On the Square Today

In today’s On the Square feature, Leroy Huizenga reveals the real St. Hildegard of Bingen :

Many have made Hildegard in their own image. She became a mystic to later medievals who saw her through the lens of her popular disciple Elisabeth of Schönau, although she was more properly a visionary and prophet. To humanists like Jacob Faber Stapulensis she became a woman of letters, to Reformers like Andreas Osiander a Protestant, and (in our own day) to the feminists like filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta a proto-feminist. She has become all things to all people that she might serve some. Like Jesus, of the making of Hildegards there is no end.

Also today, Margarita Mooney provides some insights learned from World Youth Day 2011 :

But just what does World Youth Day tell us about young Catholicism, and youth in general? It tells us first that the old liberal-conservative division in American Catholicism is hopelessly outworn. These youth, with their demand for a strenuous and countercultural faith are confounding both those elite reformers who believe the Church would be stronger if it effected a rapprochement with secularism and certain traditionalists who wish all Catholics would return to the Latin Mass.