St. Hildegard of Bingen

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a Benedictine abbess, visionary, composer, and scholar of the German Rhineland, one of the most remarkable figures of the medieval Church. The tenth child of a noble family, she was offered to God as a young girl and placed in the care of the holy anchoress Jutta at the monastery of Disibodenberg. From childhood Hildegard experienced interior visions, which she kept largely to herself for decades. She took the Benedictine habit and, upon Jutta's death in 1136, was chosen to lead the community of women that had grown up around her. Around the age of forty-two, Hildegard understood herself to be commanded by God to write down what she saw. The result was Scivias ("Know the Ways"), the first of three great visionary works. Her writings were examined and encouraged by churchmen of her day, including St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and Pope Eugene III gave her work his approbation. Around 1150 she founded her own monastery at Rupertsberg near Bingen, and later a second at Eibingen. Unusually for a woman of her era, she undertook preaching journeys and corresponded frankly with popes, emperors, and abbots, calling clergy and rulers alike to reform. Hildegard's genius ranged across sacred music, theology, and natural science. She composed a large body of liturgical chant and the sung morality play Ordo Virtutum, and she wrote treatises on medicine and the natural world. Running through all her work is a vision of creation charged with the greenness and vitality of God's life, and of the human person as a microcosm of the created order called to praise its Creator. She died at Rupertsberg on September 17, 1179. Though venerated for centuries, her formal recognition came only in the modern era: on May 10, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI extended her cult to the universal Church in an equivalent canonization, and on October 7, 2012, he declared her a Doctor of the Church, one of only four women so honored at that time. Her feast is kept on September 17, and she is invoked as a patron of musicians and writers. Her relics are venerated at the parish and pilgrimage church of Eibingen, near Rüdesheim in Germany, where the Benedictine abbey that bears her name continues her legacy.