Feast day: April 14
St. Lidwina of Schiedam
A Dutch girl crippled by a fall while ice-skating who spent thirty-eight years in pain, offering her sufferings for others and reported to live for years on the Eucharist alone.
Lidwina was born in 1380 at Schiedam in Holland, the daughter of a working-class family. As a girl of about fifteen, while skating on the frozen canals — a detail that later made her the patron of skaters — she fell and broke a rib, and from that injury developed an illness that never left her.
For the remaining thirty-eight years of her life she was a near-helpless invalid, racked by a catalogue of agonizing and worsening ailments that astonished her physicians. Rather than rebel against this suffering, she came gradually to accept and even embrace it, offering her pain in union with the sufferings of Christ for the conversion of sinners.
As the years passed she ate almost nothing, slept little, and was said to live for long periods on the Eucharist alone, while experiencing visions and mystical graces. Her sickroom became a place of pilgrimage, and she counselled and consoled the many who came to her.
She died in 1433. Her life was recorded by writers including Thomas à Kempis, and she became one of the best-loved patrons of the chronically ill — a woman who turned a lifetime of pain into a vocation.
Injured skating at fifteen, she turned a lifetime of illness into a ministry of prayer — and is honored both as patron of the chronically ill and of skaters.
Image: artist unknown (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09233a.htm
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