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Saint Birgitta (Bridget) of Sweden
God’s Emissary
Birgitta Persson made a name for herself before she even entered the world.
When her mother, Ingeborg, was several months pregnant with Birgitta (who was named after her father, the knight Birger Persson), she was miraculously rescued from a shipwreck by the king’s brother. Although dozens died in the wreck, Ingeborg survived the tragedy. In a vision she experienced the night following her rescue, a person dressed in brilliant, glowing clothing informed Ingeborg that she had been saved because of the good she bore in her womb, a gift given to her from God. A few months later, on the night of Birgitta’s birth, an elderly priest in the local parish experienced a vision as well, in which Mary appeared to him with a book in her hands, informing him that a girl had been born “whose voice will be heard throughout the world with admiration.”1
The Impediment of Marriage
Despite her auspicious beginnings, the girl who later became known as Saint Birgitta of Sweden (and by English speakers as Saint Bridget of Sweden) did not immediately show signs of the mysticism that would eventually lead to her canonization. In fact, for the first three years of her life she didn’t speak a single syllable, leading her parents to fear she was a mute. Finally, when she was nearly four years old, Bridget began to talk, surprising everyone by uttering not rudimentary words and phrases but fully articulated sentences.
By the time she was a young teenager, Bridget aspired to lead the life of a holy woman. But as she was one of only two surviving daughters of an eminent Swedish family, religious life wasn’t an option. Despite her reluctance, when she was thirteen years old Bridget wed the eighteen-year-old nobleman Ulf Gudmarsson.
Bridget landed in a tricky position. In the fourteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church still maintained that marriage was an inferior state. The traditional view of the three states of womanhood—virginity, marriage, and widowhood—emphasized virginity first and foremost as the only state in which women could achieve true union with Christ, as well as be recognized as a saint by the church itself. As biographer Bridget Morris notes, “Marriage, which involves sexual activity, was regarded by the Church as incompatible with a woman’s aspirations to live a godly life of the highest kind.”2
There were, however, a few exceptions to this doctrine: if the girl had been forced into marriage or sexual activity against her will, if her marriage was not consummated, or if she lived with her husband in partial or complete abstention from sexual activity. Bridget chose the latter option. The couple lived chastely for at least one year after their marriage, and then, when they did engage in sexual relations, it was always with the goal of pregnancy. The couple prayed diligently for a child, and they were generously rewarded—Bridget bore eight children, all of whom lived beyond infancy, a rarity in the Middle Ages.
Although marriage had gained a level of acceptability by the time Bridget was canonized, the church still reserved the highest state of sanctity for virgins. In fact, during the canonization process for Bridget’s contemporary, Saint Catherine of Siena, a Dominican advocate for the saint argued that given her unmarried state, Catherine was superior to Bridget.3
Bridget and Ulf were married for twenty-eight years, and while it was an affectionate and loving marriage, it’s clear from her own writing that Bridget was also at least somewhat relieved when her husband died. “When I buried my husband, I buried him with all bodily love,” she wrote, “and although I loved him with all my heart, I should not wish to buy back his life, not with the least money.”4 With that pronouncement, Bridget discarded the ring her husband had given her, declaring that it reminded her too much of her earthly ties. She was now free to pursue the holy life and the path to sainthood that she had always desired.
“My Bridge and My Channel”
A few days after her husband’s death, Bridget experienced a vision calling her to religious life. As she prayed in her private chapel, she witnessed a bright cloud, within which was suspended the likeness of a human being. “Woman, hear me; I am your God, who wishes to speak with you,” the voice said. “Fear not, for I am the Creator of all, and not a deceiver. I do not speak to you for your sake, but for the sake of the salvation of others. . . . You shall be my bridge and my channel, and you shall hear and see spiritual things, and my Spirit shall remain with you even until your death.”5
Up to this point, Bridget had wrestled with whether to fulfill her calling as a cloistered monastic or as a religious figure who would remain in contact with the world. The specificity of this vision may have allowed Bridget the flexibility to pursue a religious life in which she was very much out in the world. While many of her predecessors experienced personal, intimate visions in which they were united with Christ in transcendent love, Bridget’s vision was a call to action, a command to serve as a conduit—a “bridge and a channel”—of God’s love for others.
This specific calling fit well with the role to which Bridget was already accustomed. In fact, earlier in her life, she’d not only taught her husband to read and use the Franciscan Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she was also entrusted with the education of the young King Magnus Eriksson of Sweden and his wife, Queen Blanca, despite that she was only three years older than the king himself.
Bridget was related to the king through her mother’s side of the family and benefited greatly from that connection during her lifetime. In 1346, when she founded the Order of the Brigittines after the death of her husband (an order still in existence today), King Magnus donated his former castle, on the shores of Lake Wettern in Vadstena, Sweden, as a residence for the nuns. Bridget, however, did not enter her own convent. She embarked on a different mission altogether.
Radical Revelations
In 1349, Bridget received a vision from God that determined the course of the rest of her life: “Go to Rome . . . and you are to stay there in Rome until you see the supreme pontiff and the emperor there at the same time in Rome, and you shall announce my words to them.”6 She heeded the calling and set out for Rome that same year, never to return to her native country of Sweden.
In a time when mystics were often deemed heretics and messengers of the devil, Bridget’s visions and her subsequent writings were nothing short of radical. Her messages were directed specifically at powerful, influential men and often predicted dire outcomes if they did not take note of God’s commands. For example, in Book IV of her Revelations, Bridget attacked the corrupt and decayed moral state of Rome. She compared the city to a meadow overgrown with thistles, desperately in need of a thorough weeding with a sharp iron, a cleansing with fire, and plowing by a pair of oxen.7 She described the shocking, immoral behavior of the canons, priests, and deacons, whom she called “the devil’s whoremongers,”8 for abandoning clerical dress and customs and living in sin with mistresses in their own homes while still conducting daily Masses. She compared nunneries to brothels, accused monks of failing to follow their own rules, and criticized laypeople for practicing such rampant polygamy that wives and mistresses were giving birth at the same time in the same house. She also blamed the demise of the church and society on the fact that the pope had abandoned Rome to live in a luxurious palace in Avignon, France. “Don’t be surprised, my Lord, that I call Rome unfortunate,” she wrote in Revelations. “The Catholic faith may soon go under. . . . Some of the priesthood still love God, but with the pope not being there, they feel fatherless.”9
These searing criticisms of noblemen and the clergy were extraordinarily courageous, especially given her status as a widowed woman. As a result, Bridget was not immune from vicious attacks against her character, as well as accusations of heresy. It’s said that at one point, as she walked down a narrow alley in Rome, a nobleman whom she’d lambasted a few days earlier intentionally dumped the dirty water from his washbasin out the window and onto Bridget’s head. While she had friends in Rome, she was generally viewed with suspicion or outright hatred and was constantly threatened with imprisonment and even death by burning at the stake. Most likely she was spared such a death because her criticisms were directed at individual popes and the state of Rome in general, rather than at the institution of the Roman Catholic Church itself.
Bridget was determined to succeed in her calling, and her wish was fulfilled—albeit temporarily—when Pope Urban V returned to Rome in 1368, parading into the city at the side of Emperor Charles IV. By 1370, however, Urban had retreated to Montefiascone, where Bridget was granted permission to appeal to him in person. Ultimately she failed to persuade him to return to Rome. In Book IV of Revelations she also detailed the vision she received from the Virgin Mary, noting that if the pope returned to Avignon, he would “receive a blow or a puff of wind so that his teeth will gnash or be knocked out, his sight will become dim and dark and his limbs will tremble.”10 When Pope Urban succumbed to a sudden illness and died in Avignon just days after his return, Bridget’s prophecy was deemed fulfilled.
Perseverance in Trust
Bridget’s determination to see the papacy restored to Rome did not diminish over the remainder of her life. Just five days before her death in 1373, she appealed to Pope Gregory XI for the last time, despite the fact that she’d been told by God in a vision that she would not live to see the pope’s return to Rome. “If Gregory asks for signs, give him three,” she wrote to her confessor, the priest Alfonso Pecha. “That God has spoken wonderful words through a woman. To what purpose is not for the salvation of souls and their bettering. . . . It is my will that he come now, this fall, and that he comes to stay. Nothing is dearer to me than this: that he come to Italy.”11
Some might say Bridget ultimately failed in her God-given calling. After all, she dedicated much of her life to restoring the pope to Rome, yet she didn’t live to see that mission come to fruition. Likewise, she founded her monastic order at Vadstena, yet she was never a true member of the order herself, nor did she ever return to Sweden to see the results of her vision.
However, Bridget served in an extraordinarily unique capacity during her life, not only as a prophetic visionary but also as a political and social emissary who courageously criticized the moral decline of society, even at the risk of ostracism, excommunication, and death.
Even more important, perhaps, is that Bridget never wavered in her faithful trust in God. Despite the fact that she witnessed few concrete results after nearly three decades of effort, she persevered in obedience and trusted God’s calling for her. Pope Gregory XI eventually made his solemn reentry into Rome on January 17, 1377, four years after Bridget’s death, and while she did not witness the historic event in her own lifetime, she never doubted God’s word that it would eventually come to be. Bridget of Sweden reminds us that although we may not always see God’s promises entirely fulfilled in our own lifetime, the contributions we make in faith and trust are a necessary and important part of his ultimate plan.12