St. Bridget of Sweden

About this book

After a discussion of the Bridgintine Breviary, given by Our Lord to Saint Bridget we proceed to her life. THE. life of a saint who, played so important a part in the history of her time as St. Bridget of Sweden seems to require a slight sketch of the state of Europe, of the Church, and especially of the Papacy, during the period in which she lived, 1808-78, as a prelude to her biography and as a help to the understanding of her work and character. She lived throughout the greater part of the fourteenth century. Now the. watchword of that century was 'Reform.' In 1811, when Clement V consulted William Durandus as to how to hold the Council of Vienna, he answered, 'The Church ought to be reformed in its head and in its members.' The reformation of the clergy, and especially of the religious, Orders, was the leading idea of the time among thoughtful churchmen; it was, as we should say, 'in the air.' It rang through all the fourteenth century, and it's octave note was struck at the Council of Pisa in 1409. As this idea of reformation developed, it became twofold: there was the reformation desired by loyal Catholics, the friends of the Church, and there was, later on the so-called reformation desired, and unfortunately accomplished only too successfully, by the enemies of the Church, those schismatics and heretics known as the Protestant Reformers. It is sometimes said that St. Bridget was a pioneer of the Reformers. If by this is meant that she belonged to the Catholic Reformers, the true sons of the Church, it is true; but no one would have detested more the heresies of Luther, Huss, Calvin, and Knox, and the rest of the Protestant Reformers, than the Swedish seer had she lived in their time. Laxity in the observance of monastic discipline, especially with regard to the precept of Holy Poverty, had crept into most of the religious Orders, and a reaction had set- in among the Franciscans, and had led to quarrels between the two parties, among the Friars Minor, of the 'spirituals' and the 'conventuals.' The spirituals went to the length of maintaining that a friar had no right of property even in his own food; but they were theP1selves split up into several parties. While St. Bridget was still a child, Pope John XXII published his celebrated constitutions, condemning the Fraticelli and their communistic ideas. Then arose another dispute, when the General of the Franciscan Order land our William Ockham, known as the 'invincible doctor, ' also a Friar Minor, maintained that Our Lord and His Apostles possessed nothing, either individually or in common; they and their followers belonged to a school of philosophic thought called the Nominalists. A year later John XXII published a second decree pronouncing this to be heresy, and, as the authors of it persisted in teaching it, he excommunicated them, and they went over to the party of the Emperor, Louis of Bavaria. Notwithstanding these decrees, the echoes of these disputes were heard when St. Bridget was in Italy, in 1350-73, pursuing her great work of bringing the Popes back from A vignon to Rome.