Women's History Month: Saint Colette

Today, as I learned in my research for this morning's post, is the feast of Saint Colette. I keeping with
the suggestions I made this morning, I thought I should find out who she is and why she's a saint.

Life
Nicole Boellet was born on January, 13 1381 to Robert Boellet, a carpenter at the Benedictine Abbey of Corbie, and Marguerite Moyon. According to Saint Colette's biographers, Marguerite and Robert were in their 60s when Marguerite gave birth to Nicole. They had prayed to Saint Nicholas - yes, that Saint Nicholas - for a child and named the baby after him. There wasn't much for a poor girl to do in the late 14th century, so when her parents died she joined the Beguines (a lay religious order). Colette decided that the Beguine life wasn't intense enough for her so in 1402 she joined the Third Order of St. Francis (another lay religious order). But that wasn't intense enough either. After four years with the Third Order, she followed the call to reform the Second Order of St. Francis (so she basically upgraded in religious life).

Under the authority of the Antipope* Bendict XIII (it was a hard time for Catholicism - there were two men claiming to be the pope at the same time, which might seem normal since we have two popes now, but these guys weren't friends, and both wanted the keys to the popemobile), she joined the Order of Poor Clares (contempletive nuns connected to the Franciscans). Between 1406 and 1412 she founded a number of new monestaries and brought the Order of Poor Clares back to its roots. The monestaries who followed her reform had to follow her prescriptions of barefootedness (sounds like the order for me!), extremem poverty, perpetual fasting, and abstinence (I spoke too soon).

She died on March 6, 1447.

Source

Miracles
Saint Colette is credited with two miracles in her Wikipedia article. In the first, she stopped at a friend's house on the way to Nice. Her friend was having major difficulties in childbirth with her third child (and probably less than pleased to have old friends stopping by looking for a bed and supper when she was busy trying to have a baby). Saint Colette "immediately went to the local church to pray for her" (and probably to remove herself as a nuissance). The baby girl was born healthy and the mother survived. She credited Colette's prayers.

The second miracle came when a local peasant had a stillborn child. The father was concerned for the baby's soul.** The local priest refused to baptise the dead baby and told the father to go to the St. Colette's monestary. When he arrived there, Colette removed the veil that the Antipope had given her and had the father wrap the child's body in it and then bring it back to the priest. The father obeyed and by the time he arrived back at the parish the baby was alive and crying. The priest went through with the baptism.

Fun Fact
For all you folks reading this at home in Boston, you can drive by a Poor Clares cloister in West Roxbury. It's on the rotary connecting Centre Street with the Arborway (near the front gate of the Arboretum).


*Antipope=favorite word I learned this week
**In the Middle Ages it was believed that unbaptised babies couldn't go to heaven. They thought God was a lot meaner and more unfair than we think he is. But maybe, since the Middle Ages were such a sucky time to be alive, that makes sense.