Saint Ida of Herzfeld

Almost every fact about Ida's origins has a second version. The Norwegian bishops' saints database gives her birth as about 766, with about 775 in other sources, probably at what is now 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, and says historians agree only that she was closely related to the Carolingians; it sets out three competing theories of who her parents were. ¹ The parish that keeps her grave says she was born about 765, the daughter of a Frankish count in the Rhineland near Cologne, a relative of Charlemagne of the line of Pippin. ³ Catholic.net's Spanish entry makes her a great-granddaughter of Charlemagne. ⁵

All agree that she grew up close to the court. ¹⁵ katolsk.no says her mother gave her a strict, almost monastic upbringing there. ¹ Her husband was Egbert, a Saxon noble who stayed loyal to the emperor through the long wars between Franks and Saxons. ¹³ The story is that he fell seriously ill on campaign and was nursed back to health on her family's estate, and that the two fell in love; they married in 786. ¹³ katolsk.no adds that Charlemagne made Egbert duke over the Saxons between the Rhine and the Weser. ¹

That same year the couple set out for the lands near Osnabrück that the king had given them. ³ They crossed the Lippe at a ford and camped on the bank. That night, the parish guide and katolsk.no both say, an angel told Ida in a dream to build a church there. ¹³ The guide also tells how Ida saved a stag from the hunters, and how the grateful animal carried the stones for the first church across the ford; from it, the guide says, the place took its name, Hirutfeldun, then Hirschfelder, then Herzfeld. ³ katolsk.no adds that the deer may also stand for the Saxons, hard pressed by the Franks, and that it is still in the town's coat of arms. ¹

The first church was dedicated to Mary and to Saint Germanus, of Auxerre according to katolsk.no and of Paris according to the parish. ¹³ katolsk.no dates it to about 790 and calls it the first Catholic parish in the Münsterland. ¹ The couple lived across the river at Hovestadt, and katolsk.no calls theirs a model marriage, in which Ida was very happy. ¹ They had five children. ¹³ One, Warin, became a monk and later abbot of Corvey; katolsk.no names a daughter, Hedwig, who became abbess of Herford, and records doubt about whether some of the others were her children or her grandchildren. ¹ Catholic.net mentions only Warin. ⁵

Herzfeld, as katolsk.no tells it, soon became the religious center of the region, and the couple's example and their care for the poor and sick won over people still holding to the old gods. ¹ The parish guide remembers her as a peacemaker between Saxons and Franks. ³

Egbert died in 811 after a long and painful illness, through which Ida nursed him, and he was buried on the south side of the church at Herzfeld. ¹³ She was still young. ¹⁵ katolsk.no says she took up a life of prayer and strict self-denial, and that when Warin left to become a monk she moved from Hovestadt to Herzfeld. ¹ There she had a small room built against the church over her husband's grave and lived in it, as katolsk.no has it, for twelve years under the Rule of Saint Benedict. ¹³

The detail every source remembers is the coffin. To keep death before her eyes she had a stone sarcophagus set up in her cell. katolsk.no says she slept in it at night. By day it was filled twice over with food, wool and linen, and she gave the contents away. ¹³ The parish guide says the gifts went to people left poor and in need by the Saxon wars, and that they soon called her the mother of the poor. ³

At the end of her life she was ill and in great pain, which katolsk.no says she bore patiently, and when she felt death coming she sent for her spiritual director, Berengar. ¹ She died on September 4, 825, and was buried in her stone coffin beside her husband. ¹³ katolsk.no notes that some sources give 813 and others 838; Catholic.net gives 813. ¹⁵

Miracles were soon reported at the grave and pilgrims began to come. ¹³ On November 26, 980, Bishop Dodo of Münster solemnly raised her relics, which at the time amounted to a canonization; she was the first saint of Westphalia, and the same day saw the first procession of her relics through Herzfeld. ¹³⁵ For that occasion a monk of Werden named Uffing wrote her Life, the Vita Idae. katolsk.no judges it more literature than history and says it is made up largely of improbable miracles. ¹³ Part of her relics, including her head, went to the abbey of Werden on the Ruhr; the silver head reliquary, made there about 1500, came back to Herzfeld only in 1802, together with the manuscript of Uffing's Life. ¹³

Her cell became the Ida chapel, and in time the whole church took her name. ¹ The present building, from 1903, is the third on the site, and in 2011 Benedict XVI raised it to a minor basilica. ³ Excavations in 1975 and 1976 found her grave and the walls of the first church, and the crypt built over them was consecrated in 1980. ³ Pilgrims still touch the stone sarcophagus through an opening in the glass around it. ¹ The baptismal font of 1523, shown at the top of this page in a photograph from 1892, carries a relief of Ida among its saints. ³

Every September Herzfeld keeps Ida Week. The shrine is carried up from the crypt into the church, and the week ends with a procession through the village and the Ida blessing at its stations. ¹⁴ Opening the week in 2022, Bishop Felix Genn of Münster spoke of the sorrow and need that people have laid down in that crypt for more than a thousand years, at the grave of a woman he called inconspicuous. ⁴

Saint Ida is the patron saint of pregnant women, and of the poor and the weak. ¹ katolsk.no says it is above all expectant mothers who pray to her at Herzfeld and who wear blessed Ida belts. ¹ She is the patroness of the pilgrimage parish that keeps her grave, which still calls her the mother of the poor. ³ In art she is usually shown as a noblewoman in a light veil, holding a model of a church, with a hind or a stag at her side. ¹³

Saint Ida's feast day is September 4, the day of her death. ¹ The Roman Martyrology enters her on that day: at Herzfeld in Saxony, Saint Ida, widow of Duke Egbert, remarkable for her charity to the poor and her constancy in prayer. ¹² The Diocese of Münster keeps it as her feast at the basilica, where it opens Ida Week. ⁴ Herzfeld also keeps the anniversary of the translation of her relics on November 26. ¹

Ida had what most people want: a good marriage, children, standing and money. ¹³ Her holiness did not begin by giving them up. It began in the life she had, with a church built where she was told to build it and a husband nursed through a long illness. ¹³

Widowhood changed the shape of that life, and she let it. She moved into a room against the church wall, over her husband's grave, and kept her own coffin in it. ¹³ The coffin was a reminder of death, and it was also a store cupboard. Twice a day it was opened and emptied for the hungry. ¹³

Bishop Genn, preaching in her basilica, called her an inconspicuous woman whose example still spreads outward like the rings from a stone thrown into water, and said that what drew people to her was that she had found the Gospel worth more than anything else, even after the life she knew as wife and mother had ended. ⁴ The pregnant women who come to her grave are asking for something at the other end of life from where she ended hers. ¹ She had been a mother of five before she was a mother of the poor. ¹³