Note 180 — Chapter IX
Reading edition
See Revelationes Selectæ S. Brigittæ (Heuser, 1851).—This is a selection for the edification of good Catholics, and contains accordingly the most Mariolatrous and least important of her writings. Rudelbach gives some specimens of her spirited rebuke of papal iniquity in his Savonarola, pp. 300, &c. In her prophetic capacity she does not hesitate to call the pope a murderer of souls, and to declare him and his greedy prelates forerunners of Antichrist. She says,—‘If a man comes to them with four wounds, he goes away with five.’ Like Savonarola, she placed her sole hope of reform in a general council.
A common mode of self-mortification with her found an imitator in Madame Guyon:—the Swede dropped the wax of lighted tapers on her bare flesh, and carried gentian in her mouth—Vita, p. 6. The Frenchwoman burned herself with hot sealing-wax in the same manner, and chewed a quid of coloquintida.
The Revelationes de Vitâ et Passione Jesu Christi et gloriosæ Virginis, contain a puerile and profane account of the birth, childhood, and death of our Lord, in the style of the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy, professedly conveyed in conversations with the authoress by the Mother and her Son. The Virgin tells her, in reference to her Son,—‘quomodo neque aliqua immunditia ascendit super eum;’ and that his hair was never in a tangle—(nec perplexitas in capillise jus apparuit).