Gertrude the Great

Gertrude the Great, also known as Gertrude of Helfta, was a German Benedictine nun, mystic, and spiritual writer of the later thirteenth century. Tradition records that she was born on 6 January 1256 at Eisleben in Thuringia, in the Holy Roman Empire. When she was about five years old she was placed in the monastery of Helfta, near Eisleben, a house of nuns distinguished for learning and for a rich liturgical and contemplative life. There she grew up under Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn and was educated with other girls of the community, among them the mystic Mechthilde of Hackeborn. Helfta observed the Benedictine Rule with marked Cistercian influence and became one of the most important centers of women's religious culture in medieval Germany.

In her early years Gertrude excelled in the liberal arts, Latin, and the study of the Church Fathers and classical authors. She later wrote that she had for a time preferred secular learning to the life of prayer. About 1281, in her mid-twenties, she experienced a sudden conversion after a vision of Christ, which she understood as a call to turn from worldly studies to intimate friendship with God. From then on her life was marked by frequent mystical graces, a deep participation in the liturgy, and a particular devotion to the humanity of Christ and to his Heart. She is counted among the earliest Western witnesses to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Gertrude's principal writings survive in Latin. The Herald of Divine Love (Legatus divinae pietatis) comprises five books: the second book is substantially her own account of her inner experiences, while the other books were assembled by sisters of Helfta from her revelations and conversations. She also composed the Spiritual Exercises, a cycle of prayers and meditations ordered to the liturgical year and to the soul's progress in conversion, consecration, and union with God. Together with Mechthilde of Hackeborn and, for a period, Mechthild of Magdeburg, she made the Helfta community a focal point of thirteenth-century German mysticism. Her pages emphasize divine mercy, liturgical prayer, and intercession for the living and the dead.

She died at Helfta on or about 17 November 1302, though some sources give the year as 1301. Gertrude was never the object of a formal canonization process of the later Roman type, but veneration of her holiness spread in Benedictine circles and beyond. Her name was inserted in the Roman Martyrology in the seventeenth century, and her liturgical feast, kept on 16 November, was later extended more widely in the Latin Church. Pope Benedict XIV is associated with granting her the title the Great, which distinguishes her from other saints named Gertrude and acknowledges the weight of her teaching. She is invoked as a patron of the West Indies and of nuns, and her writings continued to nourish devotion to the Sacred Heart and prayer for the souls in purgatory in later centuries.