Saint Hildegard of Bingen

Saint Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 AD in the Rhineland diocese of Mainz. She was the tenth child of Hildebert and Mechtild, landowners of noble family. Her parents set her apart as a tithe offered to God.

At eight years old she was enclosed with the recluse Jutta of Spanheim beside the monastery of Saint Disibod. Jutta taught her to read the Latin psalms and to play the psaltery, and she never learned to write. She stirred wonder in many, and until her fifteenth year she did not dare tell what vision was fixed in her soul.

Jutta died in 1136 AD, after twenty-four years of monastic life, and was buried amid a great crowd. The sisters chose St. Hildegard to succeed her as magistra of the community at Disibodenberg. She resisted with all her strength, and the abbot's command compelled her to take the office.

Pope Benedict XVI said she filled the office as a woman of culture and lofty spirituality, competent in the organisation of cloistered life. By then the enclosure had grown into a small women's monastery under the Rule of Saint Benedict.

In 1141 AD, forty-two years old, a fiery light came from an opened heaven and irradiated her brain. A voice told her not to delay in setting down what she saw and heard. She hesitated out of modesty, took to her bed, and was healed as soon as she put her hand to writing.

The monk Volmar wrote down what she dictated, with the nun Richardis von Stade. She worked ten years at the book called Scivias and closed it in 1151 AD.

Fearing that the visions were illusion, she wrote in 1146 AD to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. She told him she had no formal training and could read only on the most elementary level. St. Bernard answered briefly, rejoicing in the grace of God in her and urging her to humility.

Presiding at a synod at Trier in 1147 AD, Pope Eugene III read a text she had dictated. He authorised her to write down her visions and to speak in public. Her contemporaries came to call her the Teutonic prophetess.

Around 1150 AD St. Hildegard left Disibodenberg and founded an independent monastery on the Rupertsberg, above the mouth of the Nahe at Bingen. In 1165 AD she founded a second house at Eibingen, across the Rhine, and was abbess of both. She preached in public at Mainz, Würzburg, Bamberg, Trier, Metz and Cologne.

She wrote the Liber vitae meritorum from 1158 AD and began the Liber divinorum operum in 1163 AD. She composed songs and the play Ordo Virtutum. She compiled the works of natural science and medicine known as the Physica and the Causae et curae.

About 1178 AD a young man once bound by censures, long since absolved, was buried in the cemetery at Rupertsberg. The diocesan administrators of Mainz demanded the body be taken up and laid the house under interdict. St. Hildegard answered them that she had heard in the light a voice that the dead man was not to be dishonoured.

She signed the tomb with her staff in the sign of the cross, and the grave could no longer be found. Her sisters ceased the songs of the divine praises and abstained from Communion, and the body stayed where it lay. The interdict was lifted a few months before she died.

Stricken by illness in the summer, St. Hildegard died at the monastery of Rupertsberg on September 17, 1179 AD, surrounded by her sisters. Pope Benedict XVI records that she was eighty-one, and had always been in poor health. She was buried in front of the altar in her own monastic church.

The twelfth-century Life records that she foresaw her death long beforehand and foretold it to her sisters. So many miracles followed at the tomb, and so great a crowd came, that the Archbishop of Mainz came in person and commanded the signs to cease.

The abbess and convent of Rupertsberg petitioned for her canonization in 1226 AD, and Pope Gregory IX opened the process. It was taken up again under Popes Innocent IV, Clement V and John XXII, and left unfinished each time. Her name was entered in the Roman Martyrology at September 17 in 1498 AD.

Pope Benedict XVI signed the decree of canonization in 2012 AD, dispensing from the miracle usually required. On October 7, 2012 AD, at the Mass opening the Synod of Bishops, he proclaimed her a Doctor of the Universal Church in Saint Peter's Square. By a decree of January 25, 2021 AD, Pope Francis ordered her celebration inscribed in the General Roman Calendar on September 17.