St. Hildegard of Bingen

Biography

St. Hildegard (1098–1179) was born at Bermersheim, in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a noble family. As a young child she was entrusted to Jutta of Sponheim, a holy woman who lived enclosed beside the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, and she grew up there in a small community of women. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was chosen to lead the community. From childhood she had experienced visions, and in 1141, at about forty-two, she was moved to write them down. The result, Scivias ('Know the Ways'), received the encouragement of Pope Blessed Eugene III. Around 1150 she founded a new monastery at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, and later a second house at Eibingen. Hildegard wrote further visionary works, books on medicine and the natural world, a large body of liturgical music, and a sacred musical drama, the Ordo Virtutum. She corresponded with popes, emperors, bishops, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and in her sixties and seventies she made preaching journeys, calling clergy and laity to reform. She died at Rupertsberg on September 17, 1179. Long venerated as a saint in Germany, she was declared a saint for the universal Church by Pope Benedict XVI in May 2012, through an equivalent canonization, and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church on October 7, 2012. St. Robert Bellarmine is also honored today.

Patronages

Symbols