The Bridgettine Order Today: A Living Legacy in Vadstena

The order Bridget founded did not end with her own death in 1373 before ever seeing Vadstena's community established; her daughter Catherine of Sweden carried out the actual founding, and the Bridgettines, formally the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, approved by Pope Urban the Fifth in 1370, spread across medieval Europe as a distinctive double monastery form, housing monks and nuns under a shared roof in separate quarters. The order nearly disappeared after the Reformation stripped it from much of Northern Europe, but it survives today, restored at Vadstena itself through a modern refounding led by Elisabeth Hesselblad in the early twentieth century, and the Pax Mariae convent established there continues a community of nuns, drawn from Sweden, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands among other countries, still following a rule descended from Bridget's own medieval constitution. Bridget's standing in the wider church has grown rather than faded with time: in 1999 Pope John Paul the Second named her one of three co patronesses of Europe, alongside Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein, formally placing a fourteenth century Swedish widow beside the continent's other most significant female religious figures. Vadstena remains both her shrine and a functioning convent, a rare case of a medieval founder's own community continuing, uninterrupted in spirit if not unbroken in fact, on the same ground she chose for it.