Today September 17

Today we have the feast of the great Jesuit Robert Bellarmine, the delightful Franciscan feast of the Impression of the Stigmata upon St. Francis, but we are going to go with St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179) because this woman is so modern, so misunderstood and so sympathetic.

She was modern because she was scientific (writing a series of works including one on medicine and natural history, which included a catalog of native plants, animals and minerals; the medical text anticipates the theory of circulation and repudiates the assignation of "evil spirits" for mere mental illness), unsentimental (her poetry, and she was a great poet, eschews the rampant sentimentality and syrupiness of contemporaries, especially women) and fearless. She was unafraid to speak out and correct everyone from her own religious sisters right up to princes, bishops and even popes. She corrected them with "unerring justice" - Butler's Lives. And in this she anticipated some future saints -- such as St. Catherine of Siena.

She was misunderstood because she was so astonishingly accomplished and bold that many thought her impious and unladylike. Her revelations and visions -- beautiful as they were -- were attributed to fraud, sorcery or the devil. And even her cause for canonization was rejected twice! (Although she is venerated in several German dioceses.) There were miracles in her life and plenty more at her tomb, but people whose vanity had been offended by her misunderstood her and still to this day folks twist her Scivias, her notable work, called such for Nosce vias [Domini] . . . "Know the Ways [of the Lord], even now used by New Age groups to justify their touchy-feely ways. Needless to say, such works, when they are quoted, are heavily edited because Hildegard was very much a woman of the Church.

And finally, she is sympathetic, I think, because she was plagued with suicidal thoughts all her life, suffered greatly with migraines and was both brilliant and artistic. She loved music and composed much of a sacred nature, and excoriated those (clerics, etc.) who disparaged all music. "[They] will not deserve to hear the glorious choir of angels that praises the Lord in Heaven." You tell 'em, sister!

Hildegard died peacefully on this day in 1179.