November 16 -- Feast of Saint Gertrude the Great

The crozier is a common error -- she was never abbess

It is not easy to land the title "the Great."  Only a handful of popes have earned it, and maybe a couple dozen kings and emperors.  And since most of history was not only recorded by men but also focused on men, it must have been that much harder for a woman like Gertrude to get acknowledged as great. 

It is tough to see, given what's recorded of her life, why she got the nod.  She was entrusted to a convent in Helfta, Germany at age five, raised there, lived and died there.  She was a helluva student, by all accounts, until she had a vision from the Lord turning her from secular topics to the study of the Bible and writings of the early Church leaders.  She read and wrote and prayed a lot, interspersing it all with visions and prophecies. 

Among her particular concerns were the souls in Purgatory.  I am not sure of the current Church doctrine on Purgatory -- maybe some kind reader will post something below to update me.  But at the time, Purgatory was an unpleasant place to cleanse one's soul in preparation for admittance to Heaven.  Gertrude prayed for the relief and release of souls in Purgatory, and even today folks follow her example of prayer in the hopes of springing their own loved ones and others.  Here's an online chapel dedicated to Gertrude where you can pledge such prayers.  The estimate, as of this writing, was that 38,281,889 prayers were still needed to bust everyone out. 

Here's the prayer, if you want to pitch in. 

Eternal Father, I offer You the most Precious Blood of Your Divine Son, Jesus Christ,

in union with the Masses said today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory,

for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the Universal Church,

those in my own home and within my family.

Amen.

For the record, she never went through the formal canonization process, but was proclaimed a saint with a feast on the universal calendar by Pope Clement XII.  That equivalent canonization process is used when the saint lived so long ago that the formal process would be too lacking in documentation.