When the Gospel was still young in the forests and river-lands of the Low Countries, God raised up not only preachers but women whose hidden lives made the preaching possible. Among them was Vinciana, whom the Flemish and Walloon country has long called Sainte Vinciane, sister of Saint Landoald and one of the holy company venerated together as the saints of Wintershoven.
According to the tradition preserved in the Church of Limburg, Vinciana belonged to the group of helpers whom Pope Martin I entrusted to Saint Amandus about the year 650, when that tireless apostle came to Rome to lay his missionary plans before the Apostolic See. The Pope did not send Amandus away empty-handed: he gave him laborers, among them the priest Landoald, the deacon Amantius, and Landoald's own sister Vinciana. Thus a Roman blessing rested upon the mission, and a brother and sister set out together for a land where many still lived without the knowledge of Christ.
The missionaries made their center at Wintershoven, where Landoald and his companions built a church and preached through the region that would become Belgian Limburg. Vinciana's share in this apostolate was not the pulpit but the household of God. With seven companions she formed a kind of monastic community of women, bound to prayer and to work. They sustained the missionary priests in their labors, provided for the needs of the church and its clergy, and took charge of the education of children from noble families — shaping the very households whose conversion would carry the faith into the next generation. In this quiet way Vinciana evangelized Limburg together with her brother, teaching by service, silence, and example what the preachers proclaimed aloud.
Her time of labor was short. Tradition holds that Vinciana did not long survive the founding of the mission, and that she died at Wintershoven, perhaps already in the year 653. She had crossed the Alps to a foreign land, given up home and comfort, and spent herself entirely for souls she would scarcely see converted — content that others should reap what she had sown.
The Church did not forget her. Her body rested at Wintershoven for more than three centuries, until in 977 her relics, with those of her holy companions, were translated to the monastery of Saint Bavo at Ghent, where the saints of Wintershoven were honored with solemn veneration. Her name has come down among the saints of the pre-congregation age, and her feast is kept on 11 September. In Limburg and in Flanders her memory endures as that of a Roman virgin who became a mother to the children of a mission land.
Vinciana teaches the hidden half of every apostolate: the prayer, the hospitality, the patient teaching of the young without which no preaching bears fruit.
Let us ask Saint Vinciana of Wintershoven to obtain for us her generous, self-forgetting service, and today let us do one unseen work of love for the Church and for a child entrusted to our care.
