Birgitta of sweden biography examples

Bridget is remembered by the Church of Englandwhich holds a commemoration on 23 July [ 33 ] and on the Episcopal Church liturgical calendar on 7 October. Although he was initially interested in Bridget's RevelationsMartin Luther would later conclude that her visions were mere ravings. Of her as depicted in his play Folkungasagan August Strindberg explained Bridget as "a power-hungry, vainglorious woman who intentionally vied for sainthood", adding "of this unpleasant woman and according to the historical documents I made the uncontrollable ninny now in my drama, although in her honor I let her awaken to clarity about her silliness and her arrogance.

Centuries of Selfies describes how Bridget damaged King Magnus and Queen Blanche by accusing them of "erotic deviations, extravagance and murderous plots", [ 38 ] a description particularly noted by Dala-Demokraten as likely to upset Swedish nuns. Saint Birgitta's Revelacionesthat is, her Revelations written in Latin, appeared in critical editions during the years to under the aegis of the Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, Stockholm.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikisource Wikidata item. Swedish nun, mystic, and saint c. For Swedish royalty, see Bridget of Sweden disambiguation. Biography [ edit ]. Sainthood [ edit ]. Visions [ edit ]. Vision of the birth of Christ with kneeling Virgin [ edit ].

Post-Bridget kneeling Virgin with Joseph holding a candle as he enters the space with angels, ox, and donkey, circaby Hans Memling. Prophecy [ edit ]. Fifteen 'Our Father and Hail Mary prayers' [ edit ]. Theology and philosophy. People by era or century. Desert Fathers. Contemporary papal views. Aspects of meditation Orationis Formas Literature and media.

Veneration [ edit ]. Evaluations and interpretations [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Citations [ edit ]. Archived from the original on 16 May Retrieved 16 July Bridget of Sweden". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 29 June Catholic Encyclopedia. Paolo O. Pirlo, SHMI My First Book of Saints. ISBN First Things. Institute on Religion and Public Life.

June Retrieved 18 May Bridget—or Birgitta as she is known in Sweden—left her homeland and travelled to Rome, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, sending back precise instructions for the construction of the monastery I am now entering, known as the "Blue Church" after the unique color of the granite which it was constructed with. Birgitta insisted that the abbess, signifying the Virgin Mary, should preside over both nuns and monks.

Saint Anthony Messenger. Archived from the original on 3 February Retrieved 17 April Bridget, on the life and passion of Our Lord, and the life of His Blessed Mother", edition on archive. Faced with the corruption of the Avignon papacy, she even predicted an eventual Vatican State, foretelling almost the exact boundaries delineated by Mussolini for Vatican City in Archived from the original on 25 August Retrieved 23 July OCLC University of Chicago.

Archived from the original on 18 May VIIIp. However, Christ verbally commanded her several times birgitta of sweden biography examples obliged her to write down and communicate his divine words boldly to the supreme pontiffs, to the emperor, to kings and princes, and to other nations.

Birgitta of sweden biography examples

To this aim, she travelled to Rome in to have the monastic rules approved by the pope. She had to wait untilwhen Pope Urban V finally gave his approval. During her years in Italy, she also tried to persuade the pope to make the move back from Avignon to Rome, but this was not to come to pass untila few years after her death. In Rome, Birgitta first lived in the palace of a cardinal next to the church San Lorenzo in Damaso, but in she moved into a house at Piazza Farnese owned by Francesca Papazuri, a noble Roman widow.

In the mid s she made pilgrimages all throughout Italy, using Naples as a home base, where she made the acquaintance of Queen Joanna. In — she made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, first being shipwrecked at Cyprus and shipwrecked again by the coast of the Holy Land. Birgitta died on the 23 rd of July in after returning to Rome. Her remains were transported to Vadstena monastery, where they are still preserved.

The translation of her relics to the monastery church took place in She had many proponents for her canonization, most notably her daughter St. Birgitta was finally canonized on the 7th of october See the bibliography for a more complete list on literature relating to Birgitta of Sweden. Borgehammar, Stephan. According to legend, she longed for a life of virginity and devotion to God "Better to die than be a bride!

They lived "as brother and sister" for the first two years of marriage, but then she gave birth to a child and followed up with seven more, four sons and four daughters, finding time also to teach her hitherto illiterate husband how to read. Legend has it that in the early days of their marriage, she ordered a fine bed made for herself and her husband; as she gazed upon it, she received a violent blow on the head and a rebuke from Christ, who pointed out that he'd had nowhere soft to lay his head.

After that, Bridget took to lying on a sack of straw covered only in bearskin, even in the depths of the Arctic winter, telling surprised observers that the Holy Spirit provided warmth to her soul in compensation for that lost by her body. Both Christ and Mary the Virgin became regular visitors in a lifetime of frequent visions, and usually in her Revelations she spoke not in her own voice but in the voice of Christ or the Virgin.

One might speculate that this was a powerful technique for gaining the moral advantage over any challenger. Bridget also became birgitta of sweden biography examples in good works in her district, visiting the poor and sick, rescuing prostitutes, giving dowries to destitute girls, and introducing her own children to Christian works of mercy.

Her daughter Catherine later recalled: "When Mother was reproached with taking us little girls with her, and that we might be infected from the stench of the sick people, she answered that she took us with her just while we were still small, so that we might learn at an early age to serve God in his poor and sick. In addition to these mortifications, Bridget took an interest in the intellectual developments of her age, living as she did shortly after the creative scholastic theologians Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas had reconciled Christian tradition with Aristotelian philosophy.

She learned of their work through Master Matthias, a canon of Linkoping Cathedral, near her family home, and became familiar with the intellectual, political, and religious life of greater Europe before ever leaving her homeland. Like Matthias, she was an intense student of the Biblical Book of Revelation and considered herself to be living birgitta of sweden biography examples the last days of the world, with the Day of Judgment imminent.

Many of her "Revelations," like those in the Book of Revelation, are complicated allegories and parables whose meaning is difficult to unravel. When her husband became an advisor to King Magnus Eriksson they were cousinsBridget became a governess and lady-in-waiting to his wife Blanche of Namurfollowing the royal wedding of She was godmother to the royal family's first child but apparently became dissatisfied with the worldly life at court and decided to take up pilgrimages instead.

With her husband, inBridget set off to Santiago de Compostella, in northwestern Spain, which was then one of the chief pilgrimages of Europe, the place where Saint James was believed to have brought the word of Christ to Iberia and where he was buried. In Spain, she drew attention to herself by harsh condemnations of sinful priests and bishops, and by a slashing indictment of the kings of England and France, whose war with one another the early days of the Hundred Years' War had damaged parts of France through which they had passed:.

They are like two wild beasts. One of them is greedy to swallow everything it can get, and the more it eats the hungrier it gets, and its hunger is never satisfied. The other animal wants to exalt itself above all men, and to rule over them. Each of the two animals tries to swallow the heart of the other. The terrible voices of these animals is heard far and wide across the world, and their voice and cry is this: "Take gold and the riches of the world, and do not spare the blood of Christian men.

She was dismayed that the pope then living in Avignon had been so ineffectual in his efforts to stop the war, and this pilgrimage appears to have hardened her resolve to lead a more active life in reforming a corrupt Christendom. The Avignon popes were notorious for worldliness, nepotism, and self-enrichment; poets like Petrarch and prophets like Joachim of Flora were united in their denunciations of Avignon as a new Babylon.

Passing close to the papal court, Bridget pointedly failed to pay a visit. On the way home from Santiago, her husband Ulf fell dangerously ill. While praying that he might recover, Bridget was rewarded by a vision of Saint Dionysius St. Paul 's disciple who told her that Ulf would survive but that, from now on, they should live in celibacy.

Ulf hung on only for another year and then expired at the monastery of Alvastra. Bridget, now a widow of 40, took up residence there, gaining a dispensation from the usually strict Cistercian rule against the presence of women. The sub-prior of Alvastra, Petrus Olai, became her secretary, and during Bridget's frequent visions and raptures she dictated to him messages she was receiving from God and the saints.

Chief among these revelations was that she had been chosen by Christ as His bride with the special task of saving the Swedish people from their sins. Guided by another vision, she began the work of founding her order, whose first house was raised on land that she had acquired from a greatly beneficent, or possibly terrified, king. She had warned Magnus that his sins were so wicked that he faced near-certain damnation unless he reformed and gave her the royal estate at Vadstena.

In a demonstration to duplicate early Christian fervor, her order was to consist of 60 nuns, under the rule of an abbess. In addition:. Then there shall be four deacons, who can be priests if they so desire it. They signify the four great doctors of the church: Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory. Next there shall be eight laymen who shall serve the priests.

Altogether that makes sixty sisters, thirteen priests, four. Bridget described living arrangements and the nuns' costume with similar precision and further attempts at allegory. On the white crown of the headdress, she specified, were to be sewn five small pieces of red cloth, like five drops of blood, to signify the crown of thorns. In other respects, the rule was similar to that laid down by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux for the Cistercians, and enjoined on nuns strict vows of poverty and obedience.

She sent an envoy to Avignon to obtain the pope's approval for this scheme and to renew her pleas for a peace treaty between England and France. The pope, Clement VI, treated her envoy with scant courtesy, however, and refused to endorse the rule, noting that the Lateran Council of had judged that no new monastic rules should be introduced; the existing rules Augustinian, Benedictine, Franciscan, etc.

Bridget received the news with fury, answering the pope in the voice of Christ :. Your boastful tongue shall fall silent, your name, that was famed on the earth, shall be forgotten and dishonored with me and my saints…. I shall also question you on how slothful you were to make peace between the kings [of England and France]. Meanwhile, Bridget continued to advise King Magnus and certainly approved of his dynastic schemes against the kings of Norway and Denmark and the Lords of Scania whereby Sweden reached its "natural" boundaries.

In one vision justifying Magnus' conquests, Christ told her that Swedes and Danes had originally been together in Noah's Ark. Disembarking after the flood, Christ continued, "the Swedes went towards the east, the Danes towards the west; the Swedes settled on the continent, the Danes on the islands, both were to be content with what they had and live in the land of their fathers, and within the borders of the forefathers.

She favored an expedition of monks and soldiers—there was a place for peaceful conversions but also, she believed, a place for violence. Her biographer, Johannes Jorgensen, declares: "It may even be an advantage to the heathen to die young—if they were allowed to live longer they would sin more and so get a harder punishment after death.

After early successes, the expedition against Finland turned into a costly disaster—during one retreat, one of Bridget's two surviving brothers died in the city of Riga. Bridget interpreted defeats as a sign of God's wrath against Magnus for his wastefulness and ostentation and urged him to take advantage of the forthcoming holy year by going to Rome for an indulgence.

When Magnus refused, she resolved to do it in his stead, setting out across the Baltic in as soon as the ice had melted. As it turned out, Bridget was leaving Sweden for the last time. No sooner had she departed than the Black Death swept through Scandinavia, killing two-thirds of the population of Norway and a third of the population of Sweden.

King Magnus recalled one of the curses that Bridget had fired at him as a parting shot:. Thus saith the Son of God: I will visit this kingdom with the sword and lance and with wrath. In vain do they say, "Let us do as it pleaseth us, life is short, God is merciful. He will do us no evil!