Feast day: August 16

St. Stephen of Hungary

King · c. 975–1038

Patron of Hungary

The first Christian king of Hungary, who unified the nation, organized its Church, gave it just laws, and was crowned with a crown sent by the pope — still the symbol of the country.

Stephen was the first Christian king of Hungary and the founder of the Hungarian state. Born about 969, the son of a pagan Magyar chieftain, he was baptized as a boy along with his father and married a Bavarian princess, sister of the future emperor St. Henry II, binding his people to Christian Europe.

On succeeding his father as ruler about 997, he set himself to two great tasks at once: to weld the warring, half-nomadic Magyar tribes into a single kingdom, and to make that kingdom Christian. He put down the revolts of pagan chieftains who resisted both, and then, around the year 1000, received a royal crown from the pope — the famous 'Holy Crown of Hungary' — and was solemnly anointed king.

He organized the Church in his realm from the ground up, founding dioceses and monasteries and decreeing the building of churches and the keeping of Christian law and the Lord's Day. He governed with justice, was generous and accessible to the poor, who could approach him freely, and placed his whole kingdom under the protection of the Virgin Mary.

The great sorrow of his last years was the death of his son and heir, St. Emeric. Stephen died in 1038 and was canonized in 1083. Honoured as the father and patron of his nation, he remains the central figure of Hungarian Christian identity to this day.

He turned a pagan people into a Christian kingdom in a single generation, and the Holy Crown of St. Stephen remained Hungary's emblem for a thousand years.

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/14287a.htm