St. Bridget of Sweden (1304-1373), from an early age, had visions of the crucified Christ. She lived her married life in the court of the Swedish king Magnus II. Mother of eight children, Bridget lived the strict life of a penitent after her husband’s death. She had been given land and buildings to found a monastery for men and women. This group eventually expanded into the Religious Order known today as the Bridgetines. In 1350, a year of jubilee, St. Bridget braved a plague-stricken Europe to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Although she never returned to Sweden, her years in Rome were far from happy, being hounded by debts and by opposition to her work against Church abuses. A final pilgrimage to the Holy Land, marred by shipwreck and the death of her son Charles eventually led to her death in 1373.
St. Maria Elizabeth Hesselblad, (1870–1957), was a Swedish Catholic religious sister who founded a new, active, branch of the Bridgettines known as the Bridgettine Sisters. St. Hesselblad is today recognized by Jews as a “Righteous Among The Nations” due to her efforts during World War II saving the lives of Jews caught up in the genocide of the Holocaust. Pope St. John Paul II beatified her on April 9, 2000 and Pope Francis canonized her June 5, 2016 at Saint Peter’s Square.
At the end of an ecumenical trip to Sweden in 2016, Pope Francis celebrated the solemnity of All Saints with at Mass in Malmo stadium. Catholic News Service reported that the Pope highlighted the lives of these two Swedish saints, St. Bridget and St. Elizabeth, who had both prayed and worked to create bonds of unity and fellowship among Christians and all peoples. These women were both messengers of God’s mercy and tenderness, Pope Francis said. The Pontiff was sure they will receive from God their merited rewards. These saints are blessed because they were faithful and meek and cared for others, Pope Francis continued. The best description of these saints, in fact, their “identity card,” the pope reported, is found in the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which famously begins, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (and which happily forms the Gospel for this coming Sunday’s Mass).
As good Christians, all saints have done throughout the ages what Christ’s followers today are called to do, observed the Pope. All today must confront the troubles and anxieties of our own age with the spirit and love of Jesus. Insisting that new situations require new energy and new commitments, His Holiness then offered a new list of six beatitudes for modern Christians.
1.Blessed are those who remain faithful while enduring evils inflicted on them by others, forgiving them from their heart. 2. Blessed are those who look into the eyes of the abandoned and marginalized and show them their closeness. 3. Blessed are those who see God in every person and strive to make others discover Him. 4. Blessed are those who protect and care for our common home. 5. Blessed are those who renounce their own comfort in order to help others. 6. Blessed are those who pray and work for full communion between Christians.
These beatitudes from Pope Francis in our own day as well as the Gospel beatitudes from Christ’s time continue the same practical spirit found in the ancient Psalm 146 (which is this Sunday’s psalm response), which was certainly sketched out many centuries before the Christian era. The psalmist prayed: “The LORD keeps faith forever, secures justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets captives free. The LORD gives sight to the blind; the LORD raises up those who were bowed down. The LORD loves the just; the LORD protects strangers. The fatherless and the widow the LORD sustains, but the way of the wicked he thwarts.”
And not to be outdone, this Sunday St. Paul affirms the same, perennial beatitude spirit: “God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God (1 Cor.1:28).” In every generation, ancient Jewry, early Christianity, medieval Sweden, and modern America, true blessedness is written in words of service, and service especially to the broken, bruised, beaten and bereft within society.
