(ABOUT A.D. 698.)
[Molanus in his addition to Usuardus, Wyon, Menardus, and Ferrarius.
Authority:--An ancient life by an anonymous writer, published by
Bollandus.]
Berlinda was the daughter of a nobleman named Odelard, who resided at
Meerbeeke, near Ninove, in Brabant, in the reign of King Dagobert, and
of Nona, his wife, the sister of S. Amandus. To a rare beauty,
Berlinda joined all the gifts of intellect, but she had the misfortune
to incur the anger of her father. After the death of his wife and only
son, Odelard was attacked by leprosy, and lived a miserable
languishing life, ministered to by his daughter.
One day that he asked her for something to drink, she filled a bowl
with water, and took it to him, and then, being herself thirsty, she
rinsed out the vessel, and filled it again. The father, highly
offended at her doing this, drove off at once to Nivelles and offered
all his lands to S. Gertrude, by the symbolic gift of a white glove
and a reaping-hook and a branch of foliage. Before accomplishing his
donation, he supplicated the Saint to accept his offering with her own
hands. Then the reliquary, in which the holy abbess reposed, opened,
and the lifeless hands of S. Gertrude were extended to receive the
glove, the branch, and the sickle. Then it closed upon them.
Berlinda, being disinherited, retired to the monastery of Moorsel,
near Alost, where she lived in penitence and prayer. One night she
heard a choir of angels singing, as they sailed across the dark
starlit sky, bearing the soul of her father to Paradise. She at once
besought of the superior permission to return to Meerbeeke for a
while. Her request was complied with, and she flew to her father's
castle. He was dead, so Berlinda buried him in the little church he
had erected there to the honour of S. Peter.
Retained by force in her paternal dwelling by the servants and
tenants, Berlinda remained at Meerbeeke, where she continued her life
of austerities and prayer, and died about 690, on the 3rd of February.
As no stone sarcophagus could be found in which she might be laid, a
large oak was cut down and scooped out to serve as a coffin, and her
body was placed in it. Numerous miracles were wrought at her tomb, so
that at the end of seven years the coffin was opened, and the wood was
found to have become petrified. On this occasion a church was built in
her honour and that of the Blessed Virgin, and thirty years later, her
relics were solemnly enshrined on May 2nd, 728. S. Berlinda has
remained in great honour at Meerbeeke. She is invoked against cattle
diseases; and in accordance with an ancient custom, pilgrims pray
before a wooden image of the saint represented beside a cow, and touch
the udder of the cow, which has become black through the innumerable
touchings to which it has become subjected. According to a popular
saying S. Berlinda protects trees transplanted on her festival.