St. Colette of Corbie

St. Colette of Corbie was born Nicolette Boilet on 13 January 1381 at Corbie in Picardy, France, the daughter of a poor carpenter, and was orphaned young. After trying several forms of religious life, she embraced a solitary and penitential life as an anchoress, walled into a cell beside a church, where she was granted the conviction that God called her to restore the Order of St. Clare to the primitive rigor and poverty of its foundress.

Leaving her cell about 1406, she undertook this daunting reform in an age when the Church itself was divided by the Great Western Schism, obtaining authority to proceed and, despite fierce opposition, founding or reforming a number of convents of Poor Clares who embraced strict poverty, austerity, and enclosure. These became known as the Colettine Poor Clares, and her reform spread through France, Flanders, and beyond. Herself a woman of deep prayer, penance, and mystical grace, devoted to the Passion of Christ, she governed and inspired her nuns until her death at Ghent on 6 March 1447. She was canonized in 1807, and her memory is kept on 6 March.