Lentorama 2022: It Happened on Easter*

Day 16: Lidwina embarks on the road to sainthood

As a teenager, Lidwina was seriously injured in an ice skating accident, and never fully recovered from her injuries. In fact, she became progressively more disabled, losing function in everything but her left hand and prone to bleeding and the loss of body parts. There's some thought today that Lidwina was actually suffering from multiple sclerosis. 

Attestations taken during her lifetime stated that Lidwina rarely if ever slept or eat, and recorded instances of her ability to heal the sick or provide food that would last much longer than expected based on the quantity given. She continued her good works until her death on April 14, 1433.

Locals began to venerate Lidwina almost immediately, and several biographies (including one by Thomas à Kempis) helped to establish her following. Her relics moved to Brussels for a time after the chapel they were housed in in her hometown of Schiedam, the Netherlands was destroyed.  A new church was later built and the relics returned home. In 1890, Pope Leo XII made Lidwina a saint by equipollent canonization, which allows the pope to make someone a saint outside of the usual procedure due to the continued universal veneration of the individual.

* The date used here is when Easter would have fallen if the Gregorian calendar were in place in 1433, rather than the actual date of Easter that year reckoned by the Julian calendar.