Thursday, February 7, Fourth 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/bible/readings/020713.cfm
AT THE VATICAN TODAY
The Holy Father met with
- Madame Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Minister President of the State of Saarland (Germany), and her delegation
- Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (weekly meeting)
- Participants in the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Address in Italian.
The Vatican Press Office also released the text of the Holy Father's remarks yesterday to members of
the Priestly Fraternity of San Carlo Borromeo, the priesthood arm of the Comunione e Liberazione movement.