St. Bridget of Sweden

Mystic and Mother

St. Bridget of Sweden was a visionary and one of the patron saints of Europe. She was a married noblewoman and the mother of eight children, one of whom, Catherine of Vadstena, is honoured as a saint in her own right. She served as principal lady-in-waiting to Blanche of Namur, the queen of King Magnus Eriksson, and she used that position to say things to the royal couple that other courtiers would not.

After her husband Ulf died in 1344 she gave away her property, took on a penitential way of life, and began to receive the visions that occupied the rest of her life. She dictated them in Swedish to her confessors, who translated them into Latin, and the collection became known as the Celestial Revelations. They circulated across Europe within her lifetime and were among the earliest books printed in Sweden.

Two things about her are easy to miss. She was married for twenty-eight years and her mystical life began in earnest only after that marriage ended. And she was a woman of considerable rank and money, which is a large part of why anyone in Rome or Avignon took her letters seriously.

The Life: Finsta, the Court, and the Road to Rome

Bridget was born about 1303 at Finsta in Uppland, north of Stockholm. Her father, Birger Persson, was the lawman of Uppland and one of the richest men in Sweden, involved in the compilation of the provincial law. Her mother Ingeborg died when Bridget was a child, and she was raised partly by an aunt.

She was married at about thirteen to Ulf Gudmarsson, a young nobleman who became lord of Närke. The marriage lasted twenty-eight years and produced eight children, four sons and four daughters. They ran an estate, and Bridget's biographers describe her organising care for the poor and the sick from the household. Around 1335 she was called to court to serve the new queen.

In about 1341 she and Ulf made the long pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and back. Ulf fell ill on the return journey and died in 1344 at the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra in Sweden, where Bridget then settled for a period. That is where the revelations began to come regularly, and where she first told the monks about them.

In 1349 she left Sweden for Rome, intending to be there for the Jubilee of 1350 and to obtain approval for the order she had been told to found. She never went home. She lived in Rome for the rest of her life, visited the shrines, worked among the poor of the city, wrote continuously, and made a final pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1372, where she visited Bethlehem. She died in Rome on 23 July 1373, aged about seventy. Her body was carried back to Sweden the following year.

Prophet to Popes

Bridget lived through the period when the popes resided at Avignon rather than Rome, and she regarded that as a catastrophe. She wrote to Clement VI, Innocent VI, Urban V and Gregory XI, in blunt terms, telling them to return to Rome and to reform the clergy, and warning of judgment if they did not.

She had one partial success. Urban V came back to Rome in 1367, and Bridget was in the city to see it. He returned to Avignon in 1370 and died soon after. Gregory XI finally brought the papacy back to Rome in 1377, four years after Bridget's death, with Catherine of Siena pressing him in the same way. The two women never met, and they are usually named together for this reason.

Her letters to kings were no gentler. She wrote to the king of Sweden about his government, and she wrote to the kings of England and France urging them to end the war between them. She was not a diplomat and had no office. She wrote on the basis that she had been told to.

The Revelations, and How the Church Judges Them

Bridget's visions were written down by her confessors, chiefly Matthias, a canon of Linköping, and two priests named Peter, one from Alvastra and one from Skänninge. They cover the Passion, the Nativity, the state of the Church, the clergy, the popes, individual rulers, and the souls of the dead.

Their reception was contested from the start. When her canonisation was proposed and again at the Councils of Constance and Basel in the fifteenth century, theologians argued over whether the Revelations could be trusted. Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris, wrote his treatises on distinguishing true from false revelations with cases like hers in view. Cardinal Juan de Torquemada defended them. The Church canonised Bridget and confirmed the canonisation more than once, and it never declared the contents of her book to be doctrine.

The rule that applies

Catholic teaching draws a firm line here. Public revelation was completed in Christ and handed on by the apostles, and no later private revelation can add to it or correct it. The Catechism says that Christian faith cannot accept revelations that claim to surpass or correct the revelation of which Christ is the definitive Word (CCC 67). Approved private revelations, including those of canonised mystics, help the Church live the Gospel more fully in a particular period, and no Catholic is required to believe any of them.

Applied to Bridget: her holiness is certified by the Church, her book is not. A reader can take real profit from the Revelations and is free to leave any particular vision alone.

The Nativity vision

One vision changed European art. In Bethlehem in 1372 Bridget described seeing the Virgin kneeling in adoration before her newborn Son, who lay on the ground radiating light that outshone the candle Joseph had brought. Painters across the West took that up within a generation, and the kneeling Madonna adoring the Child on the ground, lit from within, is her image. If you have seen a Nativity painted that way, you have seen Bridget's vision.

The Bridgettine Order

Bridget founded the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, whose members are called Bridgettines. Urban V approved it in 1370, under the Rule of St. Augustine with Bridget's own constitutions attached, which is how new orders were commonly authorised after the Fourth Lateran Council restricted the creation of entirely new rules.

Its structure was unusual. A Bridgettine house was a double monastery of women and men, living in strictly separate enclosures and sharing one church, with the abbess holding authority over the temporal affairs of the whole community and a priest confessor responsible for the spiritual direction of the brothers. The traditional constitution set the numbers at sixty sisters and twenty-five men, thirteen priests, four deacons and eight lay brothers, making a community of eighty-five in memory of the apostles and disciples. The abbess held the place she did as a tribute to the Virgin Mary, who stood among the apostles.

The mother house at Vadstena in Sweden was established after Bridget's death under her daughter Catherine, and it became the religious and literary centre of medieval Sweden. The Reformation closed it in the sixteenth century. Bridgettine communities survived elsewhere in Europe, and a branch refounded in the twentieth century by St. Elisabeth Hesselblad brought the order back to Sweden and spread it further. The house in Rome where Bridget lived and died is a Bridgettine convent today.

Devotion to the Wounds of Christ

Bridget's Passion visions are the most detailed part of her writing, and devotion to the wounds of Christ is the strand of her spirituality that spread furthest. The Fifteen Prayers of St. Bridget, sometimes called the Fifteen Oes because each begins with an exclamation, take the reader through the sufferings of Christ from the agony in the garden to the moment of death, one meditation at a time.

A tradition attached to the prayers holds that Bridget asked Christ how many blows he received during the Passion and was told a precise number, usually given as 5,480. That number belongs to the devotional literature that grew up around the prayers in the late Middle Ages rather than to any teaching of the Church. Whether Bridget herself reported it is disputed, and nothing in Catholic doctrine depends on it.

The substance underneath is solid and worth keeping. Meditating on the Passion, wound by wound, has been standard Catholic practice for centuries, and it is the same instinct behind the Stations of the Cross and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.

The Fifteen Prayers and the Promises Attached to Them

This needs stating plainly, because the Fifteen Prayers circulate widely online with claims attached to them that the Church does not stand behind.

Printed versions of the prayers often carry a list of promises: that anyone who says them daily for a year will release a fixed number of souls from purgatory, convert a fixed number of sinners, be told the day of their death, or be assured of salvation. The Holy See has stated that the supernatural origin of those promises cannot be affirmed, and Catholic publishers have been directed to print the prayers without them.

The prayers themselves are permitted and are good prayers. The promises are the problem, and they should be dropped rather than passed on.

The reason matters more than the ruling. No prayer, devotion, medal or scapular functions as a guarantee, and Catholic teaching does not allow any practice to be sold or promoted as insurance against judgment. Devotions dispose a person to grace, and God remains free. Anyone offering a certainty in exchange for a formula has left Catholic ground. Our page on purgatory covers what the Church actually teaches about praying for the dead.

Feast Day, Patronage and Devotion

John Paul II named her a co-patroness of Europe together with Catherine of Siena and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, alongside the older patrons Benedict, Cyril and Methodius. The three women were chosen to represent different centuries and different parts of the continent, and Bridget stands for the Christian north.

Her patronage of widows comes straight from her life. She was married for twenty-eight years, and the whole of her public work belongs to the twenty-nine years after her husband died. Pilgrims visit Vadstena in Sweden, where her relics are kept, and the house in the Piazza Farnese in Rome where she lived.

The Tone of Her Letters

Lines circulate online under Bridget's name in wordings that cannot be traced to the Latin text of the Revelations, so this page describes her manner instead of putting quotation marks around a sentence she may never have written. Her surviving letters to popes and kings are severe, specific and repetitive. She names the abuse, names the person responsible, and states the judgment she believes is coming.

The motive underneath the severity is the part worth copying. She warned rulers because she wanted them saved, and she kept writing to men who had ignored every previous letter. A warning delivered for any other motive is something else, and readers of her Revelations in every century have noticed that hers never curdles into contempt.

What a Reader Can Take From Bridget

Marriage and family were the training, not the delay

Bridget ran an estate and raised eight children before any of the rest of it. The vocation that made her famous began when she was past forty. There is no phase of an ordinary life that has to be got out of the way first.

Say the uncomfortable thing to the person who needs to hear it

She wrote to four popes and several kings without any office entitling her to. She was frequently ignored and she kept writing. Most readers have a much smaller version of that letter to write.

Take the devotion and leave the promises

Her Passion prayers are worth praying. The guarantees printed alongside them are worth dropping. That habit, keeping the prayer and refusing the bargain, protects a Catholic from most of what circulates online under the name of devotion.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the feast day of St. Bridget of Sweden?

23 July, the day of her death in Rome in 1373. In some places the day of the translation of her relics to Vadstena has also been observed. She is not the same saint as St. Brigid of Kildare, the Irish saint whose feast is 1 February.

Are the Fifteen Prayers of St. Bridget approved by the Church?

The prayers themselves may be used. The promises often printed with them, including guarantees about souls released from purgatory and assurance of salvation, are not approved: the Holy See has stated that their supernatural origin cannot be affirmed and has directed that the prayers be published without them. No Catholic devotion works as a guarantee of salvation.

What are the Revelations of St. Bridget?

They are the collected visions she dictated between 1344 and her death, translated into Latin by her confessors and circulated as the Celestial Revelations. They cover the Passion, the Nativity, the state of the Church and the conduct of popes and rulers. They are private revelation: the Church canonised Bridget without making her book binding on anyone (CCC 67).

Why is St. Bridget a patron saint of Europe?

John Paul II named her a co-patroness of Europe on 1 October 1999, with Catherine of Siena and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, to stand alongside Benedict, Cyril and Methodius. Bridget was chosen as a northern European woman whose life joined Sweden and Rome and who worked for the unity and reform of the Church across the continent.

Was St. Bridget of Sweden married?

Yes. She married Ulf Gudmarsson at about thirteen and was married for twenty-eight years, with eight children. She began her public religious life as a widow after his death in 1344, which is why she is a patron of widows.

What is the Bridgettine order?

The Order of the Most Holy Saviour, approved in 1370, built around double monasteries of enclosed women and men sharing one church, with an abbess responsible for the temporal government of the whole house. Its mother house was Vadstena in Sweden. Communities survive today, and the branch refounded by St. Elisabeth Hesselblad in the twentieth century is the most widespread.