June 16, 2026

Repeats yearly forever

St. LutgardisLutgardis was born in what is now Belgium in the year of Our Lord 1182. She was a beautiful girl, mostly interested in fine clothing and worldly amusements, but when her potential dowry was lost, she was sent to a Benedictine convent. She seemed to have no vocation until she received a vision of Our Lord, while she was still a teenager. She immediately took Christ as her spouse, becoming a Benedictine nun. Lutgardis went on to experience many other visions of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints, accompanied by ecstasies, levitations, and miraculous bleeding from her forehead. Eventually she sought an even stricter rule than that of the Benedictines. Refusing the desire of her fellow sisters to make her their abbess, Lutgardis joined a Cistercian convent near Brussels on the advice of her friend St. Christina the Astonishing. For the last eleven years of her life, Lutgardis suffered from blindness, which she gratefully accepted as a gift from God that increased her detachment from the world. She received one of the first recorded revelations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Our Lord also revealed to her the exact day of her death, in the year of Our Lord 1246. Lutgardis is a patroness of the blind and otherwise handicapped, and of women in childbirth. More details »

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