BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Monday, February 7, Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

ST. COLETTE (France, 1381-1447), Virgin, Founder of Colettine Poor Clares
Colette joined the Franciscan third order as a teenager and at age 21, became an anchoress [walled into a cell whose only opening is a window
facing the interior of a church]. After 4 years, in response to visions of St. Francis who urged reforms in his order, she joined the Poor Clares
to initiate a return to the primitive rules of the order. The Colettines lived in extreme poverty and perpetual fasting and abstinence. She went on
to found 17 monasteries following her reform, which took place during the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) when three men laid claim to the
Papacy. With St. Vicente Ferrer, the great Dominican theologian and missionary from Valencia, she worked to end the schism by persuading
two of the claimants to withdraw so that a new Pope could be elected, then getting the King of France to withdraw his support from the holdout,
Benedict XIII. (Ironically, as the Pope in Avignon, Benedict had authorized Colette's reform of the Poor Clares and her new monasteries; and
St. Vincent himself had been an avid supporter of this Pope.] It is said that all her life, Colette was plagued by demons who assailed her in
terrible physical forms, such as dragging corpses into her cell, but she was also eventually endowed with many graces including raising
the dead to life. She was canonized in 1807.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/020711.shtml


No OR today.


PAPAL EVENTS TODAY

The Holy Father met with

- Four bishops from the Philippines (central region), resuming ad-limina visits by the Filipino prelates
which began last December. Individual meetings.

- Participants in the plenary session of the Congregation for Catholic Education (Seminaries and Institutes
of Study). Address in Italian.




- Thanks to Lella for alerting me to a short report in ]Die Wochenblatt, a regional newspaper, that last Friday, Mons. Georg Ratzinger, 87, underwent knee surgery at a Regensburg hospital, is doing well, and is in good spirits, according to a spokesman. The report does not indicate if both knees required surgery, but it explains that the Pope's brother had been experiencing increasing difficulty with negotiating stairs, and was advised surgery. Say a prayer for him and his brother...

- If you go by the Yahoo catalog of headlines about the papacy and the Vatican this Monday morning, the organ-donor trivia continues to dominate, leading the Pope 's statement about Egypt at the Angelus prayer yesterday. And the Anglophone media is just now waking up to the statement last week by some 150 German theology professors with the nth reiteration of the ultra-liberal 'reform agenda' for the Church [Ho-hum and Zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!], even if the AP - of course - did file a story on it on February 4, after the Sueddeutsche Zeitung printed a highly colored story about the letter...