Feast day: January 18

St. Margaret of Hungary

Virgin · 1242–1270

Patron of Hungary

A king's daughter pledged to God in thanksgiving for her country's survival, she became a Dominican nun and refused royal marriages to keep her vows.

Margaret was a daughter of King Béla IV of Hungary, born in 1242 while the kingdom was being devastated by the Mongol invasion. In their distress her parents vowed to dedicate their child to God if the realm were delivered; when the Mongols withdrew, they kept the vow.

At the age of three or four she was placed with the Dominican sisters, and as a girl she entered the convent her father built for her on an island in the Danube near Buda — today called Margaret Island in her honour. She made her profession as a Dominican nun and refused every later proposal of a royal marriage, insisting she belonged to Christ alone.

Though a king's daughter, she sought out the humblest and most repellent tasks of the convent — nursing the sick, scrubbing floors, serving her sisters — and practised austerities that astonished even the strictest among them. Contemporaries describe a life of intense prayer and deliberate self-effacement.

She died in 1270, not yet thirty, and miracles were soon reported at her tomb. Long venerated in Hungary, she was formally canonized only in 1943, by Pope Pius XII.

Her father offered her a crown and a husband-king; she chose the convent's hardest chores instead and washed the feet of the sick.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09654a.htm