St. Hildegard dies at Rupertsberg with her nuns singing again

BINGEN, Rhineland, September 17, 1179 AD — Saint Hildegard of Bingen died before dawn this morning at the monastery of Rupertsberg, above the Rhine at Bingen, eighty-one years old, with her nuns around her.

She had founded the house some thirty years ago and had governed it ever since. She died with its singing restored. For about a year a ban from the churchmen of Mainz had silenced the sung Office and kept her nuns from Communion. It was lifted a few months ago.

The ban came out of one grave. Last year a young man who had once been excommunicated was buried in the cemetery beside her church. He had been forgiven and taken back into the Church long before. As he lay dying, his own priest heard his confession, anointed him and gave him Communion. Nobody objected at the burial, and the whole of Bingen walked in the funeral procession.

Then the churchmen running the archdiocese for Archbishop Christian of Mainz, who was away in Italy, ordered the body taken out of consecrated ground. They wanted the body out; she wanted the sacraments the man had received before he died treated as real. They could stop the singing, and she could keep the grave shut.

The order frightened her. She wrote afterwards that in a vision she had been shown what would come of digging the man up: “a terrible and lamentable danger would come upon us like a dark cloud before a threatening thunderstorm.” She did not open the grave. She traced a cross over it with her abbess’s staff, and after that nobody could find the grave.

So Mainz put the house under interdict. An interdict falls on a place and on everyone in it: no Mass, no Communion, no singing of the Office. She would not open the grave or hand the body over, and she would not simply ignore the order either. Her nuns stopped singing. They had been going to Communion nearly every month, and they gave that up too. They kept the hours by reading them instead of singing them.

Then she wrote the Mainz churchmen a long letter, most of it about what singing is for, and it ended in a warning: those who “without just cause, impose silence on a church and prohibit the singing of God’s praises and those who have on earth unjustly despoiled God of His honor and glory will lose their place among the chorus of angels, unless they have amended their lives through true penitence and humble restitution.”

A few months ago, after all the worry and all the letters, she got the interdict taken off. Her nuns sang the Office aloud in choir again, and they went back to Communion.

She had never been strong, and she fell ill in the summer. Her sisters said afterwards that she was worn out and wanted to die and be with Christ, and that God let her know when the end would come. She had named the day to them some time beforehand. The day she named was this one. She died in the first light, about four hours after midnight, at the end of the night after Sunday. Her nuns were around the bed. When she was gone they stood over her body and wept.

Over the room where she died, two very bright arcs of different colours appeared in the sky, one running north to south and the other east to west, each widening until it stretched from one horizon to the other. Where the two arcs crossed at the top, a bright light appeared, as wide as the full moon, and it spread until the night over the house was no longer dark. In that light there was a glowing cross, small at first and then immense, and around it countless circles of different colours, each with a small glowing cross of its own. The whole of it spread eastward, leaned down towards the house she had died in, and lit up the hill.

Before the burial, two men who were gravely ill dared to touch her body, and both of them recovered. Her funeral was celebrated in the church she had built on the hill. She was buried in front of its altar. A scent of great sweetness came from the grave.