Christina von Retters

Who they were

Christina of Retters was a German Premonstratensian mystic of the thirteenth century. Born in 1269 in the diocese of Mainz - her baptismal name is unknown, but she took the name Christina after an apparition of Christ - she was entrusted to the Premonstratensian canonesses at six, and made her religious profession at Frankfurt in 1281 after a vision led her to ask for the habit. Around a following Christmas she had a vision in which the Christ Child on the altar grew before her into a man who sang the divine office at her side, and from then on her devotion turned to both his Nativity and his Passion.

Though war forced her to leave the convent for a time in 1282, and on her return she went through a period of worldliness and a difficult character, she changed through repeated penances and contemplation of Christ's wounds, and bore in silence the injustices some of her sisters inflicted on her, nursing the sick among them with great charity. Comforted by visions of Jesus and Mary during a serious illness in 1283, she fell gravely ill again some years later and died in the odour of sanctity on 23 November 1292, aged twenty-three. Though she did not receive the stigmata, she lived in intimate communion with Christ's sufferings, and has always been honoured as blessed within the Premonstratensian Order, with her feast kept on 24 July.

The miracles

There was never a formal cause: she has been honoured as blessed since before the Church's formal processes began.

Why that counted as sanctity

Premonstratensian mystic devoted to the Passion of Christ, honoured as blessed in her Order since her death in 1292; feast 24 July.

The cause