But the chief companion of his life was Bd Peter of Treja, who accompanied him in his preaching journeys and was present in the woods on that Candlemas-day when our Lady appeared to Conrad and laid the Child Jesus in his arms. It was said of these two that they were “ two shining stars in the province of the Marches, like dwellers in Heaven; for between them there was such love as seemed to spring from one and the same heart and soul, so that they bound themselves, each to the other, by an agreement that every consolation that the mercy of God might vouch­safe them they would lovingly reveal the one unto the other”. The author of the Fioretti further calls Brother Conrad a “marvellous zealot of gospel poverty and of the Rule of St Francis, of so religious a life and so deserving before God that Christ, the Blessed One, honoured him in life and in death with many miracles”.

When he was sixty-five years old Bd Conrad died while preaching at Bastia, near Assisi, and was buried there. Some years later his relics were carried off to Perugia, and they now rest in the cathedral of that city beside those of Brother Giles. His cultus was confirmed in 1817.

   Her reputa­tion for miracles was great, and people came from all the surrounding country to consult her and bring their sick and afflicted. Immediately after her death on November 9, 1307, a cultus sprang up, which was greatly enhanced in 1348 by the attribution of a sudden cessation of an epidemic to her intercession. This cultus was confirmed in 1798.

An anonymous Latin life is in existence that must have been written about the year 1390. It has been printed by Fr Mencherini in the Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, vol. x (1917), pp. 367—386, and also in the Acta Sanctorum, November, vol. iv. Two other accounts of later date in Italian verse add nothing to our knowledge. Not only the Fran­ciscans, but also Vallombrosan monks, the Carmelites and the Augustinians have claimed that the recluse was attached to their respective orders. On the Vallombrosan case see F. Soldani, Ragguaglio istorico della B. Giovanna do Signa (1741). The Franciscan claim can be gathered from Mencherini as above, who supplies a bibliography. In the opinion of the Bollandists evidence is lacking that the recluse had a definite connection with any order. An account of Bd Joan is given by Leon, Aureole Séraphique (Eng. trans.), vol. iv, pp. 160—164.

1312 BD CHRISTINA. OF STOMMELN, VIRGIN; dying at the age of seventy, in 1312, with a great reputation of sanctity. Thirty years after her relics were translated to Niedeggen   in the Eifel, and again in 1569 to Jülich, where they still repose and receive the veneration of the people. Nor does anything which has been said above reflect on the credit of Bd Christina or suggest that that veneration is misplaced; for heroic virtue, which is the condition of holiness, is entirely independent of abnormal physical phenomena or extraordinary divine favours, and the first of these are not inconsistent with a life far from holy. The Holy See has recognized that the evidence touching the personal virtue of Bd Christina justifies the continuation of her age-long local cultus.

DURING her life and from the time of her death until to-day Christina Bruso was venerated as a saint in her native village of Stommeln, near Cologne, and at Jülich, where she was eventually buried; and on account of this uninterrupted local veneration Pope Pius X confirmed the cultus in 1908, just on 600 years after her death. Were it not for the large amount of contemporary, eyewitnesses’, and personal testimony to the phenomena which make her one of the most extraordinary cases in all hagiology, she would have to be dismissed as a devout but mentally diseased young woman who suffered from hallucinations on a very large scale indeed or whose biographers were either hopelessly deceived or unscrupulous liars.
   Even as it is, some of the Catholic scholars who have studied the documents are of the opinion that many statements of experiences were made by her when she was not mistress of herself; and, as one of them has put it, “it is easier to believe that the whole story was a romance concocted, letters and all, by Peter of Dacia and that no such person as Christina ever existed” than to believe the extravagances recorded in her letters written by the hand of the village schoolmaster.

   After Father Peter left Cologne in 1269 Christina corresponded with him through the parish priest, John, who sometimes added to her dictation comments of his own. From these letters it appears that the visitations, which Christina attributes to the malice of the Evil One, continued unabated, though in ever-varying forms. These violent happenings were not confined to Christina herself. Her father was hit with stones on the head and arms, her friend the Benedictine prior of Brauweiler was badly bitten by invisible teeth, and a skull, after moving about in the air, tied itself about the neck of the Brusos’ servant.

Father Peter of Dacia died about 1288 and Christina’s known history ends at that time, but she lived for another twenty-four years, dying at the age of seventy, in 1312, with a great reputation of sanctity. Thirty years after her relics were translated to Niedeggen in the Eifel, and again in 1569 to Jülich, where they still repose and receive the veneration of the people. Nor does anything which has been said above reflect on the credit of Bd Christina or suggest that that veneration is misplaced; for heroic virtue, which is the condition of holiness, is entirely independent of abnormal physical phenomena or extraordinary divine favours, and the first of these are not inconsistent with a life far from holy. The Holy See has recognized that the evidence touching the personal virtue of Bd Christina justifies the continuation of her age-long local cultus.

In 1282 Bd Bonaventure was made prior at Orvieto, but on the death of St Philip was called to the side of his successor, Father Lottaringo, and was eventually made preacher apostolic, with a commission to preach missions throughout Italy, which he did with great effect. In 1303 he was made prior at Montepulciano for the second time, and there assisted St Agnes in the foundation of her community of Dominican nuns, whose director he was. From thence he was moved to his native Pistoia, where civil war had again broken out and the Florentines threatened the enfeebled city. By the diffusion of confraternities and of the Servite third order, called Mantellate, Bd Bartholomew endeavoured to bring back the people to a sense of their responsibilities as Christians, and was tireless in his preaching on behalf of peace and civic unity. He died at Orvieto on December 14, 1315, and was buried in the Servite church in the chapel of our Lady of Sorrows as a testimony of the respect in which his brethren held him. This was also testified by the fact that even in his lifetime he was known as il Beato, and miracles were reported both before and after his death. The cultus of Bd Bonaventure Buonaccorsi was confirmed in 1822.

When he could no longer work, a citizen called James Castagnolis gave him a room in his house and, when necessary, food. Usually, however, Bd Henry subsisted on the alms of the charitable, which he shared with beggars, never holding anything over from one day to the next. Even extreme bodily weakness in ad­vancing age could not keep him from God’s house and from visiting all the churches within walking distance of Treviso. He died on June 10, 1315. His little room was immediately thronged with visitors eager to venerate him and to secure some fragment of his possessions, which consisted of a hair-shirt, a wooden log which had been his pillow, and some cords and straw that had served as his bed. Extra­ordinary scenes were witnessed after his body had been removed to the cathedral. The people broke into the basilica at night, and the bishop and the podestà, roused from their sleep, were obliged to go and protect the body by putting a wooden palisade round it. No fewer than 276 miracles, said to have been wrought by his relics, were recorded within a few days of Bd Henry’s death by the notaries appointed by the magistrates: they occupy thirty-two closely printed columns of the Acta Sanctorum. The cultus of Bd Henry was confirmed by Pope Benedict XIV.

A life of Bd Henry, by his contemporary Bishop Pierdomenico de Baone, has been printed by the Bollandists, June, vol. ii. See also R. degli Azzoni Avogaro, Memorie del Beato Enrico (2 vols., 1760); A. Tschöll (1887); Austria Sancta, Die Heiligen und Seligen Tirols, vol. ii (1910), pp. 41 seq. ; and II B. Enrico . . . (Treviso, 1915).

SIMON BALLACHI at the age of twenty-seven offered himself to God as a lay-brother in the Dominican friary of Rimini, his native place. Not content with this humble position he still further mortified himself by volunteering to do all the lowliest tasks, and he disciplined his body with an iron chain, offering his pain for the conversion of sinners. He is said to have suffered greatly from diabolical visitations. Simon was principally employed in the garden, but he was also entrusted with the cultivation of young human plants, and would go through the streets with a cross in his hand calling the children to catechism. When he was fifty-seven he was stricken with blindness, and so lived for twelve years, during the last few of which he had to keep to his bed entirely. Bd Simon bore these afflictions with courage and cheerfulness, and was rewarded with the gift of miracles, so that from the day of his death he was venerated as a saint. This cultus was confirmed in 1821.

It is not easy to give precise dates, but according to Yule and Cordier he was in western India soon after 1322, he must have spent three of the years between 1322 and 1328 in northern China, and he certainly died at home among his brethren at Udine in January 1331.

With regard to the route he followed in his wanderings we are better informed. His first objective was Constantinople, and from thence he passed on to Trebizond, Erzerum, Tabriz and Soltania. There were houses of the order in most of these cities, and he probably made a considerable stay in each, so that this part of his journey may well have occupied three years. From Soltania he seems to have wandered about very irregularly, but eventually he came south through Baghdad to Hormuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, where he took ship and sailed to Salsette. At Tana, or possibly Surat, he gathered up the bones of his four brethren who had been martyred there shortly before, in 1321, and carried them with him on his voyage eastward. He went on to Malabar and Ceylon, and then probably rested for a while at the shrine of St Thomas at Mailapur, by the modern Madras. Here he again took ship for Sumatra and Java, possibly also visiting southern and eastern Borneo.

China was his next goal. Starting from Canton, he travelled to the great ports of Fo-kien, and from Fu-chau he pro­ceeded across the mountains to Hang-chau, then famous under the name of Quinsai as the greatest city of the world, and Nan-king. Taking to the water again upon the great canal at Yang-chau, he made his way to Khanbaliq, or Peking, and there remained for three years, attached apparently to one of the churches founded by Archbishop John of Montecorvino, another heroic Franciscan mission­ary, now in extreme old age. There Odoric turned his face homewards, passing through Shen-si to Tibet and its capital, Lhasa, but we have no further record of the course by which he ultimately reached his native province in safety. It is interesting to note that during the latter part at least of these long journeys Odoric had for his companion an Irish friar of the same order, one Brother James. The fact is known to us from a record preserved in the archives of Udine, which tells us that after Odoric’s death a present of two marks was made “for the love of God and the blessed Brother Odoric” to Brother James, the Irishman, who had been his companion on his journey.

The account which has been left us of Odoric’s travels, which unfortunately was not written down by himself at the time but dictated to one of his brethren after his return, says practically nothing of any missionary labours on his part. It is, therefore, not certain how far we may credit the wonderful stories which were current in later times regarding the success which attended his preaching. Luke Wadding, the annalist, declares that he converted and baptized 2o,ooo Saracens, but he gives us no idea of the source of his information. It is also stated that Odoric’s purpose in leaving China and returning to Europe was to obtain fresh supplies of missionaries and to conduct them himself to the Far East. At Pisa, however, St Francis appeared to him and bade him return to Udine, declaring that he himself would look after those distant missions about which Odoric was anxious. On his deathbed the worn-out apostle said that God had made known to him that his sins were pardoned, but that he wished, like a humble child, to submit himself to the keys of the Church and to receive the last sacraments.

He died on January 14, 1331. Many miracles are said to have been wrought after his death, and in one of these we hear again of Brother James the Irishman, for a certain Franciscan who was a preacher and doctor of theology at Venice, and had suffered cruelly from a painful malady of the throat, asked Brother James to recommend him to his late fellow traveller, and was immediately cured. The cultus long paid to him was approved in 1755.

The Bollandists were at first unable to procure any detailed information regarding St Flora, but eventually a Latin version was sent them, made in 1709, of a life which existed at Beaulieu in Old French. It is printed as an appendix in the Acta Sanctorum, June, vol. ii. The Old French text was printed in Analecta Bollandiana, vol. lxiv (1946), pp. 5—49. It was made before 1482 from a lost Latin original, said to have been written by the saint’s confessor. See also C. Lacarrière, Vie de Ste Flore ou Fleur (1866); and Analecta jurispontificii. vol. xviii (1879), pp. 1—27. The cult of St Flora has received a sort of indirect confirmation in the fact that the Holy See has approved an office in her honour, used in the diocese of Cahors.

As the crown of a life now spent in contemplation and austerity, our Lord was pleased to honour her, on Good Friday 1340, with the marks of His sacred wounds. We read that a holy friend named Lielta had already foretold this privileged state to her, and also that she had experienced a very curious bodily manifestation in the Christmas season of the previous year. When the stigmata were thus given her, apparently as a permanent mark of God’s favour, they used to bleed seven times every day. She confided to her fellow béguine Diewerdis the news of this strange wonder.

Naturally the tidings spread, and very soon crowds came, not only from Delft, but from all the country round to behold the marvel. This destroyed all privacy and recollection, and so Gertrude implored our Lord to come to her aid. The stigmata consequently ceased to bleed, but the marks persisted. For the eighteen years she remained on earth she led a very suffering life, but she seems, like other mystics who have been similarly favoured with these outward manifestations, to have possessed a strange knowledge of people’s thoughts and of distant and future events, of which her biographer gives instances. The name “van Oosten”, by which she is known in the place of a surname, is stated to have come to her from her fond repetition of an old Dutch hymn beginning, Het daghet in den Oosten (“The day is breaking in the east”). There seems a curious appro­priateness in the fact that she died (1358) on the feast of the Epiphany when the wise men came from the east to greet their infant Saviour. “I am longing”, she said a few minutes before her death, “I am longing to go home.”

His real name was Von Berg, but he preferred to be known by the surname, Seuse, of his mother, a very holy woman who suffered much at the hands of her dissolute husband. The date of his birth is uncertain and all we know of his early years is derived from a paragraph in his autobiography (but cf. below) where, writing of himself as he always does in the third person, he says: “In his childhood it had been his custom when the beautiful summer came and the tender flowrets first began to spring up, never to pluck or touch a flower until he had greeted, with the gift of his first flowers, his spiritual love, the sweet blooming rosy maid, God’s mother.” At the age of thirteen he entered the Dominican priory at Constance, which town, as Bihlmeyer has shown, was also his birthplace. The building, which was beautifully situated on a small island at the point where the Rhine flows out of the lake, is still in existence, but now serves as a factory. Here he remained until he had been professed, when he was transferred to Cologne that he might study at the studium generale in that city. For several years he appears to have lived a somewhat careless life, satisfied with the avoidance of any gross or serious sin, but in his eighteenth year he received what he describes as “a secret illumination and drawing sent by God” which “speedily wrought in him a turning away from creatures”. “Forsake all” were the words that rang in his ears, and he deter­mined to obey at once, making no reservations. In vain did the Devil seek to deter him by maxims of worldly wisdom, suggesting that his conversion was too rapid, that he could not count upon corresponding to grace, that perseverance was im­possible, and that moderation was the secret of success. Heavenly wisdom taught him how to meet these suggestions and how to overcome them.

Bd Henry was wonderfully moved to make himself “the servant of the Eternal Wisdom”, whom he beheld afar off in vision (one thinks of Solovyev half a mil­lennium later); his veneration for the Holy Name caused him to cut its letters in his flesh; his deep love for the Mother of God, his whole highly-charged religious outlook, expressed themselves in ways that are loosely called “mystical”, sometimes touching, sometimes perhaps rather extravagant. In the same spirit he inflicted on himself bodily penances of the greatest severity, exercising upon them an ingenuity that in later times would seem somewhat morbid. Besides these physical mortifica­tions, Henry Suso was tormented by inner sufferings in the shape of imaginations against faith, intense sadness or nervous depression and a haunting fear that he was doomed to lose his soul whatever he might do. He says of himself: “After the terrible suffering had lasted about ten years, during which period he never looked upon himself in any other light than as one damned, he went to the holy Master Eckhart and made known to him his suffering. The holy man delivered him from it and thus set him free from the hell in which he had so long dwelt.!” The time also came—when Bd Henry was about forty years old—when he gave up his out­ward mortifications, for God showed him that these practices were but a beginning and that he must now press on in quite another direction if he wished to reach perfection. Instead of remaining at home and cultivating his own soul only, he must now go forth to save his neighbour. It was also revealed to him that, though he was freed from the crosses he had borne in the past, there were others in store for him. Whereas he had afflicted himself at will, he would he afflicted and persecuted by others, meeting with ingratitude and losing his good name and his friends.

Suso had distinguished himself when a student at Cologne, and now that he began to go forth preaching his learning and eloquence brought him many disciples of both sexes. He is said to have preached for thirty-seven years, converting many sinners and working miracles. On one occasion, when he was speaking at Cologne, the congregation were amazed to see his face shining like the sun. Nevertheless trouble followed him wherever he went. Upon the flimsy accusation of a child he was charged with theft and sacrilege, at another time he was suspected of poisoning, and elsewhere he was accused of faking a miracle and was obliged to fly for his life. In the Netherlands he was reprimanded for writing heretical books, and although he was afterwards exculpated his distress at the charge brought on a serious illness. His sister, a nun, fell into grievous sin and ran away from her convent; he never rested until he had found her, and after bringing her to repentance placed her in another community where she died a holy death. Another of his efforts to reclaim an erring woman did not turn out so well. A sinner who had placed herself under his direction had professed to be leading a better life, but when he discovered that she was continuing her evil ways he refused to continue to assist her with alms. In revenge she accused him of being the father of her child, and the charge seems to have been believed. Perhaps his own charitable action may have seemed to substantiate it, for when someone took to him the baby whom its mother had aban­doned he received it lovingly and adopted it until he could find it a suitable home. In view of the scandal, the master general of the order caused an inquiry to be made into the matter, and the truth being established his character was vindicated.

At a time when his monastery was burdened with debt, Suso was elected prior. Instead of seeking to raise money by begging or borrowing, he ordered a special Mass to be said in honour of St Dominic, trusting to the saint’s dying promise never to abandon his children. The other friars murmured: “The prior must be crazy. Does he think God will send food and drink from heaven?” As Bd Henry was still standing in choir, deep in thought, he was called out to receive a gift of twenty pounds of Constance money from a canon who had been admonished by God to come to his assistance. Not only did the monastery wipe off its debt, but it never lacked provisions during his term of office.

Bd Henry died at Ulm, on January 25, 1365, and was buried in the Dominican convent. It has been maintained that two hundred and forty years later his body was accidentally disinterred by workmen and was found incorrupt, wearing the Dominican habit. There is, however, no serious evidence for this identification. The burgomaster ordered the body to be covered up again) and all traces of it have been lost. The cultist of Bd Henry was confirmed in 1831.

Suso left several devotional books of great beauty, one of which, The Book of Eternal Wisdom, was extraordinarily popular during the latter part of the middle ages. His so-called “autobiography” is said to have been preserved to us by his spiritual daughter, Elizabeth Stagel, of the Dominican convent of Toss, near Winterthur. Consisting mainly of materials supplied by him, it shows evident marks of having been edited by someone other than himself—so much so that of late years the authenticity of the whole has been called in question. His books record some of the many occasions when the veil between this world and the next was lifted for him. Not only had he visions of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, but many of those whom he had known appeared to him after death—notably his parents, Elizabeth Stagel and his beloved teacher Eckhart, whom he beheld in glory. In reply to his question asking how he might attain to eternal happiness, the master replied in words which might serve as an epitome of the life of Suso himself:  “To die to self in perfect detachment, to receive everything as from God, and to maintain unruffled patience with all men, however brutal or churlish they may be.”