Patron Saint of Cats

Why St. Gertrude of Nivelles?

This is the most-searched patronage in the calendar with the thinnest official basis, and the honest version is more interesting than the tidy one. Gertrude was a seventh-century abbess, not a cat lover in any record. She was invoked against mice and rats, which mattered enormously when a granary failing meant a village starving, and medieval art shows her with mice running up her staff. The step from being asked about mice to being associated with the animal that deals with mice is short, and somewhere in the twentieth century it was taken. She was also invoked by travellers, by the recently dead in their first night of the journey, and against fever. The mice are one item on a long list. So: is she the patron saint of cats? By popular acclamation, yes, and there is nothing wrong with that. The Church does not have a register of every patronage, and a great many arose exactly this way. What is not true is that she was named for it, or that the connection is ancient. Pages that assert either are supplying a certainty nobody has.

Who was St. Gertrude of Nivelles?

Gertrude was born in 626 to Pepin of Landen, mayor of the palace under the Frankish kings, which made her family effectively the most powerful in the realm. She refused a politically arranged marriage as a child, reportedly telling the assembled court she would have Christ and no one else.

After her father died her mother Itta founded a double monastery at Nivelles, in what is now Belgium, and made Gertrude abbess of it at about twenty. She ran it for two decades. The accounts describe a woman with an unusual appetite for books, who sent to Rome for manuscripts and to Ireland for monks, and who fed and housed pilgrims and the poor on a scale that strained the house.

She wore herself out. By thirty she had resigned the abbacy because fasting and vigils had left her unable to continue, and she died at thirty-three in 659. The detail her contemporaries recorded is that she asked to be buried in an old veil, one that had belonged to a nun who had died, rather than anything new.

The feast: March 17

March 17, which she shares with St. Patrick, and that is why the day gets a second life online each year as the feast of cats. The coincidence is real and the pairing is entirely modern. In Belgium the church at Nivelles keeps her feast properly; almost everywhere else the day belongs to Ireland.

How to ask their intercession

Simply. There is no formal rite for a sick cat, and nothing prevents asking. Many parishes bless animals on October 4, the feast of St. Francis, and a cat is as welcome there as a dog. If an animal is dying, ask for the household as much as for the animal: grief over a pet is real grief and the Church has never pretended otherwise.