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Hildegard von Bingen, a German 12th-century Benedictine nun, is the first woman to be officially recognized as a “prophetess” by the Catholic Church. She was was noted as a mystic, a theologian, a poet, a composer and a scientist.
On Thursday (May 10), Benedict ordered Hildegard, who died in 1179, to be inscribed “in the catalogue of saints,” thus extending her cult “to the universal church.”
Though revered as a saint for centuries, the visionary abbess has only just now been officially recognised.
Pope Benedict has often quoted her writings to express his vision for the Church. In December 2010, used one of Hildegard’s visions to assess the damage done to the church by the sex abuse scandal, and to invite the Vatican hierarchy to accept this “humiliation” as an “an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal.”
“In the vision of St. Hildegard, the face of the church is stained with dust. … Her garment is torn — by the sins of priests. The way she saw and expressed it is the way we have experienced it this year,” he said.
He has also referred to Hildegard, when calling for reform inside the church, sparked by the “abuses of the clergy.” Benedict recalled how the saint had “harshly reprimanded” those who in her lifetime wanted “radical reform,” reminding them that “true renewal” comes from “repentance” and “conversion, rather than with a change of structures.”
In Hildegard’s lifetime, Pope Eugenius III, fighting the Cathar heresy that rejected the church’s worldly power, authorized her to preach in public. She used her unprecedented role to publicly rebuke the emperor and to call on the pope and bishops to reform the church’s ills.
In the 20th century, feminist scholars such as Rosemary Radford Ruether have recognized Hildegard as an early “Christian feminist.” “It is not surprising then that feminist history and theology have devoted much effort in rediscovering this figure,” historian Lucetta Scaraffia wrote on Thursday in a front-page article in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s semiofficial newspaper.
In 2006, Benedict himself drew on Hildegard to expound his thinking on women’s role in the church: not as priests but as bearers of a “spiritual power” that enables them to, yes, even “criticize the bishops.”
Full Story: Huffington Post
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