Ida of Louvain

Ida of Louvain (died around 1300) was a Cistercian nun in the 13th-century Low Countries (now the Netherlands and Belgium). She became a nun at the Roosendael Abbey, and a contested biography states that she experienced stigmata and mystical graces.[1] She is said to have had miraculous visions and corporeal encounters with appearances of the infant Jesus, where she would hold him, bathe him, play with him and dress him.[2][3] She was beatified by the Catholic Church for her piety and humility. Her feast day is April 13, granted by Pope Clement XI in 1719.[1][4] She is considered a saint in Catholicism.[2][1]

Life

Ida was born into a well-to-do family in Leuven, Duchy of Brabant (now Belgium). At the age of 22 she felt a religious vocation but her father was a worldly man who would not accept this and subjected her to various forms of ill-treatment to discourage her.[5] Despite parental disapproval, she first dedicated her life to God in a single cell, and later became a nun in the recently founded Cistercian Abbey of Roosendael (the Valley of the Roses) in what is now Sint-Katelijne-Waver. One historian has described her as adding "éclat" to the monastery.[6] She received the stigmata, wounds mirroring Christ's that appeared miraculously and would not heal.[7] The only record of her life is in a series of letters by her confessor, a priest named Hugh.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Michael J. Walsh (2007). A New Dictionary of Saints: East and West. Liturgical Press. p. 275. ISBN 978-0-8146-3186-7.
  2. 1 2 David Herlihy (1995). Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe. Berghahn. pp. 170–171. ISBN 978-1-57181-024-3.
  3. Constance Classen (2012). The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. University of Illinois Press. pp. 86–87. ISBN 978-0-252-09440-8.
  4. Basil Watkins (ed.), The Book of Saints (7th ed., London, 2002), p. 273.
  5. Alphonse Le Roy, "Ida ou Ide (la bienheureuse)", Biographie Nationale de Belgique, vol. 10 (Brussels, 1889), 6-7.
  6. Alphonse Wauters, Histoire des environs de Bruxelles, vol. 3, p. 662.
  7. The Cistercian fathers, or, Lives and legends of certain saints and blessed of the Order of Citeaux, tr. by H. Collins. 1872. pp. 163–170.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/1/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.