhausted by her own refusal to
serve, she gave her heart and will over to God - and agreed.
Now, all she needed was freedom to move - (she was still an Anchoress),
support, and permission from at least one of the Popes, and some
followers. God sent them.
Pierre de la Saline was a Franciscan friar deeply troubled by the
state of the Church and the world. He visited another anchoress,
Marie Amante, far away in Avignon. Enlightened by a vision, Marie
sent Father Pierre to Colette. He arrived there in the company of
one of the most powerful women of his age, Blanche of Geneva, sister
of the previous Avignon Pope. Before her, few walls stood. She swept
Colette up and took her to see Pope Benedict XIII - Pedro de Luna.
He blessed Colette, gave her the black veil of a professed Poor
Clare, and sent her out to reform the Franciscan Order. She was
twenty five years old.
New
Dawn
The 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 woolen 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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Primary Sources
- The Life
of St Colette; the Vita of Pierre de Vaux and the notebooks
of Sr Perrine. Trans. Poor Clares of Alexandria, USA . Alexandria
Poor Clares & TMD
- Letters
of St Colette. Ed. Clarisses de Paray-le-Monial, trans.
Ty Main Duw. TMD.
- Culture
et Sainteté; Colette de Corbie. Elisabeth Lopez. Publications
de L'Universite de Saint-Etienne.
Interesting Reading
-
Walled in Light:
St Colette. Sr Masy Francis PC. Sheed & Ward
-
Tall in Paradise,
the story of St Colette of Corbie. A P Schiinberg. Marshall
Jones
-
St Colette,
handing on the light. Ty Main Duw. TMD
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