Catherine of Vadstena

Catherine of Vadstena, also known as Catherine of Sweden and in Swedish as Katarina Ulfsdotter, was a fourteenth-century Swedish noblewoman and Bridgettine nun, and the daughter of Saint Bridget of Sweden. She was born at the family estate of Ulvåsa in Östergötland, in the kingdom of Sweden, around 1331 or 1332, one of the children of Bridget (Birgitta Birgersdotter) and Ulf Gudmarsson, lawspeaker of Närke and a leading member of the Swedish high nobility. She grew up in a household shaped both by aristocratic political life and by her mother’s already intense piety. While still in her early teens she was married to Eggert van Kyren, a nobleman. Tradition preserved by the later Bridgettine community holds that the marriage remained unconsummated and that the couple lived in continence; no children are recorded. Catherine continued practices of prayer and austerity associated with her mother’s circle.

In 1349 she accompanied Bridget on the journey from Sweden to Rome undertaken in view of the Jubilee of 1350. During her absence her husband died. Widowed while still young, she remained with her mother in Italy for more than twenty years, sharing Bridget’s life of penance, pilgrimage, and the reception of the Revelations. In 1372 she went with Bridget on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. After Bridget died in Rome in July 1373, Catherine took charge of her mother’s remains and of the small following that had gathered around her. She escorted the body north and brought it to Vadstena in Sweden, the site Bridget had designated for a double monastery of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour.

At Vadstena, Catherine worked to give lasting institutional form to her mother’s rule. She is regarded as the first abbess of Vadstena Abbey, the mother house of the Bridgettine Order. In the later 1370s she returned to Rome to seek further papal support for the Bridgettine constitutions and to advance the cause of her mother’s canonization. She then went back to Sweden and governed the community at Vadstena, combining monastic observance with care for the poor. She died at Vadstena on 24 March 1381 and was buried in the abbey church. Bridget herself was canonized only in 1391, after Catherine’s death.

Devotion to Catherine grew at Vadstena and in other Bridgettine houses during the fifteenth century. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII authorized her public veneration, an act later treated as equivalent to canonization for a figure of the pre-Congregation period. Her feast is kept on 24 March. She is invoked especially against miscarriage and abortion. Together with her mother she is a central figure in the religious history of late medieval Sweden and in the early expansion of the Bridgettine Order from Vadstena across northern Europe.