Feast day: February 7

St. Colette

Virgin, Abbess · 1381–1447

Patron of Expectant mothers

A French carpenter's daughter who, after years as a hermit, was called to restore the Poor Clares to their original strict poverty, founding or reforming dozens of convents.

Colette was born in 1381 at Corbie in Picardy, the daughter of a carpenter who worked for the Benedictine abbey there. Orphaned at seventeen, she gave away her inheritance and, after trying several forms of religious life, became a recluse — walled into a small cell beside a church, where she lived in prayer for several years.

There she grew convinced of a mission to restore the Order of St. Clare, the Poor Clares, to the strict poverty of its origins, which had been widely relaxed. It was an audacious aim for a young anchoress; to pursue it she left her cell and obtained authority from the pope then recognized in France to undertake the reform.

Against fierce opposition, and travelling tirelessly across France and the Low Countries, she founded or reformed a series of convents — seventeen in her lifetime — whose nuns embraced absolute poverty, austerity, and enclosure. These houses became known as the Colettine Poor Clares.

A noted mystic devoted to the Passion of Christ, Colette died at Ghent in 1447. Her reform long outlived her, and she was canonized in 1807.

Orphaned and walled into a hermit's cell at twenty-one, she emerged to reform an entire religious order across France, Flanders, and Savoy.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/04099b.htm