Recalling Gertrude
Patron Saint of Cats
Ah, the seventeenth of March. A day when most of the residents of the great outdated US of A uncover they’re Irish. Not a horrible factor. Not in any respect. But there’s an below appreciated saint because of having to share the date with tremendous saint, Patrick. Someone to know.
I first turned conscious of her as a result of of, effectively, cats.
And so, in the event you’re not aware of her, and take care of cats, I commend to your consideration and perhaps devotion, St Gertrude of Nivelles, whose feast can also be at present, the seventeenth of March.
Gertrude was born into the Aristocracy within the kingdom of Austrasia, in what’s at present Belgium, someplace round 628. Her father was Pepin of Landen, Mayor of the Merovingian Royal Palace.
After his loss of life Gertrude’s mom Itta based the Abbey of Nivelles. Gertrude had refused to marry regardless of her father’s insistence. She was intent on the monastic life. When her father died, the precise date shouldn’t be recognized, she adopted her mom in taking the veil.
It was an attention-grabbing time for faith. Christianity was in management, however it was principally an city factor, the countryside remained largely pagan. But there was an enthusiasm on the time which led to some of the nice monastic foundations. And Gertrude and her mom Itta’s work have been half of that flowering. The abbey was at first a convent of nuns, however with the arrival of a band of Irish monks turned a double monastery.
Gertrude was named the founding abbess of the monastery. Under her management the abbey was famend for studying and charity. She had a selected fondness for Irish monastics, and along with the monks who had joined, her abbey turned a resting place for Irish pilgrims.
In addition to scholarship and generosity of coronary heart, Gertrude started to be often called a visionary. She had a extensively reported imaginative and prescient of the “True Light,” At the altar “She saw descending above her a flaming pellucid sphere such that the whole basilica was illuminated by its brightness.” After her loss of life appeals to her intervention have been credited with a quantity of miracles.
She died on the seventeenth of March in 659. She’d been ailing for a time, usually believed to be because of her ascetic practices. Shortly earlier than her loss of life she named a successor as abbess. She was roughly thirty-three years outdated at her loss of life. And quickly after dying, the miracles started.
She was notably appealed to by vacationers, gardeners, for these affected by psychological sicknesses.
Why her affiliation with cats is a bit of a thriller. There is that safety towards rats which works means again. When the black loss of life got here within the early fifteenth century, some counsel her energy towards rats and cats and rats, led to the affiliation. I personally am unsure individuals knew of the affiliation between rats and the plague on the time, so I’m unsure about that.
It would seem that by the 20th century some related Gertrude with the goddess Frigg. And which will have larger antiquity, goddesses and nice abbesses usually discover their attributes intertwined. However it is just in modernity, by the Nineteen Eighties we discover Gertrude is totally related to cats.
A superb factor. Late, however as they are saying, higher late than by no means.
And with that, places Gertrude of Nivelles excessive on my private record of saints.
Icon of Gertrude discovered at CatGenie
