Feast day: November 17

St. Elizabeth of Hungary

Princess & Widow · 1207–1231

Patron of Bakers, charities, widows, the Third Order of St. Francis

Hungarian princess, devoted wife, and mother of three who built hospitals and fed the poor from the castle stores — dead at 24, canonized within four years.

Elizabeth was born in 1207, a daughter of the king of Hungary, and was betrothed in childhood and sent to be raised at the court of Thuringia in Germany, in the great castle of the Wartburg. There she married Ludwig, the young landgrave, in a union that was, by all accounts, genuinely happy and loving — and from the first she shocked the court by the seriousness of her faith and the lavishness of her charity.

As landgravine she gave herself to the poor without measure. She built a hospital below the castle and visited the sick there daily with her own hands, fed hundreds of the hungry at the castle gate, and in time of famine and plague threw open the storehouses to feed the starving, even when courtiers grumbled that she was beggaring the treasury. A beloved legend tells that when challenged about what she was carrying to the poor, the bread in her cloak was found turned to roses.

Her happiness was brief. In 1227 Ludwig died of fever on his way to join a crusade, and Elizabeth, grief-stricken and now without his protection, was pushed out of the castle by his family. She made provision for her children, renounced the comforts of her rank, and became one of the first members of the new Third Order of St. Francis, embracing the poverty she had always loved.

She settled at Marburg, built a hospital there, and spent her last years nursing the sick, the lepers, and the destitute with her own hands, under the harsh direction of a severe confessor. Worn out by penance and labor, she died in 1231 at only twenty-four, and was canonized just four years later. She is a patron of the Third Order, of hospitals, and of bakers and the charitable everywhere.

Legend says bread she smuggled to the poor turned to roses when her critics stopped her — but the documented truth is wilder: she gave away nearly everything, including her own bed.

“How could I bear a crown of gold when the Lord bears a crown of thorns?”
— St. Elizabeth of Hungary

Image: Simone Martini (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/05389a.htm