Saint Elizabeth of Hungary

Her whole life was bound up with that road down the hill. A princess learned to leave behind the silk and the servants and walk all the way to foul-smelling huts, to sit beside people no one cared to visit. And when she herself lost everything she had leaned on, she still kept walking that road of service.

Wartburg Castle, perched on a rocky crag more than four hundred meters high above the town of Eisenach, was a glittering center of poetry, culture and wealth. Only a few years before Elizabeth arrived, it had become famous throughout Europe for a singing contest among celebrated court poets, masters such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote part of his masterpiece in that very place. Yet beneath the elegant ceremonies ran quiet struggles for power. In 1213, when Elizabeth was only six, terrible news came from home: Queen Gertrude, her mother, had been brutally murdered by hostile factions in Hungary. Losing her mother left a deep wound in the childhood of a girl living in a foreign land, too far away even to come home and mourn.

Elizabeth grew up in a household of deep faith. She took early to quiet prayer and felt a special tenderness for the destitute. Her simple ways, her refusal to wear costly jewels and her soft heart more than once annoyed the nobles at court, who sneered that such things were beneath her rank. But the young man who would one day be her husband saw the holiness in her heart, and he cherished and protected it.

They had three children: Hermann, born in 1222, Sophia, born in 1224, and Gertrude, born in 1227. For all the heavy duties of a ruler’s wife, Elizabeth still opened her door day after day to the hungry poor. Far from stopping her, Ludwig backed his wife’s works of charity with all his heart.

It is a warm picture of a marriage: it is easier to keep on doing good when your husband or wife does not see that kindness as waste or as a threat to the family. Together they looked for ways to turn the riches of the palace into a shelter for the wretched outside the castle gates.

Elizabeth also cared deeply about where the things she used came from. She flatly refused to eat food or wear clothes paid for by exploitation and by the heavy taxes that weighed on poor peasants. Her charity did not stop at handing out leftovers to the needy; it went straight to a question of justice: am I living in comfort on top of someone else’s forgotten misery?

She did not stand in a high tower sending servants down with relief; she walked down the hill herself, day after day. She bent down beside bodies covered in sores, fed spoonful after spoonful of porridge to the exhausted, washed the filthy clothes of people with contagious diseases, and tenderly closed the eyes of the dying.

Compassion often begins as a passing feeling of pity, but people who suffer need it to become steady work, done again every day. The next morning the hungry were still there, the sick still groaning; and Elizabeth rolled up her sleeves and went down to the poor quarter again.

Later, popular legend told of the loaves she hid in the folds of her cloak for the poor, which turned into fresh roses when someone in the household stopped to question her. That lovely image found its way into paintings and statues of her; but what makes her a saint for every age are the real loaves that fed the hungry and the real festering wounds a princess washed clean with love. In these years she also took to heart the poverty and charity of Saint Francis of Assisi, who was still alive then and stirring all of Europe with his way of life.

Faith did not make that parting any less painful. The husband who had loved and protected her with all his heart would never come home. All their plans together lay in ruins, while three small children still needed their mother’s care.

Thanks to her mother’s family and to loyal knights returning from the Crusade, her good name and part of her inheritance were restored. She carefully provided for her three children’s future, and then made a firm choice for herself.

She was not a patroness whose name was simply carved on a plaque. She wore a coarse gray habit and worked every day as a humble servant: drawing water, splitting firewood, cooking, bathing lepers whom everyone else shrank from in disgust.

Her spiritual director at that time, the priest Conrad of Marburg, was extremely harsh and caused her great anguish of soul. Elizabeth patiently bore even those bitter trials. What we treasure in her is her complete faithfulness to God and her boundless love for the poor; her director’s harshness is not something the Church has ever held up for imitation.

An all-too-short life. Yet in those twenty-four years she lived many lives to the full: a child far from home, a loving wife, a mother of three, a penniless widow driven out, and a devoted servant of the most wretched.

Pope Gregory IX solemnly canonized her on May 27, 1235, only four years after her death. Few canonizations in the history of the Church have come so fast, a sign of how quickly devotion to her spread among the people the moment she died. The Church celebrates Saint Elizabeth of Hungary on November 17 each year. The Franciscan family has always honored her as the patron of those who live the spirit of the Gospel in the midst of the world.