CrucisSt. Hildegard of Bingen
St. Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 in the Rhineland of Germany, the tenth child of a noble family, and died on 17 September 1179 at the monastery she founded at Rupertsberg. Offered to God as a girl, she was raised in the religious life and eventually became abbess of her Benedictine community. From childhood she experienced luminous visions, which, in obedience to her superiors and with the approval of the pope and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, she recorded in her major work Scivias ('Know the Ways').
A woman of astonishing range for any age, she composed a large body of sacred music, wrote treatises on medicine and the natural world, corresponded with popes, emperors, and bishops, and undertook preaching tours — remarkable for a woman of the twelfth century. Long venerated as a saint, she was formally canonized and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI, one of only four women to bear that title.
Selected quotes
“I am a small sound of the divine voice — and even a small sound, if it is truly His, contains something of the infinite within it.”
“Humility is the green earth in which all other virtues are rooted — the proud soul is parched ground on which nothing lasting can grow.”
“Seek healing for body and soul together — for they are not enemies but companions on the same pilgrimage, and what serves one often serves the other.”