SAINT GERTRUDE
Abbess
(† c. 1302)
St. Gertrude was born in 1256 to a noble Saxon family, and at the age of five placed in the Benedictine abbey of Rodelsdorf for education. Her strong mind was carefully cultivated, and she wrote Latin with unusual elegance and force; above all, she was perfect in humility and mortification, in obedience, and in all monastic observances.
Her life was crowded with wonders. She has in obedience recorded some of her visions, in which she traces the intimate converse of her soul with Jesus and Mary. She was gentle to all, most gentle to sinners; filled with devotion to the Saints, to the souls in purgatory, and above all to the Passion of Our Lord and to His Sacred Heart.
She ruled her abbey with perfect wisdom and love for forty years. Her life was one of great and almost continual suffering, and her longing to be with Jesus was not granted till 1301 or 1302, when she had reached her forty-first year.