Feast Day of St. Gertrude of Nivelle
While today is celebrated by virtually the whole world as St. Patrick's Day, today is also the Feast of St. Gertrude, Abbess of Nivelle, (not to be confused with St. Gertrude the Great) who died in 659 CE, due to probably a severely ascetic life in the monastery at about 30 years old. She is considered as the Patron Saint of Cats (and Cat people!) but this is really pretty new.... staring in the 1980's! Yeah, just a couple of decades ago. Her traditional iconography shows her holding a crosier as an abbess, and with rats and mice climbing her dress and her crosier (see the picture of her and St. John the Evangelist at the upper right... mice are crawling up her crosier). It seems that Gertrude had visions of souls in Purgatory and in medieval art these souls were often pictured as mice or rats. Why? Who knows, but that was the image at the time. Anyway...since she is always shown with rodents it is a natural procession to move to cats to deal with rodents infestation. So St. Gertrude of Nivelle moved from a mystic who prays for the Poor Souls in Purgatory (pictured around her as mice or rats) to the Patron Saint of Cats who deals with mice and rats, and is now pictured almost completely with a cat (see the upper left picture of her with a crosier and a cat). It just kinda makes you wanna go "Huh?"