St. Elizabeth of Hungary

Who they were

Elizabeth was a Hungarian princess married at fourteen into the court of Thuringia, and, rarest of medieval royal facts, it was a love match. Ludwig backed her charity against his own court's complaints, and the accounts of their marriage read warm eight centuries later. She built a hospital below the castle and fed hundreds daily in famine. The rose legend attached to her, in which bread hidden in her cloak turns to roses under inspection, is told here as legend, though her actual documented behaviour needed no miracle to scandalize a court.

Ludwig died of fever on the way to crusade when she was twenty. Grief broke her, the court pushed her out, and she took the grey habit of the Franciscan third order as one of its first members anywhere. She built a hospital at Marburg, nursed with her own hands under a spiritual director history remembers harshly, and died at twenty four. She was canonized four years later.

Why people turn to St. Elizabeth of Hungary

Widows, and anyone in the first raw year of loss. She is the patron who knows the specific grief of a good marriage ended early. Every parish food programme can claim her too.

How to ask their intercession

For a widow or widower by name, especially in their first November. Her feast on 17 November is a natural day to pray for the recently bereaved.