Bridget of Sweden's Revelations: a prophetess between Rome and Avignon
Saint Bridget of Sweden, fourteenth-century visionary: the Revelationes, the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, her appeals to the popes and the Bethlehem vision.
In the fourteenth century, while the papacy resided at Avignon and Europe was scarred by plague and the Hundred Years' War, a Swedish noblewoman became one of the most listened-to prophetic voices in Christendom. Birgitta Birgersdotter, born around 1303 into a powerful family of Uppland, received hundreds of visions during her life, which her confessors translated into Latin and gathered in the Revelationes, one of the most widely read visionary works of the late Middle Ages.
From the Swedish court to her vocation
Married very young to Ulf Gudmarsson, Bridget had eight children, among them Catherine, later also venerated as a saint. For a time she served as a lady at the court of King Magnus Eriksson. After a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela made with her husband, Ulf died around 1344, and from then on the widow devoted herself entirely to religious life, living near the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra.
In these years her visions became frequent. Bridget reported receiving messages from Christ and the Virgin, which her confessors, in particular Canon Matthias of Linköping and Prior Peter of Alvastra, wrote down. In one of these visions she received the rule of a new religious order, that of the Most Holy Saviour, whose mother house would rise at Vadstena.
Warnings to popes and kings
In 1349 Bridget left for Rome ahead of the jubilee of 1350, and she never returned to Sweden. From the city, which seemed to her decayed and abandoned by the popes, she sent letters and messages to the popes at Avignon, urging them to bring the apostolic see back to Rome and to reform the Church. In her revelations the prophetic word often takes the tone of rebuke, addressed to rulers, bishops and the curia itself.
When Urban V, who had returned to Rome in 1367, decided to leave again for Avignon in 1370, Bridget told him that the return to France would be fatal to him; the pope died a few months after his arrival. Her revelations also addressed the war between France and England, proposing paths to peace. The approval of her order's rule in 1370 was an important recognition of her authority.
The vision at Bethlehem
In 1372, already elderly, Bridget made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At Bethlehem she had a vision of the Nativity that was to have a profound influence on European art. She saw the Virgin kneeling in prayer and the Child laid naked on the ground, shining with a light that outshone the candle held by Joseph. This image spread through fifteenth-century painting, replacing in many works the traditional scene of the Madonna lying beside the Child. Art historians recognise its echo in many Flemish and Italian Nativities.
Bridget died in Rome on 23 July 1373. Her body was taken back to Vadstena, and as early as 1391 Pope Boniface IX proclaimed her a saint. In 1999 John Paul II named her a co-patroness of Europe. Her Revelations, already printed in the fifteenth century, remain a valuable witness to how medieval prophecy could turn into political intervention and into new images of the sacred.