Today is the
feast day of St. Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden, who lived in the fourteenth
century. She was married in her early
teens and had eight children, one of them St. Catherine of Sweden, she enjoyed a
deeply committed and loving relationship with her husband, and at the same time
acquired a reputation for personal piety and charity that attracted favorable
notice from many people, including learned clerics and even the King of Sweden. When Birgitta was in her early forties her
beloved husband died, after which she devoted herself completely to the
practice of religion and Christian virtues.
Also, as the Catholic Encyclopedia [link]
puts it:
The visions which she believed
herself to have had from her early childhood now became more frequent and
definite. She believed that Christ
Himself appeared to her, and she wrote down the revelations she then received,
which were in great repute during the Middle Ages. They were translated into Latin by Matthias Magister
and Peter Prior.
Influenced by these visions, she laid the foundations for a
new religious order (the Brigittines), and set out for Rome, both to seek Papal
approval for her order (which was finally granted twenty years after she set
out, in 1370), and also to urge to Pope to return to Rome from Avignon (a task
later taken up by St. Catherine of Siena).
She is truly a versatile saint: she can be seen as a patroness of
mothers and families, and also for those in religious communities, and also an
exemplar of charity, piety, and determination.
One of things that I found most interesting about St. Bridget is summed
up in this passage from the article about her [link] at Catholic Online:
Although she had longed to become a
nun, she never even saw the monastery in Vadstena. In fact, nothing she set out to do was ever realized. She had never had the pope return to Rome
permanently, she never managed to make peace between France and England, she
never saw any nun in the habit that Christ had shown her, and she never
returned to Sweden but died, [a] worn out old lady far from home in July
1373. She can be called the Patroness of
Failures.
The article goes on to call her a “successful failure”,
citing her canonization in 1391.
St. Bridget of
Sweden is in fact an excellent example of the quote attributed to St. Theresa
of Calcutta: “God hasn’t called me to be successful, he has called me to be
faithful”. Whether or not Mother Theresa
actually said it, it’s a marvelous statement of what it is to be a Saint. As St. Paul tells us, the “wisdom of this
world” is foolishness in the sight of God (1 Corinthians 3:19). St. Bridget is a living reminder to all of us
that our “success” as Christians consists in fidelity to Christ, and in nothing
else.
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