Saint Lutgardis

She was born in 1182 at Tongeren, in Limburg, into a family the vicariate of Walloon Brabant describes as middle-class, with nobility on her mother's side. ¹² Her father meant her to marry well and entrusted the money for her dowry to a merchant friend. The venture failed and the money was gone. ¹⁵ At twelve she was sent to live with Benedictine nuns. ¹²⁵

The sources do not agree on which house it was. The vicariate says the Benedictines of Tongeren, though it later places her as a novice at Sint-Truiden; Kerknet says the Benedictines of Sint-Truiden; Loyola Press says St. Catherine's monastery "near Liège." ¹²⁴ All of them agree that she had not chosen it. Kerknet calls her a frivolous girl with little interest in convent life, and Aleteia says she was "more of a boarder than a novice," still seeing the young people of the town. ²⁵

The convent allowed visitors, and young men came to court her. ⁴ One day, while she sat talking with one of them, she saw Christ, who showed her the wound in his side. ¹⁴ Loyola Press gives the words her biographer reports. Christ told her, "Contemplate here what you should love and why you should love it." When the young man tried to pick up the conversation, she sent him away: "Get away from me, you fodder of death," she said, "for I have been overtaken by another lover." ⁴ Aleteia puts her age at twenty; in the vicariate's telling she was younger and wavered for some time afterward. ¹⁵

She made her profession as a Benedictine at about eighteen or twenty. ¹ The vicariate, which is careful to say that saints' lives are strewn with more or less legendary episodes, passes on two from these years. In one she is feverish and late for matins, stops to kiss the feet of a large wooden crucifix at the chapel door, and the figure frees an arm from the cross and draws her to the wound in its side. ¹ The other is the exchange of hearts.

Christ, the story goes, had given her gifts: the power to heal and an understanding of the convent's Latin prayers. She asked him to take them back, because both distracted her from loving him. ⁴ Loyola Press continues: "Then the Lord said to her, 'What do you want?' 'I want your heart,' she said. 'No, rather it is your heart that I want,' replied the Lord." ⁴ She agreed, on condition that his love be mingled with hers. ⁴

The vicariate and Loyola Press set this at the Benedictine house. Aleteia's Joseph Bottum sets it later, at Aywières, where in her isolation she had asked for a better grasp of Latin and then wanted something more. ¹⁴⁵ Wherever it happened, it is the reason she is counted among the earliest witnesses to devotion to the Sacred Heart, a devotion that Bottum says began to "flourish widely in the eighteenth century." ¹⁵ Pope Francis names her first among the holy women who "have spoken of resting in the heart of the Lord as the source of life and interior peace." ⁷

When the prioress died the community chose Lutgardis to replace her; the vicariate says she was twenty-one. ¹ She did not want the office. Aleteia says the convent meant to make her abbess and that she feared it would draw her away from prayer. ⁵ She looked instead to the Cistercians, whose life was plainer and more austere. ¹² The vicariate says a priest of the diocese of Liège, John of Lier, advised her to enter Aywières; Kerknet says she came there by way of Christina the Astonishing, whom Aleteia calls her friend. ¹²⁵

Aywières was a French-speaking house, at Lasne in what is now Walloon Brabant, and Lutgardis spoke only Flemish. ¹⁵ The vicariate says she hesitated over this and that it remained a real hardship to the end of her life. ¹ Kerknet reports the legend that grew from it: she prayed to Mary that she might never learn French, so that she could not be made abbess of a Walloon abbey. That story, Kerknet says, made her the patron saint of the Flemish Movement. ²

She lived there about thirty years by the vicariate's count, four decades by that of Loyola Press. ¹⁴ Three times she undertook a fast of seven years, on bread and beer, to which she later added a vegetable gruel. ¹⁴ Loyola Press gives the intentions: the conversion of heretics, the salvation of sinners, and the emperor Frederick II, "who was threatening the church." ⁴ The vicariate names the heretics as the Albigensians. ¹

People came to her for healing and advice, and the vicariate adds visits from souls in purgatory asking her prayers, ecstasies, and the stigmata. ¹ Aleteia calls her "the first woman known to have received the stigmata," around the time of Saint Francis of Assisi, and says her sisters often found her drenched in blood after prayer. ⁶

Her life was written by Thomas of Cantimpré, a Dominican who had studied under Saint Albert the Great and who knew her for sixteen years. ⁵ Bottum is frank about his reputation. Butler's Lives of the Saints worried about his "obvious credulity," and Thomas Merton, who wrote an account of Lutgardis in 1950 as reading for his fellow monks, granted that he had "the naiveté common in his age." ⁵

Bottum's own judgment is that what Thomas tells from his own knowledge of her is "more judicious, less incredible," than what he repeats from others. ⁵ The stories her sisters told are of a different kind from the levitations. They remembered her saying, when called away from prayer, "Wait here, Lord Jesus, and I will be back in a moment." ⁵ Loyola Press tells of a Sunday when, after Communion, she was torn between her prayer and her hunger, and asked Christ to go and occupy a sick sister named Elizabeth instead so that she could eat. Elizabeth, the story ends, was healed. ⁴ The vicariate tells of the same Sunday more briefly and takes it as proof that she never lost her practical sense. ¹

For the last eleven years of her life she was blind. ¹ She died at Aywières on June 16, 1246, and was buried in the abbey church at the spot where she used to pray. ¹⁶ Loyola Press says she had foretold the fall of Frederick II, who died four years after her. ⁴

The abbey was suppressed in the French Revolution. The nuns moved several times, and when they gave up their last house her relics were carried with great ceremony to the parish church of Ittre, on July 2, 1827. They are still there, in a chapel to the right of the altar of the church of Saint-Rémi. ¹ At Borgloon, in the church of Saint Odulphus, Kerknet points to a prayer chair from the abbey of Sint-Truiden that is linked with her and is thought to be the oldest piece of furniture in Belgium. ²

The patronage the sources state is a national one. Kerknet, the site of the Church in Flanders, calls her the patroness of Flanders and explains that the legend of her refusal to learn French made her the patron saint of the Flemish Movement. ²³ The vicariate of Walloon Brabant, on the French-speaking side of the same language border, tells the story of her Flemish without the legend and claims her as a saint of its own soil. ¹

None of the sources consulted for this page names her patron of any trade, illness or need, and the page does not add one. ¹²⁴

Saint Lutgardis's feast day is June 16, the day of her death in 1246. ⁶ Kerknet's notice says she is celebrated on June 16, and Aleteia calls the date her feast. ³⁵

Lutgardis did not choose the convent. A business deal went wrong when she was a child, and that settled where she would live. ¹⁵ The sources are plain that for years she was there in body only. ²⁵ What changed her was being asked for her love by someone she could see, and her answer to the young man in the parlor has nothing pious about it. ⁴

The prayer she is remembered for is a refusal of gifts. She had been given healing and understanding, and she handed them back and asked for the giver. ⁴ Pope Francis places her at the head of a line of women who found in the heart of Christ a place to rest, and that is the word he uses. ⁷

Her sisters remembered someone practical. She told Christ to wait while she saw to something, and she said outright that she needed to eat. ⁴⁵ The vicariate makes a point of this: she was favored with mystical experience and never lost her sense of mealtimes. ¹

Then there are the thirty or forty years in a house whose language was not hers, and the eleven years without sight. ¹⁴⁵ Her biographer saw wonders everywhere, and readers since have not known how many to believe. ⁵ The blindness is not one of the doubtful parts. Bottum, who doubts a good deal, grants that even blind she found the world full of occasions for God to make himself known. ⁵