Landrada

Saint Landrada (also called Leandra) was a hermit and then the foundress and first abbess of the convent of Munsterbilsen, in present-⁠day Belgium. She reposed around the year 690.

She was the only daughter of German nobles, of the family of Pepin of Landen. From childhood she was seen as a model of Christian perfection. She refused suitors, since she had chosen a bridegroom not of this world, left her parents' home and became a hermit in the forest near Munsterbilsen. She built her own hut, did not sleep in a bed or use a bath, and ate only bread and water.

Saint Lambert, bishop of Maastricht, visited and counseled her, and together they founded in the forest a chapel in honor of the Mother of God, which she built herself and which became the beginning of Munsterbilsen Abbey. According to one account, the site was shown to her in a vision: a cross of exquisite workmanship descended from heaven and impressed itself on a stone as if on wax, and a voice told her the cross was a gift for her. She became the first abbess of the convent and died there.

A legend says that after her death she appeared to Lambert in a dream and asked to be buried at a spot marked by a fiery cross, at Wintershoven. The people gathered for her funeral wished to bury her at the abbey, and Lambert yielded. Three days later, however, he ordered a grave dug at Wintershoven, and by the work of angels her body, together with a marble sarcophagus, was carried there. In 980 her body was moved to the church of Saint Bavo in Ghent. Parts of the relics were returned to Wintershoven in 1624 and others went to Munsterbilsen. She is patron of Munsterbilsen and Ghent. She is commemorated on 8 July (at Munsterbilsen three days earlier), as a saint of the undivided Church, by the New Calendar.