The Story of Vadstena

...It is desirable that chiefs of mission should correspond in their general trend of political thought to that of the chief of state...

...It is told in Vadstena of how the saint returned once from heaven to see how her church was faring...

...In an ironbound casket, which today rests in the saint's cell in the cloister, Swedish pilgrims bore her remains across Carinthia, up through Austria, through the forests of Poland and Prussia, until after crossing the Baltic, they brought them to Vadstena, where today they lie in a shrine in her own church, close by the tomb of her daughter Saint Catherine, the abbess...

...Richest of all, there is the shrine of the saint herself...

...Then suddenly she broke out into the full, sound speech of an adult...

...The act has not fused the Foreign Service with the departmental service, and until that is done efficiency will never be complete...

...No things of silver or gold shall be in possession of the monastery...

...Birgitta at once disposed of her worldly property, arranged for the care of her children, and asked the prior of Alvastra for a cell wherein she might live a life of prayer and penance until God's will might be made plainly manifest to her...

...Beyond that point, the crystallization of the service should not go...

...But there are treasures of a kind far richer than silver or gold...

...to hold the right Faith...

...An arrow's flight from the castle rises the square September 30, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 501 bulk and delicate spire of the Cloister Church whose founding goes back, a century and a half before the great Gustavus was born...

...Build my church square and staunch," said Birgitta to the artisans, and today it stands square and staunch as the character of its founder...

...Roosevelt was very open to the same charge...

...During this time, the rule and breviary of the order, as well as the dress, were divinely revealed to her...

...THE STORY OF VADSTENA By CHARLES GRENVILLE WILSON AS THE boat glides from the turquoise waters of Lake Vattern and comes to rest in the old moat at Vadstena, the shadow of the past falls upon you and envelops your fancy as does a fog envelop a ship at sea...

...The holes and the cross are deeply worn and smoothly polished by thousands upon thousands of pilgrims throughout the centuries placing their fingers on the fingerprints the saint left on the rock...

...Here in the orchardgarden of the monastery where once the monks toiled, in the cloisters where centuries ago prayerful nuns "kept the noiseless tenor of their way," the sweet, benign spirit of the Holy Bridget walks abroad...

...Spirits walk by night in Vadstena's quaint, old cobbled streets, and within the castle's walls...

...Wilbur Carr, whose patient efforts have made it second to none...

...Only one of Cleveland's appointees has reached the rank of ambassador...

...After European service, a further term of service was to follow as heads of bureaus in the department before promotion from the ranks to be chiefs of missions...

...By her saintly life, Birgitta gained great religious influence over her husband and together they lived devoutly...

...Gustavus Vasa paces the castle's corridors, his fingers tugging at his tawny beard, his eyes gleaming with the driving force of his burning will, his shapely body bowed with the weight of a nation's destiny...

...The President should frequently use his power to draw in new blood at the top, lest lack of competition infect the fabric with dry rot...

...On the ramparts, the sturdy dalesmen in chain and mail walk their posts, every nerve alert to guard the king who so daringly snatched Swedish liberty from the assaults of the outlanders...

...No common child was this Birgitta (to give her her Swedish name) daughter of Birger Persson, governor of Uppland...

...The Savior told her to journey to Vadstena and when she had arrived there, He showed her the site He had chosen and the plans of the cloister in most minute detail...

...At least our cliques have been made up of good, if not brilliant, men, and if they have spun about themselves a cocoon of security in office, they have also done excellent work...

...The Rogers Act, by amalgamating the career-diplomats and the consular service in one Foreign Service corps, has done a positive good by forcing the "diplomats" under the advantage of the sound American training the consular branch has enjoyed during the years it has stood under the guidance of Mr...

...and statues of the Virgin and Son—all of which have escaped the fierce fires of the Reformation which swept Sweden in the sixteenth century...

...At the age of eight, she had visiqns of Our Lady and of Jesus, crucified and the Passion was graven deep in her heart, making her character grave, sweet and sad...

...and McKinley's favoritism was notorious...

...Bryan's so-called "looting of the service for deserving Democrats" is neither strictly true nor important...

...After a severe breakdown caused by her relentless fasting, Jesus made known to the saint the great work of her life—the foundation of a new religious order, the rule of which He dictated Himself...

...vestments wrought by the nuns' own hands...

...These young men were to familiarize themselves with the problems of the Pacific, each specializing...

...there is a wondrous altar brought from Brussels in the sixteenth century...

...The new law provides a secretariat from which ministers and ambassadors may be drawn...

...they shall keep to them neither silver, nor gold, nor precious stones, but the Grace of God, with continual study, devout prayer and divine praises," said the Master in His revelations to the saint...

...This accounts for the lack of rich treasure...

...Then, with her thumb, she scratched the sign of the Cross on the wall as a blessing, and went back to her rest...

...It should never provide for a service closed in the responsible ranks to "outsiders...

...Until she was four, she was dumb, no sound came from her lips...

...Under our loose system, the service has often been run by cliques of men whose wealth ensures their own permanency and sufficient influence to advance or exclude others from promotion...

...Until the passage of the Rogers bill into law, the foreign service of the United States consisted of four antagonistic parts...

...Just across the narrow moat, and between the ship and the sun, rises the beautiful castle the great Gustavus Vasa, built nearly three hundred and seventy-five years ago...

...At once Birgitta began work on the raising of the church and buildings...

...The first to reach minister (the youngest ever promoted to that grade) was unable to carry the expense of an ambassadorship and was forced out...

...In one of these revelations, Jesus said to her—"I have taught thee three things by which thou mayest know the Good Spirit—to honor God, thy Maker...

...But the security should never be absolute...

...Even this evil, however, is better than a service so ordered (as in several European countries) that one has but to sit very small and still and wait for the shoes of the next higher man...

...She found that it was not placed with the altar exactly facing the west, so she placed the tips of her fingers on the wall and swung the church into line...

...to practise a prudent abstinence in all created things...

...They have not been exclusively deserving Democrats...

...As you enter, you are at once impressed with the stately simplicity of it...

...the career-diplomats, the "outsiders," the consular service, and the departmental service—hostile to each other and often obstructive, ruled by cliques and political and social influence...

...The king who built it, those who added to it, have long since gone, still the old palace lies, its blind windows brooding out over the beauty of the lake and the tenuous Swedish landscape beyond, like an old man brooding over the cherished, happy days of his dead youth...

...In 1370, she received confirmation of the foundation of the Order of Saint Savior, or Bridgettines, at Vadstena...

...There is no florid decoration, no wealth of detail to detract from the serene character of the edifice and from the significance of the great crucifix that hangs over the altar...

...As you go out the door, you will see in the granite wall five small holes and beside them a cross sunken into the stone...

...None of these objectives was realized...

...With the work under way, Birgitta went to Rome to obtain from the Pope confirmation of her order...

...In middle life, Birgitta and Ulf made a pilgrimage to Compostella, and a few years after their return, Ulf died in the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra...

...The best of these were then to be brought home to Washington and trained in the routine duties of the State Department, utilizing this period for special studies in courses necessary to their profession, such as law, economics, history—above all, American diplomatic history...

...Only after satisfactory progress under the supervision and guidance of the department, and when immunized to the subtle influences of European court environment, might they be appointed to the European posts...

...Perhaps there should even be always a slight majority of outsiders...

...Olney's choice of aspirants, he began a system of appointing first to the Far Eastern posts and to those of the Latin American Pacific coast, in the belief that in the general scramble for spheres of influence, the Pacific was of vital importance in the training of American diplomats...

...No European service is free of misfits...

...But the American diplomatic service is not singular in its mixture of competence and mediocrity...

...During the years, eight children were born to them, the fifth of whom was destined to become abbess of Vadstena, and later to be canonized as Saint Catherine...

...membership in the Rough Riders was a certain key to promotion and protection...

...There is a statue of Birgitta carved by the monks' hands...

...Nor were his appointees particularly harmful or glaringly incompetent...

...to believe nothing exists, or can exist, but by God...

...For two years she lived thus, fasting four days a week, and during this time she had the revelations which were translated into Latin by Mathias, canon of Linkoping and the good prior of Alvastra, and which became the spiritual guide of so many during the middle-ages...

...I had heard of this old gentleman's great work in preserving for future...

...It was most fitting that here in ancient Vadstena, in a little cell-like room through the windows of which drifted the fragrance of the lilacs of an age-old garden, I should meet Erik Ihrfors, a man who in body and spirit is a strong link between Vadstena's colorful past and her prosaic present...

...Before she was fourteen, she married Ulf, Prince of Nercia...

...Obviously, men have found their way into diplomacy, as they do into every branch of democratic government, who have been entirely unfit for their duties...

...In 1373, worn by a life of rigorous sacrifice and wasted by the hardships of a recent pilgrimage to Jerusalem, she died, and her spirit was claimed by the Savior to Whose service she had devoted her life...

...In the moonlit courtyard under the ancient rustling elms walks the fair young Catherine, the queen whom Vasa took to himself in Vadstena Castle when she was but sixteen years of age, and her beauty a thing renowned throughout the land...

...These were troublous times in the Eternal City, the Pope had removed to Avignon, and for twenty years Birgitta waited, leading a holy life, making herself beloved by all people and praying for the Pope to come back to Rome...