Lutgardis of Tongeren and the devotion to the Sacred Heart

Lutgardis was a 13th-century Belgian nun. She had a typical childhood, showing no particular religious inclinations, but at the age of 17, suddenly "the mystical life swept over her like a hurricane" (Jacques Leclercq): she had a vision of Christ, who showed her the wound on his side. Following this vision, she chose to give her life to God. At the convents of Tongeren and then of Aywiers, she had other mystical experiences (visions, levitations, ecstasies, stigmata). The apparition of 1199 is considered the first medieval vision of the Sacred Heart, whose devotion Lutgardis began to spread.

Détail de la vision de sainte Lutgarde sur le pont Charles de Prague/ ©CC BY 2.0/jimmyweee

Reasons to believe:

The life of Saint Lutgardis and the miracles observed both during her lifetime and posthumously, were recorded by Thomas de Cantimpré (d. 1272), an encyclopedist and spiritual friend of Lutgardis, and appear in the Acta Sanctorum (June, vol. 4), as well as in the Roman Martyrology.
In her youth, Lutgardis had no particular religious inclinations. Suddenly, at the age of 17, she heard the call to the monastic life. It was a huge change of direction that implied major life commitments: embracing poverty, obedience, and chastity. Why this choice? Her decision would make no sense unless she was in fact responding to Jesus' call.
Lutgardis's mystical experiences were witnessed by all the nuns in her community and many other people outside her convent.
St. Lutgardis's humility has gone down in history. For example, when she was elected prioress, she preferred to leave her community in order to continue living a hidden life. This character trait supports the argument of the veracity of what she experienced, since she never sought to draw attention to herself. It is only on the orders of her confessor that she transcribed her visions and other mystical events.
Lutgardis belonged to a monastic order that was traditionally skeptical or at least very prudent about visionary experiences. If the alleged facts were a fabrication or deception, the Cistercians would never have made her a model of holiness. Indeed, Lutgardis herself was cautious about her own mystical experiences, being aware that not all visions necessarily come from God.
The content of the vision of 1199 is in total harmony with other facts that were unknown to Lutgardis: the existence of the devotion to the Sacred Heart since the time of the Church Fathers; St. Bernard's reflection on the subject some 50 years earlier; the strong devotion of the mendicant orders to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the following decades; and above all, the perfect similarity between her experience and that of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque more than 470 years later. Such organic continuity across the centuries, both in the modalities of the vision and in the meaning of Jesus' words, is completely improbable in human terms.

Summary:

Juliette Verlinde (later Maria Lutgardis) was born in 1182, in Tongeren, a town now located in the Belgian province of Limburg. Her parents were wealthy bourgeois who were active in the social and cultural life of Flanders at the end of the 12th century. They were also involved in trade with northwest Europe, had civic responsibilities and made economic investments. Juliette was a normal child, at once cheerful, outgoing, playful, obedient to her parents, and good-natured. She had keen intellectual abilities, and made friends easily. Her religious education was sound but not excessive.

Unlike other mystics, the young Juliette showed no predisposition for the miraculous and had no early supernatural experiences. But in 1199, at age 17, a vision lasting only a few minutes was to mark her life forever: Jesus appeared to her and showed her the wound in his side. Our Lord spoke to her and invited her to give her life to him by becoming a contemplative nun. This vision is unique in history as it is the earliest known vision of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which represents God's love for mankind. Devotion to the Sacred Heart actually goes back to the Gospel, since the heart of Jesus was pierced during His Passion (Jn 19:34-37).

In the 12th century, St. Bernard, the founder of the Cistercian order and advisor to popes and princes, wrote beautiful pages on the "sacred wounds" of the Passion, explaining that the spear thrust into the side of the crucified Jesus by the Roman soldier had made manifest the love of his heart for mankind. It is striking to note that, after Saint Bernard’s intuition, it was a Cistercian nun, therefore a daughter of Saint Bernard, who was graced with such a vision.

The apparition of Jesus was not an optical illusion or a hallucination: Lutgardis describes the encounter as more real than reality. Above all, this event changed the saint's life forever: it was from this moment onwards that her monastic vocation emerged, something she had never mentioned before.

Lutgardis is the first link of a mystical "chain" on the theme of Jesus’ Heart: after her, other nuns, all or most of whom were proclaimed saints or blessed by the Church, had similar visions: St. Gertrude of Helfta (contemporary of Lutgardis), Mechtild of Hackeborn… down to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a 17th-century French Visitation nun whose revelations led Rome to institute the Feast of the Sacred Heart in 1765, extended to the universal Church in 1856.

The content of the 1199 vision is fully aligned with four elements that were obviously unknown to Lutgardis as they plunge back to centuries prior or relate to the distant future:

devotion to the Sacred Heart since the time of the Church Fathers,
the ever-relevant nature of this devotion as it had been practiced by St. Bernard and his Cistercian community some fifty years earlier,
the attachment to the Sacred Heart shown by the mendicant orders in the decades that followed,
and above all, the perfect resemblance between Lutgardis' vision of 1199 and that of Saint Margaret Mary more than 470 years later.

Such organic continuity spanning centuries, both in the modalities of vision and in the meaning of Jesus' words, surpasses human capability.

Lutgardis became a Benedictine nun at the monastery of Tongeren, which, in 1215, joined the reform of the Order undertaken by the Cistercians since the middle of the 12th century. In this community, Lutgardis was graced with extraordinary charisms, for the first time in her life. Nuns caught her levitating in the abbey church or in her cell. She also fell into ecstasies. Regarding this mystical occurrence, an ecstasy is a rapture in God that cannot be attributed to a psychological disorder. With respect to Lutgardis, she only fell into ecstasy outside times of duty, and would return to her senses when ordered to do so, showing perfect obedience to her superiors.

Just a few weeks after being admitted as a novice, Lutgardis experienced excruciating pain in her hands, feet, head and side. One day, the wounds of the Passion appeared on her body, letting far more blood than natural wounds should cause.

At the same time, she discovered that God had given her the gift of healing. Ever charitable and ready to help her sisters, she visited the sick in the infirmary after obtaining permission from the Mother Superior. One day, she held a suffering nun close to her heart. The next thing she knew, the nun was back to full health, even though preparations for her funeral were already underway! Other similar stories were reported.

However, one very solid reason for believing in the truth of these divine interventions lies in Lutgardis's constant discernment with regard to her own supernatural experiences and, as if that weren't enough, with regard to her own person. Three centuries before St. Teresa of Avila, Lutgardis was wary of visions, because she knew - without ever having learned this from books - that these manifestations can sometimes originate from diabolical suggestions or one’s imagination.

Another reason to believe in Lutgardis' mystical experiences is the reliable character and theological soundness of her spiritual confessors. One of them, Thomas de Cantimpré (1201-1270), was a Dominican theologian, canon, former student of St. Albert the Great, then professor of philosophy and theology in his own right.

Lutgardis lived the humility proper to her order to an exceptional degree. So much so, in fact, that when her sisters elected her prioress at the young age of 25 (she had very little experience of monastic life at the time), she made the radical decision to escape this honor, which she didn't think she deserved, asking to change monasteries to continue leading a recluse life. She joined the Cistercian community of Aywiers, in Walloon Brabant, where she spent the rest of her life.

The mother tongue of the Aywiers sisters was French, but Lutgardis spoke and understood only Dutch on her arrival. For months, she was distressed by her slowness in learning this new language, failing to learn it properly after a good two years. In 1234, she became blind, and remained so for the last twelve years of her life. Christ foretold her death on June 16, 1246.

Modern detractors have tried to denounce Lutgardis' biographical details as being full of fanciful miraculous stories. In reality, every fact we mentioned is historically true, even if some details may have been aggrandized by well-meaning chroniclers to make up for Lutgardis’ omissions. This has been the case with many competent and informed chroniclers (for example, the poet Franck Bruntano, Blessed Anne-Catherine Emmerich's "secretary" in the early 19th century) who, enthused by their subject, sometimes enlarged the "miraculous" elements in the mystics’ biography.

Patrick Sbalchiero

Beyond reasons to believe:

A woman of action and a mystic, like Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Lutgardis continued to live a faithful, deep religious life after she went blind for twelve years - until her death. Her human and religious influence, both during her lifetime and throughout the centuries, and her mission to propagate the spirituality of the Sacred Heart, make Lutgardis one of the most important mystics of the Middle Ages.

Going further:

Zita Wenker, “Following the Lamb Wherever He Goes: The Story of St Lutgardis”, Medieval Women Monastics: Wisdom’s Wellsprings, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 1996, p. 197-214.