St. Hildegard of Bingen

Offered to God as a child and raised by an anchoress beside a Benedictine monastery on the Rhine, Hildegard became abbess of her community and one of the most extraordinary figures of the Middle Ages. From childhood she received visions of a "living light," and at forty-three, on divine command, she began to write them down — producing Scivias and two further visionary works that won the approval of popes and the admiration of all Europe.

Her genius overflowed every boundary set for a medieval woman. She composed soaring liturgical music and the first known morality play, wrote treatises on medicine and the natural world, corresponded with emperors, bishops, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and undertook preaching tours along the Rhine — almost unheard of for a woman of her time. She founded independent monasteries at Rupertsberg and Eibingen, governing them with firm wisdom.

Hildegard saw all creation as a "symphony" of God’s glory and called herself "a feather on the breath of God." In 2012, more than eight centuries after her death in 1179, Pope Benedict XVI named her a Doctor of the Church — one of only four women so honored.