St. Gertrude the Great and the Prayer for a Thousand Souls
Her name is on the best-known prayer for the holy souls. The woman behind it is worth knowing too.
November is the month the Church gives to the dead, and one prayer goes around more than any other in it:
Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the holy souls in purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal Church, those in my own home and within my family. Amen.
It usually comes with a promise: that Our Lord told St. Gertrude the Great that each time it is said, a thousand souls are released from purgatory. Her feast is November 16. She is worth meeting properly, and the promise is worth tracing.
A child at Helfta
Gertrude was born on the feast of the Epiphany in 1256. Nothing is known of her parents or her birthplace. At five she was placed in the convent of Helfta, near Eisleben in Saxony, to be raised and taught, which was a common thing to do with a daughter at the time.
She landed in one of the most learned houses in Europe. The abbess, Gertrude of Hackeborn (no relation), believed nuns should study, and her sister Mechtilde, herself a mystic, became the child’s teacher. The Beguine writer Mechthild of Magdeburg spent her last years in the same house. Gertrude learned Latin and the liberal arts, music and the painting of miniatures, and loved all of it. Later she looked back on those years as time spent on the wrong things, and asked God to forgive her for them.
Twenty-five
In Advent of 1280 she grew weary of her studies, and on 27 January 1281, toward Compline, the night prayer, she saw a young man who took her by the hand. She knew him by the wounds.
Her biographer put the change in one line, which Pope Benedict XVI quoted when he spoke about her in 2010: “from a grammarian she became a theologian.” From then on she read Scripture and the Fathers of the Church instead of the classics, and she began to write.
What she wrote
Her great book is The Herald of Divine Love, in five parts. The second she wrote in her own hand, beginning on Holy Thursday of 1289; the others were written by one or more of her sisters at Helfta, partly from her dictation. She also wrote seven Spiritual Exercises, which run from the grace of baptism to the preparation for death.
One page of the Herald has never stopped being read. On the feast of St. John the Evangelist, it says, she rested her head near the wound in Christ’s side and heard His heart beating. She asked John, who had leaned on that breast at the Last Supper, why his Gospel said nothing about it. He told her that the sweetness of that heartbeat had been kept for a later age, when the world had grown cold and would need it.
That is devotion to the Sacred Heart, written down nearly four hundred years before St. Margaret Mary Alacoque made it famous.
Where the thousand souls come from
Gertrude did care for the dead. The old Catholic Encyclopedia singles out her “tender sympathy towards the souls in purgatory.”
But the promise is not in anything she wrote, and nobody has found where the number came from. The prayer itself, in the words above, is attributed to her, but it does not appear in her writings either. The Church has never attached a number to it, and it is not among the prayers the Church has indulgenced.
None of that is a reason not to say it. The prayer gets the important thing right: it joins your prayer to the Mass, which is the greatest thing the Church offers for the dead. Praying for the dead is older than Christianity itself, since the Second Book of Maccabees praises Judas Maccabeus for it, and the first Christians kept the custom.
The Church does make one offer with a definite promise. On each of the first eight days of November, a plenary indulgence, applicable to the souls in purgatory, is granted to anyone who visits a cemetery and prays for the dead, with the usual conditions: confession, Communion, a prayer for the Pope’s intentions, and turning away from all attachment to sin.
The Great
Gertrude died at Helfta on 17 November, in 1301 or 1302, at about forty-six. She was never canonized in the formal way that is usual now. Rome approved a liturgical office in her honor in 1606, which counts as the equivalent, and later extended her feast to the whole Church.
Pope Benedict XIV gave her the title “the Great,” partly to tell her apart from her abbess of the same name. Benedict XVI called her the only German woman to be called Great. Her feast falls on November 16 in most of the Church, and on the 17th in Germany.
Helfta itself did not last: the community was closed during the Reformation. But in 1999 Cistercian nuns from the abbey of Seligenthal in Bavaria refounded it, and there are sisters praying there again, where she prayed for the dead seven hundred years ago.
If you say her prayer this month, say it the way she would have: not to count souls, but because the dead are still ours.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.