By DEB PIROCH
Not all of us are so holy that St. Thomas à Kempis witnessed to some of our miracles. Such was the saintliness of Blessed Lydwina of Schiedam, Holland, born Palm Sunday, 1380, into a poor family of nine children. With four older and four younger brothers, she was a lively and fine child up until the age of 15, and devoted to the Blessed Virgin. We know this, and that she had already taken a vow of perpetual virginity. But that winter she had been ill, and not fully recovered, and went out to ice skate and fell. At the time she was believed to have broken a rib, which led to illness the rest of her life.
Today? She is venerated often by ice skaters and those with chronic illness. For until Easter Sunday 1433, she suffered unceasingly — for the next 38 years. Even Butler’s Lives prefers not to mention all the details of her illnesses, deeming them perhaps too grotesque. It seems her broken rib became an internal abscess that led to vomiting. She progressively had pain — headaches, toothaches, sores, more vomiting, and became bedridden. Her sores became gangrenous but while one doctor healed the latter, this caused swelling presumably associated today with congestive heart failure. She would pass out. And her features were disfigured by a crack down the middle of her face, while other parts of her body had “neuritis,” causing nerve pain.
Moreover, her one eye became blind, and the other could bear hardly any light because it was so sensitive. She could not really move and had fevers frequently. She also bled copiously and parts of her body were open.
Miraculously, she also took no food nor drink but the Eucharist for the last nineteen years of her life, as sworn to by witnesses. She literally could not keep down anything else. When I speak of open areas, one description seems to imply pressure had to be exerted on her abdomen to allow her to receive enough water to gargle down the sacred Host. Her body had to be wrapped when moved.
And yet, we are told she ached with all her natural self for the things we all wish: health, vigor, and youth. Only with great self-control exerted over years was she able to import upon herself that her new role in life was to be a victim in expiation for the sins of mankind, to offer her suffering in union with Christ. Initially she received little spiritual consolation from the village priest, and the Host only about once a year and on holy days. One day the priest brought her an unconsecrated host for communion, but in doing so was testing her, because he did not believe easily in anything miraculous. However, her body literally rejected it and she spat it out, unable to swallow.
The priest feigned indignation but she was angry in turn, accusing him of perpetrating a falsehood, telling him she could not swallow anything at this time but the true Host. She knew it could not be the Body and Blood of Christ. Eventually an investigation by the bishop cleared her of any deception and sometime thereafter, she received Communion every two weeks till the end of her life. She had suffered without it; it was her only nourishment, physical and spiritual.
This brought her to a point of spiritual development where she had mystical visions and experiences with our Lord, the saints, and the angels. She was also given the gift of prophecy. She was able to heal others, if not herself. Indeed, she had been brought to feel even joy at her suffering and said that had a Hail Mary been able to reduce her own suffering, she would not have uttered it. She instead added to her own weighty offerings — for instance, sleeping on a hard bed instead of a mattress, though she spent the last thirty years of her life in bed. Any alms she received, she gave away. She may have had trances and ecstasies, but for seven years barely slept.
St. Thomas à Kempis also rewrote her biography from an earlier version of her life by Fr. John Brugman, OFM, and that in its turn was based upon sources such as her confessor, a relative of Lydwina’s and people who knew her in town. For witnesses to have sworn for almost two decades that she subsisted on only the Eucharist untruthfully, it would have required the complicity of St. Thomas à Kempis, the town, the magistrates . . . totally impossible.
Rather, it is with skepticism that we read one online medical summary about her, which wants to define her case as simply but unscientifically multiple sclerosis. The rest of her symptoms which do not fit, the summary merely attempts to define as exaggerations of the period based upon faith.
Lydwina, thankfully, always had the love, belief, and support of her family. Instead of creating a stench, her sickroom smelled of perfume. She dreamt she would see a rose bush before she died — and she did — and so she is often pictured with same rose bush. She was buried nearby and her house became a chapel for the Grey Sisters, but this was sadly destroyed by Calvinists.
Lydwina’s relics were moved for safekeeping to Brussels but later returned to Schiedam, Holland in 1871. Not too long after, in 1890, Pope Leo XIII officially put the stamp on her already unofficial beatification.
One writer pointed out that her name, “Lydwina,” is a corruption of the Dutch “Lijd-wijt,” meaning, “suffering widely.” Let us conclude by mentioning her great devotion to the Holy Souls in Purgatory, due in part to a vision shown to her by her guardian angel.
Her sufferings helped convert a sinner she knew, who had made a good Confession but then died soon afterwards. There was not much time for remission of punishment due to sin. She asked her angel, though, what had become of him and was told he remained in the outermost part of Purgatory. This was shown to be like a prison, a loud and terrifying place, along the edge of a wall that bordered Hell. Her angel asked at each step in her vision if she wished to see more, so frightened was she, but Lydwina told her angel yes. As they approached, she looked down:
“Our virgin saw appear at the mouth of the pit a spirit all on fire, resembling incandescent metal, which said to her in a voice scarcely audible, ‘O Lydwina, servant of God, who will give me to contemplate the face of the Most High?’ The sight of this soul, a prey to the most terrible torment of fire, gave our saint such a shock that the cincture which she wore around her body was rent in twain; and, no longer able to endure the sight, she awoke suddenly from her ecstasy. The persons present, perceiving her fear, asked her its cause. ‘Alas!’ she replied, ‘how frightful are the prisons of Purgatory!’” — Fr. François Xavier Schouppe, SJ.
A few days later, Lydwina was shown that this soul was released from the well of fire and in normal Purgatory. However, she did not cease praying till she saw the gates of Heaven opened to him. Let us therefore follow the example of Blessed Lydwina of Schiedam and offer up our sufferings now — for ourselves, others, and the Poor Souls, so that we, too, may all achieve Heaven the sooner, through her intercession.
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