Virgin Gertrude

Saint Gertrude of Helfta, commonly called Gertrude the Great, was a German Benedictine nun, mystic, and spiritual writer of the thirteenth century. She was born in 1256 in Thuringia; the precise locality of her birth is not recorded in surviving sources. At the age of five she was given to the monastery of Helfta near Eisleben in Saxony, a Benedictine community that observed Cistercian customs and was then a notable center of learning under Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn. There she received a thorough education in Latin, the liberal arts, Scripture, and both sacred and secular literature. For a number of years she devoted herself chiefly to these studies, a period she later regarded as one of spiritual distraction.

In 1281 Gertrude underwent a spiritual conversion after a vision in which Christ appeared to her and called her to a life of intimate friendship with him. She thereafter turned from purely academic pursuits to prayer, lectio divina, and the liturgy. Over the following decades she received numerous revelations concerning the humanity of Christ, especially the Sacred Heart, the mysteries of the Mass and the Divine Office, and the mercy of God toward sinners and the souls in Purgatory. She served her community as a spiritual guide while remaining within the cloister. Together with Mechthild of Hackeborn, and in the wake of Mechthild of Magdeburg's earlier residence at Helfta, she helped make the monastery one of the principal centers of female mysticism in the medieval West.

Her principal writings are the Herald of Divine Love (Legatus divinae pietatis), a five-book account of her visions compiled in part by her sisters from her own reports, and the Spiritual Exercises, a series of meditations arranged according to the liturgical year and the theme of spiritual nuptials. These works display a strongly Christocentric and liturgical piety and are among the earliest extended treatments of devotion to the Heart of Jesus. A widely circulated prayer for the souls in Purgatory has long been associated with her name, though modern scholars debate the exact attribution of that particular text.

Gertrude spent her entire adult life in the cloister of Helfta and died there on 17 November 1302. She was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later juridical type. Her liturgical cult was recognized when her name was entered in the Roman Martyrology, and Pope Benedict XIV later bestowed on her the rare title the Great. Her feast is kept in the General Roman Calendar on 16 November. She is invoked as patroness of the West Indies, of travelers, of nuns, and of those recently deceased. Although the original monastery of Helfta was later destroyed and the community dispersed, her writings continued to circulate after they were printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and remain important sources for the history of medieval women's spirituality and of Sacred Heart devotion.