Katharina von Bora

Life

Katharina von Bora was born in 1499 into a noble family that had fallen on hard times. Sources differ on her place of birth. At about the age of five, she was placed in a convent school at Brehna. Around the age of ten, she was moved to the Cistercian convent at Nimbschen near Grimma, which was headed by her aunt. The Cistercians are a Catholic religious order known for the strictness of their monastic life. She took her vows in 1515, becoming a fully professed nun.

When the reforming ideas of Martin Luther reached the convent, she began to have doubts about the monastic life. Around Easter 1523, she and eight fellow nuns secretly fled the convent. Luther knew of the escape, and Leonhard Köppe, a town councilor of Torgau, helped carry it out. According to a well-known story, the nuns escaped hidden in herring barrels, but this account is legendary. The escaped nuns settled in Wittenberg, where Luther's circle arranged lodging and marriages for them.

Katharina turned down several marriage proposals. She reportedly declared that she would marry no one but Luther or his colleague Nicolaus von Amsdorf. Finally, on June 13, 1525, she married the 41-year-old Luther in Wittenberg. She was 26 at the time, and the German Peasants' War was at its height that year. The couple had six children and also took in and raised orphaned children of relatives.

After Luther's death in 1546, Katharina faced great difficulty in securing her inheritance. When the Schmalkaldic War broke out, she took refuge in Dessau and Magdeburg. In 1552, when plague broke out in Wittenberg, she fled toward Torgau and was injured in a carriage accident on the way. She died in Torgau on December 20 of that year and was buried in St. Mary's Church in Torgau.

Ministry and Accomplishments

The Luthers made their home in the former Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg. Katharina took charge of this large household and personally managed the following:

• Farming the land and raising livestock
• Brewing beer
• Running a boarding house where students paid for lodging and meals
• Caring for the sick during epidemics

As a result, Luther was free to devote his energy to teaching and writing. Their home was an open household, with students and guests constantly coming and going. At the time, priests and members of religious orders were required to remain celibate, and the couple's marriage was seen as a direct repudiation of that rule. It later became a symbolic starting point for the Protestant tradition of pastors marrying and raising families.

Influence on the Korean Church

In the Korean church, Katharina is presented chiefly as "Luther's wife." In discussions of the pastor's family and the role of the pastor's wife, she is cited as an example from the first generation of Protestantism. Around the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, Christian broadcasters such as CTS Christian TV, as well as the secular press, featured her. These reports portrayed her as a partner in the work of the Reformation and as a forward-looking woman.

Assessment

Today she is regarded as a figure who supported Luther's work through her strong will and her skill in managing a household. Some also see her as a woman who went beyond the roles expected of women in her era. A statue of her stands in the courtyard of the Lutherhaus in Wittenberg, now a museum of Reformation history. Catholics of her own time, by contrast, regarded the marriage as a scandal, since it united two people who had taken religious vows and involved a large difference in age. It is generally held that the two did not marry out of romantic love; rather, their affection deepened as they lived together.