Sancta Birgitta Vidua
A Life, for her feast on the eighth day of October — III classis
Commemoratio ad Laudes tantum: Ss. Sergii, Bacchi, Marcelli et Apuleji Martyrum
Mulierem fortem quis inveniet? procul et de ultimis finibus pretium eius. “Who shall find a valiant woman? far and from the uttermost coasts is the price of her.” — Prov. 31:10, from the Epistle of the Mass Cognovi
I. The house of the lawman
She was born in the year 1303 at Finsta, in the province of Uppland in Sweden, to Birger Persson, the lagman — the lawman, the hereditary expounder and judge of the provincial law — of Uppland, and his wife Ingeborg Bengtsdotter, who was of the blood of the Folkungs, the royal kin of Sweden. It was a household of great wealth and of a piety that was serious rather than decorative: her father made pilgrimages to Compostela and to the Holy Land, confessed every Friday, and was known for keeping the law he administered.
Her mother died when she was about eleven, and she was sent to be raised by her aunt Katarina at Aspenäs in Östergötland, a woman of firm hand and sound faith.
From these childhood years her biographers — her own confessors, writing for the process of canonization — record a vision which the reader may weigh as he will, but which the Church has never been embarrassed to repeat. Having heard a sermon on the Passion, the child saw that night Christ crucified and freshly wounded, and asked Him: Who has done this to You? And He answered: Those who despise Me and forget My love. She said afterward that from that hour she could hardly think of the Passion without tears. Whatever is made of the narrative, the sentence governs the rest of her life. Everything she later wrote — the rebukes to kings, the letters to popes, the long meditations on the sorrows of Our Lady — is an answer to that question and that reply.
II. Wife, mother, and lady of the court
At thirteen, according to the custom of her rank, she was married to Ulf Gudmarsson, a young nobleman of eighteen, afterward lawman of Närke. She had wished, it is said, rather to die than to marry; she obeyed her father. The marriage that resulted is one of the quiet monuments of Christian matrimony in the Middle Ages. The couple lived at Ulvåsa on the shore of Lake Boren; they read Scripture together, kept the hours, and practised continence for stretches of their married life by mutual consent; and they had eight children, four sons and four daughters. One of them, Karin, is venerated as St. Catherine of Sweden. Another, Karl, was the grief of his mother’s life.
Bridget was no recluse in these years. She managed a great household, cared for the sick of the district with her own hands, had a translation of parts of Scripture made into Swedish by her confessor, Master Mathias of Linköping, and studied with an intensity that made her one of the best-instructed laywomen of her country. About 1335 she was called to the court of King Magnus Eriksson to serve as magistra — mistress of the household and instructress — to his young queen, Blanche of Namur. She found the court frivolous and told the king so, and he did not for that reason dismiss her; he respected her, and in the end left her the royal estate at Vadstena by his will.
III. Compostela, and a widow’s vow
In 1341 she and Ulf went on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Compostela. On the return journey, at Arras, Ulf fell gravely ill. He recovered, and the two of them resolved that whichever outlived the other would give the rest of life wholly to God. Ulf entered the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra, not as a professed monk but as a guest of the house, and died there in February of 1344. She was about forty.
She took the step her vow required with characteristic directness. She divided her goods among her children and the poor, put on a coarse habit, and withdrew to a dwelling beside Alvastra, under the direction of its prior, Peter Olofsson.
IV. Sponsa mea et canale meum
It was there, in the first years of her widowhood, that the visions which made her famous began in their full form. She recorded that Christ called her to be His bride and His channel — the instrument by which He would speak to His friends and to His enemies — and that she was to see and hear spiritual things and to declare them.
Here it is necessary to speak plainly about the kind of thing her Revelations are, because the plain account is the Church’s own. The eight books of the Liber Celestis, with the Rule of her order and the supplementary Revelationes Extravagantes, were dictated by her in Swedish, rendered into Latin by her confessors, and edited for circulation by Alfonso Pecha, sometime Bishop of Jaén, who defended them against their critics. They were examined at length, attacked at the Council of Constance by Jean Gerson, defended at Basel by Juan de Torquemada, and survived the scrutiny. But their approval is of the kind the Church gives to private revelations, which Pope Benedict XIV, treating of Bridget by name in his great work on beatification, defined with care: such approval means only that the revelations contain nothing contrary to faith or morals and may be prudently believed with human faith, not with the assent of divine and Catholic faith owed to public Revelation. The Church has proposed Bridget for veneration because of her virtue, not because of her visions; and the faithful who read the Revelations with profit read them as the meditations of a saint, not as a supplement to Scripture.
With that understood, their worth is great. They are, above all, a school of compunction. Their consistent burden is the Passion of Christ and the compassion of His Mother — the Revelations gave the later Church much of its devotion to the Seven Sorrows — and the consequence of both for the soul that has received grace and squanders it. Their tone toward the powerful is severe. Kings, prelates, and religious who betray their charge are addressed with a frankness that only the prophetic books of the Old Testament match.
V. The Order of the Most Holy Saviour
Among the things she recorded at Alvastra was the Rule of a new religious order, which she said had been given her by Christ Himself: the Ordo Sanctissimi Salvatoris. It was conceived as a double monastery under the government of an abbess, who represented the Blessed Virgin among the Apostles. Sixty nuns were to be served by thirteen priests, after the number of the Apostles with St. Paul; four deacons, after the four Doctors of the Latin Church; and eight lay brothers — making in all eighty-five, the number of the Twelve and the Seventy-two with Our Lady. The priests were to preach in the vernacular and hear confessions; the nuns were to keep an office of their own, the Sermo Angelicus, which Bridget said had been dictated by an angel, a series of readings on the Blessed Virgin for each day of the week.
King Magnus granted Vadstena for the mother house in 1346. But a new rule required the approval of the Holy See, and the Holy See was not in Rome. It was at Avignon.
VI. Rome, 1349: the widow and the popes
In 1349 she set out for Rome, to gain the Jubilee indulgence of 1350 and to obtain the confirmation of her Rule. She was forty-six. Like St. Joseph Calasanctius after her, she would never see her own country again.
She remained in Rome for the rest of her life, first in lodgings at San Lorenzo in Damaso, later in a house near what is now the Piazza Farnese, where her rooms are still shown. Her daughter Catherine joined her in 1350 and became her inseparable companion. They lived poorly, often in debt, at times begging at church doors for the poor and for their own bread. Bridget visited the churches and catacombs of the city in turn, cared for pilgrims and the sick, and was known in Rome simply as the princess of the north.
And she gave herself, with the whole force of her character, to a single cause: the return of the Vicar of Christ to the See of Peter. The papacy had been at Avignon since 1309. Rome was half ruined, its basilicas neglected, its people lawless. Bridget wrote to Clement VI, to Urban V, to Gregory XI, in the name of the revelations she had received, and the letters are without diplomacy. She told them that the Bride of Christ was a widow while her Spouse’s vicar remained away, and that the souls entrusted to them would be required of them.
In 1367 Urban V did return to Rome, and in 1370 he received Bridget and approved her Rule — not in the exact form she had proposed, but as a Rule of the Order of St. Augustine with the Constitutions of St. Saviour added, which was what the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council required of new foundations. That same year, wearied by Rome and pressed by the French cardinals, Urban resolved to go back to Avignon. Bridget sent him word, through Alfonso of Jaén, that if he left he would shortly die. He left in September of 1370. He died at Avignon in December.
The return she had laboured for would come only in 1377, under Gregory XI, four years after her death, and through the urging of another woman of prophetic speech, St. Catherine of Siena. Bridget did not live to see it. She had prayed and written for twenty years toward an end she would never witness, and she did not stop for that reason.
VII. Ut thesaurus absconditus: Jerusalem and Bethlehem
In 1371, nearly seventy, she obeyed one last command and set out for the Holy Land with Catherine, her sons Karl and Birger, and a small company. At Naples, on the way, the great sorrow of her life was completed. Karl, a brilliant and dissolute young man, became entangled with Queen Joanna I of Naples, though both of them were bound in marriage, and before the scandal could run its course he fell ill and died there in March of 1372. His mother kept vigil by him. She recorded afterward, in one of the most tender passages of the Revelations, that she was given to understand his soul had been saved through the prayers and tears of his mother and the intercession of the Mother of God, who had kept, as it were, a reckoning of every tear.
At Jerusalem she visited the holy places with an intensity her companions found hard to watch. At Bethlehem she was given the vision of the Nativity for which she is perhaps best remembered: the Virgin, alone, kneeling in prayer; the Child suddenly lying on the ground before her, radiant with a light that put out the light of Joseph’s candle; the Mother adoring her newborn God before she took Him in her arms. Whatever its standing as a private revelation, this account entered the imagination of the Western Church through its painters, and the kneeling Madonna adoring the Child on the ground — familiar from a thousand Nativities of the fifteenth century — is, to a large degree, Bridget’s.
The Gospel of her Mass compares the kingdom of heaven to a treasure hidden in a field, which a man having found, hid it, and for joy thereof goeth, and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field (Matt. 13:44). She had sold everything — her estates, her place at court, her country, her ease, finally the son she loved — and she had found the field.
VIII. Ecce vidua: the death of a pilgrim
She returned to Rome in the spring of 1373 worn out. Through the early summer she grew weaker, and received the last of her revelations, in which Christ told her that she would be clothed and consecrated as a nun of Vadstena and be counted, in His sight, among the professed of the order she had founded but never entered. On the morning of the twenty-third of July, 1373, Mass was said at an altar in her room; she received Holy Communion and Extreme Unction; and with the words In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum she died. She was seventy.
She was laid for a time in the church of the Poor Clares at San Lorenzo in Panisperna. In the following year Catherine carried her mother’s bones home across Europe to Vadstena, where they were received with honour, and where the abbey her mother had seen only in vision was at last brought into being.
IX. The cultus
She was canonized by Boniface IX on the seventh of October, 1391. Because the Great Western Schism had cast doubt on the acts of every claimant to the papal throne, the canonization was confirmed again during the Council of Constance and afterward by Martin V, once the unity of the Church had been restored. The Order of the Most Holy Saviour spread through Scandinavia, the Baltic lands, Germany, the Low Countries, Italy, and Poland; Henry V of England founded Syon Abbey for the Bridgettines in 1415, and its nuns kept their life through exile and return for more than five centuries. The northern houses were swept away by the Protestant Reformation, Vadstena among them, but the order survived in Catholic lands and has been renewed in modern times.
Her feast is kept in the traditional Roman calendar on the eighth of October, the day following that of her canonization. The reformed calendar of 1969 transfers it to the twenty-third of July, her dies natalis.
She is honoured as the patroness of Sweden. The Mass is that of the Common of a holy woman neither virgin nor martyr, Cognovi, with its Epistle of the valiant woman from the last chapter of Proverbs and its Gospel of the treasure, the pearl, and the net; only the Collect is proper to her.
A word must be said, finally, about the Fifteen Prayers on the Passion that circulate under her name, together with extravagant promises of the number of souls they will deliver. Their attribution to her is very doubtful, and in 1954 the Holy Office warned the faithful against the promises attached to them, which have no ecclesiastical approval. The prayers themselves may be said with profit as prayers; the promises are not to be relied upon. Bridget, who spent her life calling kings and popes to account for their actual deeds, would not have thanked anyone for a devotion that offered salvation by arithmetic.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That every state of life is a road to sanctity. Bridget was a daughter, a wife, a mother of eight, a courtier, a widow, a pilgrim, and a foundress, and she was holy in each state before she passed to the next. The Church gives her the title vidua, and widowhood was indeed the state in which her mission opened; but the valiant woman of the Epistle is praised for what she did in her husband’s house, and Bridget had been that woman long before she was a prophetess.
That charity sometimes takes the form of rebuke. She spoke to the great of the world with a freedom that would be insolence in anyone who did not love them. She did not flatter the court of Sweden, or the court of Avignon, or the court of Naples where her own son was dying in sin. The Church has canonized her frankness along with her humility, and the two were not at odds: she rebuked others because she had first taken the Passion of Christ as a rebuke to herself.
That fidelity is not the same as success. The Order she founded was not approved in the form she sought. The pope she called back to Rome went away again. The son she prayed for died in scandal. The return of the papacy came after her death and by another hand. She was faithful for thirty years to a mission whose fruits she was mostly not permitted to see, and she did not grow bitter. As with Calasanctius, the vindication belonged to God and came on His calendar.
The martyrs of the day
At Lauds the Church makes a commemoration of four martyrs whose own day in the Roman Martyrology is the seventh of October, now occupied by the feast of the Most Holy Rosary.
Sergius and Bacchus were Roman soldiers, officers of the imperial guard, who are said to have been discovered to be Christians when they refused to enter a temple with the emperor. According to their Passio — a document of the fifth century, whose particulars belong to pious tradition rather than history — they were paraded through the streets in women’s clothing in mockery, then sent to Syria; Bacchus was scourged to death, and Sergius, after further torments, was beheaded at Resafa in the desert. That they were real soldier-martyrs of the eastern frontier, put to death about the beginning of the fourth century, is not doubted; their cult is among the oldest and most widespread in Christendom. Resafa became Sergiopolis, a great pilgrimage city; Justinian built a church in their honour at Constantinople that still stands; and the Byzantine Church keeps their feast, as the Roman Martyrology does, on the seventh of October.
Marcellus and Apuleius are honoured in the Martyrology as Romans who first followed Simon Magus, were converted by the preaching of St. Peter after witnessing the Apostle’s triumph over the sorcerer, and later gave their lives for Christ. Beyond the fact of their martyrdom and their ancient veneration at Rome, little of their history can be established. Their story is a fitting companion to Bridget’s: two men who had been misled by a false prophet, and who found the true one.
Practice
Examine. In which state of life am I now — and am I seeking holiness in it, or waiting for a different one in which holiness will be easier? Bridget did not postpone her sanctity until her widowhood; it had been forming in the household at Ulvåsa for thirty years.
Do. Meditate today for a quarter of an hour on one scene of the Passion, as she did from childhood, and ask the question she asked: Who has done this to You? Then make an honest answer.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Domine Deus noster, qui beatæ Birgittæ per Filium tuum unigenitum secreta cælestia revelasti: ipsius pia intercessione da nobis famulis tuis; in revelatione sempiternæ gloriæ tuæ gaudere lætantes.
“O Lord our God, who didst reveal heavenly secrets to blessed Bridget through Thine only-begotten Son: grant to us Thy servants, by her loving intercession, to rejoice and be glad in the revelation of Thine everlasting glory.”
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, or the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady, whose devotion her Revelations did so much to spread. For those carrying the burden of a child who has strayed, commend him to the Mother of God in the confidence Bridget learned at Naples.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the women who rebuked popes out of love — Catherine of Siena above all, who finished what Bridget began — and with the holy widows of the calendar, from Monica to Jane Frances de Chantal. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the Church’s teaching on private revelation: what its approval means, what it does not mean, and why the faithful are free to set it aside. The Church History path takes up the Avignon papacy and the Great Western Schism, in which her prophecies and her canonization were both entangled.
Sancta Birgitta, sponsa Christi et patrona Sueciæ, ora pro nobis. Sancti Sergi, Bacche, Marcelle et Apulei, orate pro nobis.