Jean-Claude Colin was a really extraordinary man, full of insight, capacity, and determination in pursuing the foundation of the Society of Mary. He often overworked and exhausted himself, disdained eating and sleeping. Describing him in his prime, Gabriel Mayet, who spent much time with him, wrote: “He walked not with measured step but with gigantic strides which, it must be granted, tended to splash mud on the next man, but while the nit-pickers….were still at the beginning of the road...he had already covered an immense distance.”

Now let us look at Father Colin about the time the Marist Fathers were approved by Rome. He was then forty-six, very active and about to be still more so. Here he is: five feet four inches tall and somewhat plump, his hair greying. He had an aquiline nose, soft light blue eyes and a smile that charmed people who met him. “At first sight he appeared to be one of those good, little old country priests, very simple, very timid, not knowing where to put themselves to take up less space, and at the same time so abounding in kindness.” (Mayet again). He had a slight speech impediment, but would pour out a torrent of words if he got excited or angry. He was addicted to snuff, (thought to improve weakened sight) and apparently careless about his dress and appearance.

What a contrast between these two accounts: driving energy and effectiveness, with some roughshod cantering over other people; on the other hand, a shy, little man so abounding in kindness.

It is, then, not at all easy to do justice to Jean-Claude Colin. As for most of us, Colin’s habitual modes of perception and response were formed in the earliest period of his life. His first years were indeed as traumatic as a child could experience. This made him at times a disconcerting, even a disquieting leader. We have already seen something of that in his relations with Jeanne Marie Chavoin and his decisions concerning the Marist Sisters. So we will never appreciate him without knowing something of where he is coming from.

The Colin family lived near a village some distance out from Lyons. They farmed, did some weaving, and were modestly comfortable. Steady Catholics too. In August 1790 when Jean-Claude was born, the youngest of eight children, the Revolution was already reaching everywhere in France. The French were largely practising Catholics, so everyone was affected by the decision of the government to give the Church a Civil Constitution, and to appoint its bishops and priests. The Pope refused to accept this new version of the Church and so did the people, particularly in the Lyons area. There was a schism...the official church of the Civil Constitution, which few people attended, and the Roman Catholic Church which went underground. Many clergy went into exile, others were hidden by the people, hunted by the authorities, sometimes caught and eventually executed.

The Colin’s parish and family suffered greatly. While Jean-Claude was a baby his father had to go on the run, accused of harbouring priests, and his mother was continually harassed by the authorities threatening confiscation and eviction. Jean-Claude was not yet five years old when both his parents died within a few weeks of each other.

The children became wards of an uncle, an amiable but weak bachelor. He hired a housekeeper to care for the orphaned family. She was sharp-tongued, parsimonious, puritanically preoccupied with sex and rules of modesty. She was hardly likely to be received as a second mother. In a few years Jean-Claude’s three sisters had left home. By the time he was eight his immediate world had become almost completely male. This minimal female influence in his early years may have affected his own attitude to women.

The pain of loss remained. Jean-Claude become a lonely, introverted little boy with a stammer. Looking for his own place to escape, he turned to the neighbouring forest. His father had hidden in that forest, and when Jean-Claude was eight or nine during a second round of severe persecution, the parish priest was hiding there. The boy would imagine he was a priest opposing the Revolution or a hermit hidden away from that wicked world. He would remember the Masses held at night, secretly, and having to crawl under a loom to make his first confession to a priest hiding in a weaver’s workshop.

At some time in the years between ten and fourteen Colin became conscious of an attraction to Mary. In his mother’s room a votive lamp used to burn before the statue of Mary. His mother, dying, made her children look at it and told them solemnly, “Mary is your mother now.” “When I was young”, he recalled, “I often went to pray in front of a statue of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows in our parish. I have remembered it ever since.” Perhaps no other woman would touch his heart.

After 1802, the Church was reunited and officially recognised by Napoleon’s government. Jean-Claude’s brother went to the minor seminary. When he was thirteen, a critical episode demonstrated the kind of determination and obstinacy this shy little boy could show. He absolutely refused to be instructed for First Communion by the current parish priest! He would walk nearly three miles there and back to another priest in a different parish for the whole thing. He insisted on the then traditional, long, severe preparation for communion, and nothing else would do him. To give them their due, the family stood by him, although embarrassed. He was haunted by scruples, sexual ignorance and inhibitions. He wept a lot and spent hours in church. We have a detailed written account of this episode from his nephew, and years later from himself. He blushingly told Mayet about the strange idea he had had about how children were conceived and the torment it caused him.

We see already emerging that contrast between timid shyness and unbending determination to do what he considered right, the desire to avoid all sin, recourse to Mary. The boy Colin sensed that his parents had really been martyrs for a faith that must never be watered down, but involved total fidelity to the Pope and the Roman Church.

In the autumn of 1804, Jean-Claude followed his brother to the minor seminary...more to find a holy way of life sheltered from the world in an institution than with any thought of being a priest! And here we must leave Jean-Claude Colin for the moment…….

Denis Green sm

Additional Information

A Certain Idea, of the Society of Mary- Jean-Claude Colin - Jean Coste sm, [translated from the French by Sean Fagan sm].
The Founder of the Marist Fathers, Fr. Jean Claude Colin.