St. Brigid of Sweden

Summary

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Catholic Saints Podcast: St. Brigid of Sweden

Augustine Institute | July 23, 2026
Hosts: Dr. Elizabeth Klein & Dr. Jessica Murdoch

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Catholic Saints podcast, hosted by Dr. Elizabeth Klein and Dr. Jessica Murdoch, shines a spotlight on St. Brigid (Bridget) of Sweden—a mystic, noblewoman, wife, mother, order founder, and active participant in the ecclesial and political life of her time. The conversation delves into her remarkable journey from medieval noblewoman to visionary religious leader, highlighting themes of vocation, family holiness, and active discipleship in challenging times.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. St. Brigid’s Early Life and Family

• Noble Origins:
  Brigid was born in 1303 to a royal, deeply pious Swedish family, related to another saint, St. Ingrid.

  “She comes from a very pious family that already included a saint, Saint Ingrid, as a relative.” (02:18, Dr. Murdoch)

• Childhood Vision:
  At age 10, she saw a vision of Christ crucified; a foundational spiritual experience.

  “‘Look at me, my daughter.’ … [Christ] goes on to tell her that it is those who refuse his love.” (02:33, Dr. Murdoch)

2. Marriage, Motherhood, and Holiness in Family Life

• Early Marriage:
  Married at 13 to Prince Ulfo (a pious Christian), with whom she had eight children—including St. Catherine of Sweden.
• Pattern of Holy Families:
  Hosts note a recurring theme: “It seems like holy women have the habit of creating holy families, so it’s a good blessing.” (03:13, Dr. Klein)
• Family to Religious Life:
  After raising children, Brigid and her husband agreed to separate so he could join the Cistercians—a more common occurrence in medieval Europe than today.

  “Bridget and Ulfo separated by mutual consent ... so that Ulfo could enter the Cistercian order.” (03:24, Dr. Murdoch)

3. Founding the Order of St. Savior (Brigittines)

• Monastic Leadership:
  Brigid founded the Order of St. Savior, known as the Brigittines, centered around charitable works, prayer, and renewal in the Church.

  “Bridget, for her part, founded a new order, the Order of Saint Savior, which is known today as the Brigantines.” (03:51, Dr. Murdoch)

4. Widowhood and Mystical Experience

• Death of Husband and Visions:
  Ulfo died during a pilgrimage; afterward Brigid’s mystical experiences intensified.
• Pilgrimage and Suffering:
  She herself then undertakes pilgrimages, including to the Holy Land, experiencing Christ’s passion in a new way.

  “Her husband died in 1344 on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. And after that, it seems that she really picked up as a visionary.” (04:20, Dr. Murdoch)

• Dangerous Pilgrimages:
  Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages was risky and often penitential—a far cry from modern travel.

  “Pilgrimage was often undertaken even under orders as a penance because it was very dangerous ... You maybe didn’t have enough money or food to get the whole way ...” (05:23, Dr. Klein)

5. Active Leadership and Church Reform

• Church and Politics:
  Brigid intervened in pressing Church issues, notably urging the Pope to return to Rome from Avignon—much like St. Catherine of Siena, but less known for it.

  “She even urged the Pope personally to return from Avignon to Rome.” (04:57, Dr. Murdoch) “She’s so much like Catherine of Siena.” (05:15, Dr. Klein)

• Responding to God’s Call in Each Season:
  Brigid's life is mapped as a succession of vocations—noblewoman, wife, mother, widow, religious founder, church reformer.

  “She really sort of surrendered herself to wherever God wanted her to be and what God wanted her to be doing at a given time ...” (07:06, Dr. Murdoch)

6. Living Multiple Vocations: Ancient and Modern Perspectives

• Complex Vocations:
  The hosts discuss how medieval Christians often lived more than one “life” or vocation, with marriage and religious life sometimes following one another.

  “There are many saints who live out multiple vocations at different stages. And it’s often very complicated.” (08:01, Dr. Klein)

• Modern Implications:
  Lessons for listeners about the evolving nature of vocation today: our own lives also move through stages where God calls us differently.

7. Brigid’s Writings and Mystical Theology

• The Revelations:
  Brigid’s mystical visions led to extensive writings—her “Revelations”—which combine theology, spirituality, and instruction for the Church.

  “These are no, like, kind of low grade writings. There are long writings. Bridget of Sweden. I mean, I read them at one point in graduate school.” (11:49, Dr. Klein)

• Active & Contemplative:
  Brigid represents a union of action and contemplation: her activism in church life flowed from prayer and mystical experience.

  “Together, the active and the contemplative life.” (12:42, Dr. Murdoch)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Following God’s Call:

  “She really sort of surrendered herself to wherever God wanted her to be and what God wanted her to be doing at a given time.”
  — Dr. Murdoch (07:06)

• On Pilgrimage:

  “We’re able to visit these holy places and venerate them easily ... without those kinds of risks ... but those journeys can be an opportunity for penance ...”
  — Dr. Klein (05:23)

• On Multidimensional Sainthood:

  “She’s kind of like a combo of Saint Catherine of Siena and Zelie Martin, like all in one saint. And so she’s a very cool saint.”
  — Dr. Klein (11:31)

• On Modern Vocations:

  “You have to always be open to the continued calling of God and you don’t know where that call will lead.”
  — Dr. Klein (10:10)

• On Active Discipleship:

  “To be Christian is to be a part of the times in which we live and to respond sort of with the heart of Christ to the very times in which we are living and moving.”
  — Dr. Murdoch (10:51)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:18] Brigid’s noble birth and childhood vision of Christ
• [03:13] Marriage, family life, and tradition of holy families
• [03:51] Foundation of the Brigittine order
• [04:20] Husband’s death, Brigid’s mystical visions, and pilgrimage
• [04:57] Brigid’s interventions in Church crises, including Avignon papacy
• [05:23] Pilgrimage as penance in medieval context
• [07:06] Transitioning vocations and surrender to God’s will
• [08:01] Saints living multiple vocations, relevance for modern listeners
• [11:49] Brigid’s mystical writings and their impact

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Conclusion

Drs. Klein and Murdoch present St. Brigid of Sweden as a uniquely versatile saint: visionary, reformer, mother, widow, foundress, and mystic. Her life is lauded as a model for openness to God’s evolving call and for balancing action with contemplation. The episode encourages all—regardless of state in life—to seek Brigid as an intercessor and example of lived holiness adapted authentically to the needs of one’s time and circumstances.

“I hope you found a new holy friend in her, someone to help you contemplate your vocation. Whether you’re single, married or have grown up children or are out in the world. She pretty much covers all the bases and has something for everyone to think about.”
— Dr. Klein (12:44)

St. Bridget, pray for us.

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Transcript

[A]

Hi, I'm James Prothero, associate professor at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. We hope you've enjoyed listening to and learning from our professors on this and all our podcasts. The Augustine Institute Graduate School exists to make Christ and his church better known and loved through the exercise of academic study. With St. Augustine as our guide, we focus on the narrative of Scripture and the evangelization of the culture. Faculty and students alike immerse themselves in the rich sources of the Catholic faith, drawing upon sacred Scripture, the catechism of the Catholic Church, and the writings of the fathers and doctors of the church. We have 550 students and over a thousand alumni serving the church in parishes, dioceses, schools, the academy apostolates, the domestic church, and even the secular world. With master's degrees in theology, pastoral theology, Catholic education, and Biblical Studies, our programs are for anyone looking to go deeper in their faith. Are you interested in studying theology with the professors of this podcast? Earn your degree online or on campus in St. Louis, Missouri. Apply now for the coming term of study. Learn more@ augustine.edu.

[B]

you're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.

[C]

Welcome to forum now. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Klein and I'm here with Dr. Jessica Murdoch. We're both professors here and teach at the Augustine Institute. We're here doing our series on holy women you've never heard of. So we've gathered some of our favorite female saints from throughout tradition who you might not know about. And so we're hoping you can meet some new holy friends in the course of this series. This episode is on Saint Bridget of Sweden, who, unsurprisingly, is from Sweden. She lived from 1303 to 1373, so in the late Middle Ages. So, unsurprisingly, given our specialties, Dr. Murdoch studies more medieval theology. I do more theology. So this medieval saint was picked by Dr. Murdoch. So I'll let her kick it off with. Tell us a little bit about Bridget.

[D]

Well, Bridget was born to a royal family, and as you might suspect, they were landowners. Her father was governor and provincial judge of Upland. So she comes from a very pious family that already included a saint, Saint Ingrid, as a relative. So she was raised, like, firmly in Christian piety. She was shown to be a religious prodigy in her childhood. At the age of 10, she is said to have had a vision of our Lord Jesus Christ, where he comes to her in a crucified form and says, look at me, my daughter and she looks at him and she says, who's treated you like this? And our Lord goes on to tell her that it is those who refuse his love. So this is really like a formative episode in her childhood. She was married at the young age of 13 to her 18 year old husband, Prince Ulfo of Sweden, who was also a pious Christian. And their happy marriage produced eight children, including another saint, Saint Catherine of Sweden.

[C]

This has been a common theme in our holy women. It seems like holy women have the habit of creating holy families, so it's a good blessing. So what happened after that?

[D]

So she was known for her saintly life and charity to the poor. Her reputation was widely known. And because she was part of a noble family, she was able to exercise great influence over the theologians of the day and later even of the king. After some time, Bridget and Ulfo separated by mutual consent, obviously after the eight children, so that Ulfo could enter the Cistercian order.

[C]

So is this like after their children have kind of grown up and they're living their own lives and they.

[D]

I think that's unclear, but probably when they're older, I mean, sometimes, you know, medieval women might have other people help them raise the children so that they could live that life of piety, even when they're young, actually. But Bridget, for her part, founded a new order, the Order of Saint Savior, which is known today as the Brigantines.

[C]

Okay, so named after her. Okay, so after she enters the monastic life then, do we have any other stories about her kind of life after that?

[D]

Yes. Well, she started to have more and more visions. Her husband died in 1344 on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. And after that, it seems that she really picked up as a visionary. Many of her visions urged her to intervene for the cause of Christ and for the Church in the day. It was the time of the Abingham papacy. And so she was called to intervene with the important personages of the day. She also received a vision to go to the Holy Land on pilgrimage. So that's another theme of this series. It's pilgrimages where Christ gave her a particular intimate understanding of his own passion in the Holy Land. So it's said that her monastery actually was the center of church renewal at the time and that she even urged the Pope personally to return from Avignon to Rome.

[C]

Okay, so she's like the lesser known Catherine of Siena.

[D]

She's so much like Catherine of Siena.

[C]

But she went in person.

[D]

She did go in person. There were times that she had 18 too.

[C]

Yeah, that's really, it's really interesting that you bring up the theme of pilgrimage and how that plays into the lives of the saints, because often I think when we think of going on pilgrimage, we think of it as like, basically a lot of fun. It's like you go with the priest, they're raising money, you're going to the Holy Land, you stay in a nice hotel. But of course, in the past, pilgrimage was often undertaken even under orders as a penance because it was very dangerous and you often had to make great personal sacrifice. You maybe didn't have enough money or food to get the whole way. You didn't know how you were going to get there. And. And as an example of her husband dying on pilgrimage, this was really a very. This is a very serious undertaking to travel these distances in order to sort of like pay homage. And I mean, it'd be hard for us to kind of like recreate that, I suppose. I mean, I think there are some orders who do like, poverty pilgrimages and things, but maybe it is just something to keep in mind out of gratitude that we're able to visit these holy places and venerate them without those. Easily, easily without those kinds of risks. And that, you know, those journeys can be an opportunity for penance, as in the story with Mary of Egypt, who undertook her kind of like anti. Pilgrimage. But it ended up still being this kind of like penitential process, which is very interesting. And also maybe you could say a little more about. I think this unfamiliar for people today to think about somebody having like two vocations.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

Like they have. I mean, when you're married at 13.

[D]

Right.

[C]

You have eight children. You may be done having children by the time you're 30.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

And now we don't start having children till 30.

[D]

Right, right.

[C]

But then. And then having this like, almost totally like, second life. So can you say a little more about that?

[D]

Right. I think it really shows that St Brigid was wholly at the disposal of Christ. She really sort of surrendered herself to wherever God wanted her to be and what God wanted her to be doing at a given time when she was focused on her own household and her motherhood, she gave herself entirely to that. She raised eight children in a pious household, one again, who was herself a saint. And then when her husband asked to be sort of released from living at home so that he could go into the Cistercian order again, she offers herself up whole holy to God and does likewise. So again, we still have that sense of holy example in the family that we've been talking about in this series. And then we have the total surrender, yes, I'll do this. I'm going to start this religious order. But then she doesn't even stop there. So then even over against that, she enters into the life of the church in these very, very difficult times. She's really amazing.

[C]

Which can be. I mean, that can be sacrificial in and of itself. When you undertake a monastic life and then you're kind of pulled back into the world, often that feels very sacrificial. I really love how you emphasized her kind of responding to what God was asking her at any given time. Because I think nowadays in the church, we sometimes have a very simplistic understanding of what a vocation is like. We're discerning our vocation as if God only ever makes one call of us and never makes any further calls. Right. Vocation being a call, when in reality there are many saints who live out multiple vocations at different stages. And it's often very complicated. I mean, for us to look at a married couple, like parting to live a monastic life. I wouldn't say it's quite scandalous to us, but it's very unusual. Whereas I don't think it was necessarily that unusual.

[D]

No, it's actually much more common in the Middle Ages than you'd think.

[C]

And also something that was common in the Middle Ages, very similar is widows would often enter monastic life. We mentioned that a little bit with Saint Macrina, that, like in Brigid's time, women were often married to men that were much older. So if you're 13 and you're married to a man who's five, six, you're

[D]

going to be widowed.

[C]

Seven, you're going to be widowed, you're going to be without your husband much, much earlier in life. And this often becomes a time when you're called by God to do something else. And although, thankfully, by the grace of God, most of us don't experience that now, we're not. Don't have that gap. And, you know, we have modern medicine and lots of wonderful things. We don't die going on pilgrimages. We still. We still have different phases of our lives. You know, we have. There's always going to be a time in your life before you're married or religious, but that doesn't mean you have no vocation. Right? You have your. You have your baptismal vocation, you have calls by God to make these daily sacrifices to respond to him.

[D]

And at the same time, they don't all happen at once. You know, we Sort of see a kind of progressive vocation over time. In St. Brigid, she wasn't simultaneously burying her children and.

[C]

And praying the hours.

[D]

Yeah, praying the hours, running a monastery and advising the Pope all at one time either.

[C]

Right. You know, and so, yeah, and so sometimes we can feel, I don't know, at loss at certain transition periods in our lives where, you know, maybe our children grow up and leave home. And then it's like, well, where'd my vocation go? They just walked out the door and now they're in college. How do I live out my vocation or whatever that God. You have to always be open to the continued calling of God and you don't know where that call will lead. I mean, Certainly as a 13 year old girl, you have no idea that you're gonna be called to have eight children and then after that depart from your husband, be widowed, found a monastic order, and then be called to like, you know, intervene or worry about incredibly complicated church politics.

[D]

And I think even, you know, her being involved in the complicated church politics is, I think she shows us that, you know, to be Christian is to be a part of the times in which we live and to respond sort of with the heart of Christ to the very times in which we are living and moving. There are specific issues of our day that we need to respond to that God's giving us insight and grace to respond to. And I think she's a wonderful model of that.

[C]

So, yeah, it can be very difficult to like, live in. The moment's kind of trite, but it can be difficult to be continued, to be open to those promptings of the Holy Spirit and to what God's asking us to do and to deal with problems in our family or in our day that are kind of right there, that we'd rather ignore or rather not have an active participation in. But you never know kind of what you're gonna be or she can be called to do. And so you were saying to me before that she's kind of like a combo of Saint Catherine of Siena and Zelie Martin, like all in one saint. And so she's a very cool saint. And she also, you mentioned her visions. And these are no like, kind of low grade writings. There are long writings. Bridget of Sweden. I mean, I read them at one point in graduate school. I don't remember them that well. There was angels and maybe ladders. But to think about that mystical side too, that we all know, of course, that prayer and communion with God is where the fruit of our efforts comes from. And it's where sort of the holiness of our life comes from. It can be easy to forget that that's true even of a saint who was so busy who did all these things, but also clearly had a very deep spiritual life and a deep communion

[D]

with God together, the active and the contemplative life.

[C]

Yeah. Out of all where all these things, all of these things were flowing. So I hope you enjoyed learning about Bridget of Sweden. If you want to know more about her, there are definitely biographies out there. You can go read the book of Bridget's visions. But I hope you found a new holy friend in her, someone to help you contemplate your vocation. Whether you're single, married or have grown up children or are out in the world. She pretty much covers all the bases and has something for everyone to think about. And so we'll close this by asking for her intercession. St Bridget pray for us.

[D]

Pray for us.

[B]

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