Adela was born in the year 1009, a daughter of the Capetian king Robert II of France, called the Pious, and of his wife Constance of Arles. In the charters of her long life she appears under many spellings — Adala, Addele, Adelaidis, Adele, Aelide, Alix — but posterity has kept the simpler names of Adela of France and Adela of Messines. She was the sister of a king, Henry I, and would live to be the mother-in-law of a conqueror; yet the memory the Church treasures is not of her rank but of the quiet turning of that rank into service of God.
Royal daughters were rarely schooled beyond what courtesy required, but Adela received from the monks of Saint Peter's abbey at Ghent an education far above the custom of her time. She learned to speak and read Latin, and later she taught it to her own children with her own lips — the first sign of a woman who never treated the gifts of God as ornaments to be admired but as instruments to be used.
In January 1027, at about eighteen years of age, she was joined to Richard III, Duke of Normandy, receiving with the marriage the county of Contenance in the far north of the Cotentin. The union lasted only months: Richard died on 6 August of that same year. In 1028, at Paris, Adela was married again, to Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, called the Pious, and her father gave her as dowry the lordship of Corbie. Of this marriage were born Baldwin VI, who succeeded his father in Flanders; Matilda, who in 1053 married William, Duke of Normandy, and became Queen of England beside William the Conqueror; and Robert, called the Frisian, who would one day be Count of Flanders himself.
Adela was no ornamental consort. Half of the charters her husband issued bear her signature beside his, often with the proud title "sister of the King of France," a thing far from usual for a countess. She used that weight of influence for the Church. She threw herself into the reform of the ecclesiastical institutions of Flanders, urging the discipline of clerical celibacy at a time when it was widely neglected, and directly or indirectly she stood behind her husband's great foundations: the collegiate churches of Aire-sur-la-Lys in 1049, of Lille in 1050 and of Harelbeke in 1064, and the abbeys of Ename in 1063 and of Messines near Ypres in 1057 — the Benedictine house of women that would receive her own last years and her body. To her influence too is ascribed the decision of her brother King Henry I, shortly before his death, to entrust the guardianship of his seven-year-old son Philip I to Baldwin, so that from 1060 to 1067 the Count of Flanders governed France as regent together with the queen mother, Anne of Kiev.
Baldwin died on 1 September 1067 at Lille. Adela did not remain to enjoy the honors of a dowager countess. She set out for Rome, and there in that same year she received the veil from the hands of Pope Alexander II, renouncing the world to live as a religious. She withdrew to her own foundation, the Benedictine abbey of Messines, and there she spent the remainder of her life. That her cloister was not forgotten in Rome is shown by the bull which Pope Gregory VII addressed to her on 10 November 1076.
The cloister did not spare her sorrow. Her eldest son, Baldwin VI, died in 1070, only three years after his father, and his widow Richilde's quarrel with Adela's second son, Robert the Frisian, tore the county apart. In 1071 Robert marched on Flanders against the legitimate count, Adela's own grandson Arnulf III. The old countess, hearing of it from her monastery, pleaded with King Philip I to intervene; Philip sent troops, and William the Conqueror, husband of her daughter Matilda, sent a contingent of Norman knights under William FitzOsbern. At Cassel the numerically superior army was struck before it could form; Arnulf was killed, FitzOsbern with him, and Robert carried the county. Adela's last years were thus lived in the shadow of a family divided against itself — a grief she carried, as she had carried everything, to God in prayer.
According to a beloved tradition of Messines, Adela possessed a relic of the True Cross, and one night in sleep she saw the Blessed Virgin Mary, who bade her not to keep the sacred wood hidden for herself but to let the faithful come and honor it; Our Lady also asked for a procession along a way that would be shown to her. Waking, Adela found a red thread leading out from the church and tracing a path of some six kilometers around Messines. From that day the procession has been kept: each year from the fourteenth to the twenty-second of September the townsfolk walk the appointed round, and the farmers whose fields lie along the way leave a passage open through their crops so that the Cross may pass.
Adela died at Messines on 8 January 1079 and was buried in the abbey she had founded. In the old crypt beneath the church of Messines a memorial still honors her. She has long been venerated as Blessed Adela, called by the people Adela the Holy and Saint Adela of Messines; her feast was first kept on 8 January, the day of her death, and afterwards transferred to 8 September, near the days of her procession.
A king's daughter who learned Latin to teach it to her children, a countess who signed charters to build churches, a widow who exchanged a coronet for a veil — Adela shows that no state in life is too high or too busy for holiness, and that the greatest use of power is to give it away to God.
Let us ask Blessed Adela of Messines to obtain for us her generous spirit, and today give away some portion of our own advantage — our learning, our influence, our time — for the good of Christ's Church.
