St. Bridget of Sweden

July 23 is the feast of St. Bridget of Sweden (c. 1303-1373), the mystic and foundress of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour (the Bridgettines). Born at Finsta, in Sweden, the daughter of the lagman Birger Persson, she married Ulf Gudmarsson at thirteen and bore eight children, one of whom, Catherine, is also a saint. After Ulf's death in 1344 she devoted herself to the religious life and in 1346 founded a double monastery at Vadstena, on the shores of Lake Vättern — monks and nuns in the same enclosure, under the rule of an abbess.

Bridget's Revelations — the visions she received from Christ and the Virgin — are one of the great mystical corpora of the late Middle Ages. She went to Rome in 1349 and lived there for the rest of her life, except for pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Bethlehem in 1372. She repeatedly urged the Popes, then at Avignon, to return to Rome, and she died in Rome on July 23, 1373. Her body was translated to Vadstena in 1374.

Bridget was canonized in 1391 and proclaimed co-patron of Europe by Pope John Paul II in 1999, with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein. From Vadstena, where she founded her order, to Rome, where she died, to Jerusalem, which she visited, the July 23 feast is the feast of the Swedish mystic whose revelations shaped the late medieval Church.