Claude de la Colombière

Claude de la Colombière was born on 2 February 1641 at Saint-Symphorien-d'Ozon, near Lyon in the Dauphiné of southeastern France. He was the third of seven children of Bertrand de la Colombière, a notary, and Margaret Coindat. Raised in a devout Catholic household of the provincial professional class, he was sent to the Jesuit college at Lyon and subsequently to Avignon, where he showed marked ability in letters and oratory. In 1658, at the age of seventeen, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Avignon. After two years of novitiate he taught grammar and the humanities in Jesuit schools, following the Society’s usual course of formation, and later studied philosophy and theology.

Ordained a priest in 1669, he completed his theological studies at the Collège de Clermont in Paris, the principal Jesuit house of studies in the French capital. For a time he served as tutor to the sons of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance to King Louis XIV. Colombière acquired a reputation as a preacher of unusual clarity and as a spiritual director who combined rigor with gentleness. In 1675 he pronounced his solemn vows as a professed Jesuit and was named superior of the small Jesuit community at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy. Shortly after his arrival he was asked to hear the confessions of the Visitation nuns. In that capacity he became the spiritual director of Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque, who reported a series of visions of Christ emphasizing his Sacred Heart. Colombière examined her claims with care, judged them authentic, and thereafter supported her, helped to formulate the devotion, and promoted it through preaching and personal counsel. His role was decisive in giving the Sacred Heart devotion an early theological and institutional footing within the Church.

In the autumn of 1676 his superiors assigned him to London as preacher to Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, a Catholic Italian princess married to James, brother of King Charles II and later King James II. Colombière lived at the ducal court, preached in the chapel of St. James’s Palace, and also served the wider recusant Catholic community. England was then a dangerous mission for a Jesuit. In 1678 the fictitious Popish Plot, promoted by Titus Oates, unleashed a wave of arrests. Colombière was seized, accused of conspiring against the king, and confined in the King’s Bench Prison. The damp and crowding of the prison permanently damaged his health. He was not put to death, but after several weeks he was released through French diplomatic pressure and expelled from the kingdom in 1679.

Back in France he was stationed at Lyon, where he continued to preach, give retreats, and write despite recurrent illness, including a serious pulmonary complaint. In 1681, his strength failing, he was allowed to return to Paray-le-Monial, which he regarded as the spiritual home of his work for the Sacred Heart. He died there on 15 February 1682, aged forty-one, and was buried in the Jesuit chapel of the town. His letters, retreat notes, and sermons were preserved and later published; they remain important sources for seventeenth-century Jesuit spirituality and for the early history of Sacred Heart devotion.

Veneration of Colombière developed first among Jesuits and among communities devoted to the Sacred Heart. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 16 June 1929 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on 31 May 1992. The Church observes his feast on 15 February. He is remembered as the confessor and advocate of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, as a missionary who suffered imprisonment for the Catholic faith in England, and as a principal architect of the modern devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.