Saint Elizabeth of Hungary

17 November  ·  Memorial  ·  White

In a hospital ward of red-curtained beds Elizabeth bends to hold a sick man who kneels and reaches up to her; across the street, under a Gothic canopy, she lies dead while a woman reads beside the bed and two angels lift her soul away in a white cloth. The Master of the Saint Elizabeth Panels sets her last years in the streets of a Netherlandish town, for an altarpiece in the great church at Dordrecht.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3146

Her life

She was born in Hungary, probably at Pressburg, in 1207, a daughter of King Andrew II, and brought up at the castle of the Wartburg in Thuringia. In 1221 she married Ludwig of Thuringia; they had a son, Hermann, and two daughters, Sophia and Gertrude. In the famine of 1226 she built a hospital of twenty-eight beds below the Wartburg. Ludwig died of the plague at Otranto on 11 September 1227, on his way to the crusade. Whether she was then driven from the Wartburg or left it freely, the sources do not agree.

In the summer of 1228 she built the Franciscan hospital at Marburg and served the sick in it herself, wearing the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis, under a director, Conrad of Marburg, whom the Catholic Encyclopedia calls somewhat rough and very severe. She died at Marburg on 17 November 1231, at the age of twenty-four, and Gregory IX canonised her at Perugia at Pentecost in 1235. The best-known story about her is a legend: that the bread she was carrying to the poor, and trying to hide, was turned into roses. She was twenty-four. Every hospital ward is her house, and the bread is ours to carry now.

Michael Bihl, “St. Elizabeth of Hungary”, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909): newadvent.org

In Scripture

¹⁸My little children, let us not love in word nor in tongue, but in deed and in truth.

³⁸Give: and it shall be given to you: good measure and pressed down and shaken together and running over shall they give into your bosom. For with the same measure that you shall mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.

1 John 3:18 · Luke 6:38, Douay-Rheims (Challoner).

In painting

The day in the next three years

Near this day

• Saint Margaret of Scotland
• The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
• Saint Cecilia

The saints of the year  ·  The feasts  ·  The Rosary

Written and checked by the Monstrance editors; sources cited. Scripture in the Douay-Rheims (Challoner). Every painting is in the public domain, and each caption follows the record of the institution that holds it.