Our building is a modern expression of the chapel that once existed in Rupertsberg, Germany (outside the walls of Bingen). You can see here a photo of a computer-generated image of the 12^th century Rupertsberg chapel on display in the Museum am Strom in Bingen, Germany.  We do not know exactly what the Rupertsberg chapel looked like (it was destroyed in the 17^th century) but this image represents an informed guess. It was divine coincidence (synchronicity) that our Hildegard Haus so closely resembles this image.

Rupertsberg was the first monastery Hildegard built when she received permission around 1150 to move her sisters out of Disibodenberg to their own monastery on Mount St. Rupert (corner of the Nahe and Rhine Rivers). Popular tradition has taught that Rupert was born in the late seventh century of a Roman pagan father named Robolaus and a devout Christian mother named Bertha who had received the land on the corner of the Rhine and Nahe Rivers from her father as part of her dowry. According to the vita Hildegard wrote on Rupert, his father Robolaus died in battle when Rupert was three years old.

Hildegard described Rupert as being a unique baby/child blessed by the Holy Spirit. In this tradition, Rupert was believed to have died at the young age of twenty years old and assumed to have been buried at the Rupertsberg. For several hundred years, the story of his life had been passed on by oral tradition. These are stories Hildegard would have grown up hearing.

With further research, however, it seems more likely that there was in fact a monastery founded by a man named Rupert at the corner of the Nahe and Rhine Rivers in Bingen in the eighth century but that it more likely had been founded by a wealthy missionary who had served as a bishop in Worms and then Salzburg. St. Rupert of Salzburg has been named the Apostle to Austria and Bavaria because he built so many monasteries and churches throughout these areas.  It makes sense to assume he built a Benedictine monastery on the corner of the Nahe and Rhine Rivers which later fell into disuse.  With that in mind, the legendary space of Rupertsberg would have been the ideal location for Hildegard to move her sisters. Not only would there have been a foundation and some type of structure existing when Hildegard and her sisters moved into the space, but it would have connected her monastery to this rich Benedictine history.

Scholars date the consecration of the chapel at Rupertsberg no later than May 1, 1151 (which is close to the time they acquired the space). The charter from Henry, Archbishop of Mainz in 1152 refers to the chapel as having been “restored” not built. Assuming there was already a structure existing makes much more sense with the preserved timeline that the Rupert who originally founded this monastery was the infamous Rupert of Salzbuerg.

In her hagiography of St. Rupert, Hildegard wrote the following:

“For through the Holy Spirit good and holy desires were distilled in [Rupert’s] mind like balsam… On his vast estates he had farms and churches built where there were none…”  (59) The text names a number of locations where he built churches/monasteries but in the footnote of the hagiography, there is a citation that reads, “The modern German equivalent of several of the place names mentioned in this paragraph are unclear” (49)

In the opening paragraph of the charter issued by Henry, Archbishop of Mainz in 1152, it stated, “Let all Christ’s faithful both those alive now and those yet to come, know that a certain chapel on mount St. Rupert the Confessor, situated by the river Nahe outside of the walls of the city of Bingen and long neglected and left derelict by its tenants, has in our time been repaired and restored to the worship of God” (238).

This information is important to our shrine because as you can see from the photos, our building is similar in style and structure to the image from the museum in Bingen. Much like Hildegard, we “moved out” of our previous parish (not without challenges from the local hierarchy) to “restore” a building had a sacred past but fell into “disuse” and had even been neglected (there was much work to be done before we could begin to use the space). The building that has become the Hildegard Haus was built in 1926 as St. Michael’s Byzantine Catholic Church. It was founded by a community of immigrant families who faithfully worshipped here until it closed its doors in 2012 (the same year Hildegard was canonized and named a Doctor of the Church). When we acquired the building, there was much work to do to prepare it for our use (it needed to be restored – windows were broken, plaster was peeling, the floors were damaged, and the boiler stopped working…) Like Hildegard, we took this space and “in our time has been repaired and restored to the worship of God.”