Blessed Margareta Ebner

Margareta Ebner (1291 – 20 June 1351) was a German professed religious from the Dominican Nuns. Ebner – from 1311 – experienced a series of spiritual visions in which Jesus Christ gave her messages which she recorded in letters and a journal at the behest of her spiritual director; she was ill for well over a decade as she experienced these visions. The backdrop of much of Ebner's religious life was the bitter fighting between Pope John XXII and Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Bavarian, in which she and her convent faithfully backed Louis. Ebner's beatification cause began in the 1600s well after her death though stalled for a time until 1910 when the initial process was concluded; Pope John Paul II beatified Ebner in 1979 after confirming her longstanding "cultus" – or popular devotion to her – rather than recognizing a miracle as would be the norm. Margareta Ebner was born circa 1291 in Donauwörth to aristocratics; she received a thorough education in her home. In about 1305 she entered the Kloster Mödingen convent of the Dominican Nuns near Dillingen and made her profession around 1306. From 1312 to 1325 she suffered a grave illness and in her later Revelations described how she had "no control over herself" and often would laugh or weep on a constant level with sometimes little reprieve. This illness was the stimulus for her conversion to a deeper spiritual life of devotion to God. This illness seemed to even put her at the point of death on occasion and even when she seemed to recover she still remained in bed for well over a decade. It was from 1311 that she began to experience her visions of Jesus Christ who graced her with messages. Ebner became prone to further bouts of illness for the remainder of her life. But she could exercise her desire for penance and mortification via abstinence from wine and fruit as well as bathing which were considered some of the greatest pleasures of life in that time.