St. Gertrude the Great

Entrusted to the Benedictine monastery of Helfta in Saxony as a child of five, Gertrude was a brilliant student of literature and philosophy before a sudden encounter with Christ at the age of twenty-five turned her wholly to God. From that moment she set aside secular learning for Scripture and the Fathers, and she began to receive the visions and intimate conversations with the Lord that fill her writings.

Gertrude is one of the great early heralds of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, centuries before the revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Her Herald of Divine Love records a mysticism marked not by fear but by tenderness and confidence — she experienced God above all as overflowing love, and she invited souls to rest, as the apostle John did, upon the Heart of Christ.

She is the only woman saint honored with the title "the Great." Devoted to the souls in purgatory and to the liturgy of her community, she died at Helfta around 1302. Her spirituality of trust and divine friendship has nourished the Church ever since.