Mystic · Medieval
St. Bridget of Sweden
1303–1373 · Prophetic visionary; Bridgettine
Canonized 1391 by Boniface IX; foundress of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour (Bridgettines); co-patroness of Europe (1999).
A Swedish noblewoman, wife of Ulf Gudmarsson and mother of eight (one of them St. Catherine of Vadstena), who after her husband's death in 1344 received the visions recorded in her Revelations. She told King Magnus how a Christian king must rule with wise counsel and under God's law, urged the kings of England and France to make peace, and demanded that the popes leave Avignon for Rome, where she lived from 1350 until her death. Her visions of the Passion and of the Nativity, with the Virgin kneeling in adoration before the Child, shaped late medieval art, and she founded a double monastery at Vadstena governed by an abbess.
Why he matters: She is the great lay prophet of the fourteenth century, a married woman and widow who held kings and popes to the Gospel, and with Catherine of Siena she is the reason the papacy returned to Rome.
Where to be careful
The “Fifteen Prayers” (the “Fifteen O's”) and the promises printed with them are not hers; the Holy Office warned against the promises in 1954. Her Revelations are approved private revelation, which binds no one's faith.
Reading
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Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected RevelationsSt. Birgitta of Sweden (ed. Marguerite Tjader Harris, trans. Albert Ryle Kezel), 1990 · Her life by her confessors and a good selection of the Revelations, including the Nativity vision.
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St Birgitta of SwedenBridget Morris, 1999 · A historian's life, good on her politics.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.