SAINT CATHERINE OF SWEDEN

Catherine of Vadstena, Bridg.
Feast day: March 24
Also known as Catherine of Sweden
Born at Ulfasa, Sweden, in 1331;
Died March 24, 1381;
Cultus approved in 1484 by Pope Innocent VIII.


Fourth of the eight children of Saint Bridget and her husband, Ulf Gudmarsson of Nierck, Saint Catherine was sent to Risberg Convent to be educated at a very young age. She wished to remain in the convent to pursue a religious vocation, but she was married at age 13 or 14 to Eggard (Edgard) Lydersson von Kürnen, a lifelong invalid and long- suffering man. She and Eggard took a vow to remain celibate and she tended to him with great devotion. He allowed her to do anything she pleased under the direction of the Church.

Catherine grew extremely sad when her father died and Saint Bridget went to live in Rome. For a time as she herself told Saint Catherine of Siena, she never smiled. In 1349, Eggard permitted Catherine to travel to Rome to visit her mother during the Jubilee of 1350. While in Rome she learned of her husband's death, which Saint Bridget had prophesied. (Farmer says that she returned to Sweden and nursed her husband until his death.) Even then she was for some time extremely unhappy, because Rome in the 14th century was a dissolute place and her mother would not let her go out.

From the time of her husband's death, she lived the life of devotion that she had desired, refusing persistent suitors who wished to marry the beautiful young widow. Some of them even lay in wait for her to carry her off. One was distracted when a hart ran by just as Bridget and Catherine passed. Others, it is said, were blinded. To try to repulse such suitors, and also as an act of humility, Catherine always went about in the most ragged and threadbare clothing.

Soon Catherine was her mother's devoted, reliable, and constant assistant, and served her for the next 25 years. In 1372, she and her mother made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, returning by way of Rome, where Saint Bridget died the following year. Catherine returned with her mother's body to Sweden and there she became abbess of the convent of Vadstena, founded by her mother, and the motherhouse of the Bridgettine (Salvatorian) Order.

Now followed intense work to promote the Bridgettine Order. Bound together in double monasteries, men and women pledged themselves to live in poverty, save for the right to buy as many books as they needed for study and devotion (my kind of order!).

In 1375, she returned to Rome to win papal approval for the order. She succeeded in getting Urban VI's approval but failed in bringing about the canonization of her mother. She died soon after her return from Rome. Her vita was written by Ulpho, a Brigittine friar, thirty years after her death