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The saints

St. Hildegard of Bingen

A nun who saw visions from childhood, preached in cathedrals, and wrote music still sung today.

Feast: 17 September · 1098 to 1179 · The Middle Ages · Rhineland, Germany

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The Abbey of St. Hildegard above Rüdesheim: a red sandstone church with two square towers over vineyards.

DXR, 2014. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

Home / The saints / St. Hildegard of Bingen

The Abbey of Disibodenberg, Rhineland, 1106

A noble family brings their eight-year-old daughter to a Benedictine abbey.1

Since childhood she has been seeing visions, and she will one day dictate them to a monk.1

For decades she kept silent. Then the pope told her to write and to speak.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers her as a Benedictine abbess and Doctor of the Church.

01St. Hildegard of Bingen

Authorized to speak

St. Bernard of Clairvaux encouraged her, and in 1147 Pope Eugene III authorized her to write and to speak in public.1

Around 1150 she founded a monastery on the hill of Rupertsberg, near Bingen, moving there with twenty sisters.1

She traveled to preach even in public squares and cathedrals, at Cologne, Trier, Mainz and elsewhere, something unusual for a woman at that time.1

02St. Hildegard of Bingen

Doctor of the Church

She died at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179.1

Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Universal Church in 2012.1

The Abbey of St. Hildegard above Rüdesheim: a red sandstone church with two square towers over vineyards.
The Abbey of St. Hildegard above Rüdesheim on the Rhine, home of her Benedictine community today. DXR, 2014. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

Live it this week

Make something beautiful for God

Hildegard wrote music still sung today. This week, make one thing for God with your hands: a song, a sketch, a loaf of bread for a neighbor, a garden bed. Offer it to Him when you’re done.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Pope Benedict XVI, Apostolic Letter proclaiming St. Hildegard of Bingen a Doctor of the Church, 7 October 2012. Holy See, official English text. vatican.va

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.