Saint Odile

The oldest account of Odile is a Life written in the tenth century, of which a copy is kept in the library of Saint Gall in Switzerland. It is a work of legend, and historians give it limited weight. According to the Life, Odile was the first child of Adalric, also called Etichon, duke of Alsace, and of his wife Bereswinde, and she was born blind about 662. Her father wanted the child put to death. Her mother saved her, and a nurse took her to the abbey of Palma, often identified with Baume-les-Dames in Franche-Comté.

There, the Life continues, a Bavarian bishop, Erhard, was told in a revelation to baptize her. He gave her the name Odile and anointed her eyes with holy chrism, and she could see. Later a brother helped her return home, and her father killed him in a rage. Adalric was at last reconciled with his daughter after he saw her carrying flour to the poor, and he gave her his castle of Hohenbourg on the mountain that now bears her name. She founded a monastery there and was its first abbess.

Because the climb was hard for the sick and the infirm, she founded at the foot of the mountain a second house, Niedermunster, with a church and a hospice to receive them. Tradition says that she prayed for the soul of her father, and that she died on December 13, about 720; her nuns, the story goes, called her back to life, and she received Communion and died again.

Her tomb drew pilgrims early, and about 980 her pilgrimage was already known in Westphalia, hundreds of miles away. By the fourteenth century parts of her relics had been taken to Corbie, Prague and Einsiedeln. Tradition, followed by Vatican News, credits Pope Leo IX with her canonization in the eleventh century, though the faithful had honored her as a saint long before formal canonizations began. The title patroness of Alsace appears from the early seventeenth century, and in 1946, a year after the war and the annexation of the region by Nazi Germany, Pope Pius XII proclaimed her patroness of Alsace. Perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament has been kept on the mountain since 1931, with the faithful taking turns day and night.

Her feast is December 13, the traditional day of her death. The archdiocese of Strasbourg kept a Great Jubilee for the thirteen hundredth anniversary of her death from December 13, 2020, to December 13, 2021. On July 4, 2021, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, sent by Pope Francis as his envoy, celebrated its Mass in the cathedral of Strasbourg, and the next day he celebrated Mass on the mountain for young people and for the ninety years of adoration.

Odile is shown as an abbess praying before an altar, or holding a book on which lie two eyes, an image common from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century; a stained-glass window of about 1500 shows the eyes in a chalice. A carved stone of the twelfth century, defaced at the Revolution, shows Duke Adalric handing the deeds of the abbey to his daughter. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted her with Saint Christina in 1506.

Patroness of Alsace, proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1946; invoked by those who suffer from diseases of the eyes.

• Mont Sainte-OdileThe convent on the site of Hohenbourg, with her tomb, the chapel of the Tears and the perpetual adoration kept since 1931.
• NiedermunsterAt the foot of the mountain, the site of the lower house she founded for the sick and for pilgrims, whose buildings burned in 1542.

On our ways: Mont Sainte-Odile.

• Via NativitatisThe Christmas Way, six daysDay III, Mont Sainte-Odile, then Sélestat