An archbishop orders miracles at St. Hildegard's tomb to stop

VATICAN CITY, 2012 AD — Saint Hildegard of Bingen died in 1179 AD. Soon so many people crowded around her tomb that the noise got in the way of the nuns’ prayers.

Her convent was under the archbishop of Mainz. He came to the tomb in person and ordered the miracles there to stop. After that, they did.

St. Hildegard was a German abbess. She had founded the Rupertsberg convent at Bingen, on the Rhine. She was known for her visions and for what she knew about nature, medicine and music. People honoured her as a saint from the start. But the Church didn’t declare her a saint until 2012 AD. That order at her tomb was one of the reasons it took so long.

Who gets to say someone is a saint

In the days of the first Christians, local bishops made that choice. The bishop of the place where a martyr died decided if people could honour him as a saint. Near the end of the 1000s AD, the Popes began taking that power away from bishops. Pope Alexander III lived in St. Hildegard’s time. He forbade people to honour a man as a saint without the Roman Church’s permission, “even though miracles were worked through him.”

St. Hildegard’s nuns asked the Pope in 1226 AD. Pope Gregory IX wrote to church leaders in Mainz. He told them to find witnesses they could trust. The leaders were to question those witnesses about St. Hildegard’s life and her miracles.

In December 1233 AD the written record of the questioning was sealed shut at her convent. A priest from Strasbourg carried it to Rome. Three people from Bingen gave evidence in those papers. They said that on many days they had seen St. Hildegard drive out demons and heal people with epilepsy. Epilepsy is an illness that causes sudden fits.

It wasn’t enough. In 1237 AD Pope Gregory IX wrote back with a problem. The witnesses said she had cured many sick people, but they named no people, no places and no dates. Pope Gregory IX also wrote down what the nun then leading her convent had told the questioners. St. Hildegard had worked many miracles and then stopped, the nun said, because the archbishop had ordered it.

Popes ordered new inquiries in 1243 AD and in the early 1300s AD. None of them was finished, because there were no longer enough witnesses.

Digging for lost papers

In 1489 AD the archbishop of Mainz at that time tried to start the case again. He had St. Hildegard’s grave opened, hoping to find the old canonization papers inside. There weren’t any. In 1498 AD the abbot of Sponheim had the grave opened a second time. Again nobody found any papers.

The Church did write her name into the Roman Martyrology, its book that lists saints under their feast days. Her day is September 17. People kept her feast day. But no Pope had ever declared her a saint, so her case stayed open.

In 1979 AD the German bishops asked the Pope to name St. Hildegard a Doctor of the Church. The Vatican didn’t act on their request, because she had never been declared a saint. Pope Benedict XVI later wrote that the bishops’ request had joined a wish shared by Catholics around the world. They wanted her declared a saint.

In 2011 AD Pope Benedict XVI reopened St. Hildegard’s case. He told the Vatican office that handles saints’ cases to finish it quickly. He also set aside the rule that a new saint needs a proven miracle. His decree said he made that choice “considering the age, constancy and dependability of the esteem in which Hildegard has been held”.

In 2012 AD Pope Benedict XVI signed the decree of canonization. It declared St. Hildegard a saint of the whole Church, all over the world. Her name was entered in the Church’s list of saints. Her nuns had first asked for it in 1226 AD. It had taken 786 years.

On October 7, 2012 AD, Pope Benedict XVI said Mass in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. There he named St. Hildegard a Doctor of the Church. It was the title the German bishops had asked for in 1979 AD.