COLETTA (COELLET O BOYLET, NICOLETTE), SANTA

COLETTA (COELLET or BOYLET, NICOLETTE), saint. — Foundress of the Poor Clares known as Colettine, born at Calceye near Corbie on 13 January 1381, died at Ghent on 6 March 1447. At the age of 21 she became a recluse at the church of St Mary in Corbie, leading an extremely austere life there for three years. Feeling herself called to a particular mission, she asked to be dispensed from perpetual Challant (v.), legate of the antipope Benedict XIII. Having obtained the dispensation on 19 August 1406 (Acta SS. Martii, I, pp. 536-37), she soon afterwards entered the Poor Clares, to whose reform she dedicated the whole of her subsequent life. With the help of the Blessed Henry of Baume and Bianca of Geneva, in 1408 she began her work of reform at Besançon in a convent of Urbanist Poor Clares, founded on absolute poverty. This was followed by the foundations at Auxonne, Poligny, Decize and others, amounting in all to twenty-two. Her reform also extended among the Franciscans, resulting in the so-called Colettines, suppressed by Leo X in 1517. She was beatified on 26 August 1740 by Benedict XIV and canonized on 24 May 1807 by Pius VII.