Given at the Catholic Record Society Conference on the feast of St Bridget of Sweden, 23rd July 2018, in Cambridge
One of the first things you’re told when you begin your studies at the Venerabile is, ‘We’ve been neighbours of St Bridget’s for six-and-a-half centuries!’
Very soon you discover how the tangible links with her are. Just a few hundred yards from the College, in the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, you can kneel before the beautiful 14th century crucifix to which St Bridget used to pray.
A little further afield, in San Paolo fuori le Mura, you can see the still finer crucifix of Cavallini’s before which Bridget also liked to pray and from which it’s said she heard the Lord speak, as he spoke to her also in the church of San Francesco a Ripa, close by San Crisogono in Trastevere, and called her to Assisi.
Right next door to the College, you can visit her rooms preserved in the Casa Santa Brigida; see the very table at which she recorded her visions. The pilgrim is told the saint was laid out on this very same table after she died.
This gospel we’re given for her feast day reminds us that her most eloquent revelation was of Christ the Vine, ‘Christ the Lord of the Vines’, as she called it. This is contained in her spiritual masterpiece, the so-called ‘Twelve Points’.
Canon Jonathan Boardman, Vicar of All Saints Church in via Babuino, who has re-translated the ‘Twelve Points’, claims selections of St Bridget’s writings were amongst the most popular passages translated from Latin into 15th century Middle English; and were indeed among the religious bestsellers of their day.
‘Christ the Lord of the Vines’ is so fine that I’d like to share with you its seven or so sentences in full.
‘There is a Lord who owns many vines,’ writes St Bridget, ‘and the wine of each vine tastes different according to the ground in which it grows. So then, when the wine has been pressed, the Lord of the vines sometimes drinks the inferior, lighter wine rather than the superior. But if anyone noticing this as he stands close should ask him why he acts in this way, the Lord will say that he does it because this wine tastes better and sweeter for the moment; that he does not open and dishonour better wines but keeps them back for his honour and profit, each according to their proper time. So have I acted with you. I have many friends, whose life is sweeter to me than honey, more delightful than wine and brighter in my sight than the sun. Nevertheless, I want to single you out in my spirit, not because you are better than them, are to be compared with them, or are worthier of merit than they. But I have chosen you, simply because I, who make wise the simple, and righteous men of sinners, desire it to be so. I have not graced you so as to pass over them; rather, I have kept them back for my further use and honour as righteousness prompts. Therefore humble yourself and be anxious about nothing except your sins. Love even those people who seem to hate and despise you because they give you more opportunity to work for your crown.’
St Bridget began receiving revelations from a young age, after she’d entered the court of King Magnus II of Sweden, as lady-in-waiting to Queen Blanche of Namur.
She was born in 1303, the daughter of Birger, Governor of Upland, the principal province of Sweden. Before she was even 14, she was married to the 18-year-old Ulf Gudmarsson. Theirs was a marriage that lasted 28 years, bearing eight children, four boys and four girls, including the future St Catherine of Sweden.
Once in the Swedish court, Bridget began to receive revelations - Daniel-, Joseph-like dreams - urging her to make the King and Queen curb their material excesses, though to no avail.
In 1340, one of her sons died. This gave Ulf and Bridget the desire to visit Compostela. Ulf became seriously ill on the way back as they paused in Arras, northern France; so they decided each to take vows promising God they would live henceforth as Religious. Ulf entered the Cistercian convent of Alvastra in Sweden and soon died there. Bridget chose to remain close by.
She continued to receive visions which gave her courage to renew her warnings to King Magnus of his impending doom, with such effect that he agreed to endow the monastery she was in the process of founding at Vadstena, also in Sweden. Rather like Fontevrault in Anjou, Vadstena was a monastery for both women and men. It had 60 nuns in one enclosure; some 25 brothers and priests in another. Significantly, the men were subject to the abbess in matters temporal; the women subject to the superior of the men for matters spiritual.
Come 1349, in spite of the risk of meeting the Black Death, Bridget resolved to visit Rome, in order to have her order recognised and also to obtain the Jubilee Indulgence. And in Rome she stayed. Her revelations continued, prophesying with increasing urgency about matters political. She prophesied that pope and emperor would meet amicably in Rome, as Blessed Pope Urban V and the Emperor Charles IV did in 1368.
In 1371, she went to the Holy Land. But her son Charles died of fever in Naples. She was nearly drowned in a shipwreck off Jaffa.
She returned to Rome and died there two years later, this day, 23rd July 1373, in via di Monserrato, less than 200 yards from the newly-established English Hospice of the Most Holy Trinity and St Thomas of Canterbury, by then just ten years old.