St. Elizabeth of Hungary

St. Elizabeth of Hungary was born in 1207, a daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, and died on 17 November 1231 at Marburg (in modern Germany), aged only twenty-four. Betrothed in childhood and raised at the Thuringian court, she was happily married to Ludwig IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, and bore him three children. Even as a young noblewoman she was known for her humility, her life of prayer, and her extraordinary charity to the poor and the sick.

When her husband died of plague while on crusade, Elizabeth, then twenty, renounced the comforts of court and, as a Franciscan tertiary under a strict spiritual director, gave herself wholly to the service of the needy, building a hospital at Marburg where she personally tended the sick and lepers until her early death exhausted her. A beloved legend tells how bread she was secretly carrying to the poor turned to roses when her disapproving relatives demanded to see it. Canonized in 1235, just four years after her death, she is a patron of charitable works and of the Third Order of St. Francis.