St. Radegund

St. Radegund was born around 520, a princess of Thuringia, and died on 13 August 587 at Poitiers in Gaul (modern France). Seized as a girl amid the wars that destroyed her homeland, she was carried off as war booty by the Frankish king Chlothar I and raised to be his wife. Deeply Christian and drawn to a life of prayer and charity even at court, she endured an unhappy marriage to a brutal husband, and when he had her brother murdered she finally fled the palace.

With the help of a bishop who ordained her a deaconess, she embraced the religious life and founded the monastery of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, one of the first great convents for women in Gaul, where she lived humbly among her nuns, serving the sick and poor. She obtained for the community a relic of the True Cross, on the occasion of which the poet Venantius Fortunatus composed the famous hymns still sung in the Church's liturgy. She is venerated as a saint, a model of a queen who chose Christ over a throne.