Santa Brigida a Campo de'Fiori is an 18th convent church of the
Bridgittine order
dedicated to
St Bridget of Sweden, patron saint of Europe. It is the Swedish national church. The church is in Piazza Farnese in in the rione VII Regola.
St Bridget founded the monastic Order of the Holy Savior at Vadstena in Sweden. She journeyed to Rome in 1350 with one of her daughters,
St Catherine of Sweden. St Bridget founded a hospice in a private house originally owned by a noble lady called Francesca Papazurri. After St Bridget's death, the palazzo was donated to the Bridgettine order's mother house in Vadstena. The first little church or house-chapel here was dedicated to St Bridget during the pontificate of Boniface IX (1389-1404) after she was canonized in 1391.
By 1507 the institution had fallen into decay and its premises seized by squatters. Peder Månsson, a Bridgettine monk of Vadstena, was sent to Rome to recover the property of the hospice. He succeeded and commissioned a new church, which was completed in 1513.
The Reformation brought radical changes; Lutheranism was made the official religion of Sweden in 1536. Virtually all the Northern European Bridgettine monasteries (the bulk of the order) were destroyed during the Reformation.
Both convent and church were restored in 1614, with a new façade designed by
Francesco Peparelli. However, this early Baroque work did not last long because the church and convent were rebuilt at the beginning of the 18th century by Pope Clement XI (1700-1721). It involved the provision of the present façade, which was begun in 1705.
The convent in Rome was suppressed by the French occupiers in the early 19th century, and was left empty after the restoration of Papal government in 1815. The church and convent passed to the Congregation of the Holy Cross, a French missionary congregation, in 1855. They restored the church, and also the rooms of St Bridget in the convent, in 1857-1858. However, they moved out in 1889. The next owner was a community of Polish Discalced Carmelite nuns.
The new Order of the Most Holy Savior of Saint Bridget was reestablished in the early 20th century by
Elizabeth Hesselblad, Swedish Lutheran, converted to the Catholic faith, with the desire to restore the old order, in the first decade of 1900. The church and convent were given to the Order in 1930. The old convent became their Generalate.
