A whole monastery told to stop singing, over one grave

BINGEN, Rhineland, September 17, 1179 AD — For about a year, the nuns at the monastery of Rupertsberg were not allowed to sing. They still said all their prayers at the set hours of the day. But they read them out loud instead of singing them. They were not allowed to go to Communion either. Before this they had been going nearly every month.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen had founded the monastery some thirty years before. She had governed it ever since. The ban started with one grave in the graveyard beside her church.

The year before, a young man who had once been excommunicated was buried there. He had been forgiven and taken back into the Church long before that. 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.

Archbishop Christian of Mainz was away in Italy. The churchmen running the Church’s business for him ordered the young man’s body dug up. They wanted it out of the graveyard beside her church. But the man had been given confession, the anointing and Communion before he died. St. Hildegard wanted that to count.

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.”

The order she would not obey

She did not open the grave. With the staff she carried as abbess, she traced the shape of a cross over it. After that, nobody could find the grave.

So the churchmen of Mainz put the whole monastery under an interdict. An interdict falls on a place and on everyone in it: no Mass, no Communion, no singing of the Office. St. Hildegard still would not open the grave or hand the body over. But she would not simply ignore the order either. That was when the singing stopped.

Then she wrote the churchmen of Mainz a long letter. Most of it was about why a church’s prayers should be sung. At the end she warned them about people who “without just cause, impose silence on a church and prohibit the singing of God’s praises”. They will “lose their place among the chorus of angels”, unless they are truly sorry and make it right.

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

The day she had named

St. Hildegard had been in poor health all her life, and this summer she fell ill. Her sisters said afterwards that she was worn out and wanted to die and be with Christ. She had told her nuns which day she would die on. She died on the day she had named.

She died in the first light, about four hours after midnight. She was eighty-one, and 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 ran north to south and the other east to west. Each one widened 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. In that light there was a glowing cross, small at first and then huge. Around it were 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 got well. Her funeral was held 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.