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Saints and Blesseds
Saint Hildegund
February 6
The parents of St. Hildegund were Count Herman of Lidtberg and Countess Hedwig who, on losing her husband, retired with her third daughter, Gertrude, into the Premonstrratensian convent of Dunwald. The example of her mother was followed by Hildegund when her husband, Count Lothair, and one of her sons had died and the other, Herman, had entered a monastery. In 1178, after a pilgrimage to Rome, she made over all her possessions to Christ, and with the consent and help of her son Herman started to convert her castle of Mehre, some way north of Cologne, into a convent. She was somewhat delayed in executing her purpose, because her sister Elizabeth, withdrawing her consent to a prior division of their inheritance, demanded a fresh settlement. After this had been arranged, Hildegund and her daughter Hedwig, (called Blessed) assumed the Premonstratensian habit and entered their new foundation, of which the saint became prioress. The number of inhabitants increasing rapidly, she removed the convent to a more convenient site, where it grew and flourished, filled with holy women who maintained an unbroken stream of prayer and praise: the house, in the words of its charter, had been converted from being a fort for military exercises into a college for holy virgins. St. Hildegund's son Herman was also called Blessed, and a portrait of him standing at his mother's right hand, hung formerly in the convent church.
Footnotes:
See the Acta Sanctorum, February, vol. i; and Dunbar, Dictionary of Saintly Women, vol. i).
Source: Butler's Lives of the Saints, unabridged, volume I, page 265-266, February 6.
