Elizabeth’s charity is remembered in numerous hospitals that bear her name throughout the world. She was born in 1207 at Pressburg (now Bratislava), daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, and was married in 1221 to Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, to whom she bore three children.

At an early age she showed concern for the poor and the sick, and was thus attracted to the Franciscans who came to the Wartburg in 1223. From them she received spiritual direction. Her husband was sympathetic to her almsgiving and allowed her to use her dowry for this purpose. During a famine and epidemic in 1226, when her husband was in Italy, she sold her jewels and established a hospital, where she cared for the sick and the poor. To supply their needs, she opened the royal granaries. After her husband’s death in 1227, however, the opposition of the court to such “extravagances” compelled her to leave the Wartburg with her children.

For some time, Elizabeth lived in great distress. She then took the habit of the Franciscans—the first of the Franciscan Tertiaries, or Third Order, in Germany. Finally, arrangements with her family gave her a subsistence, and she spent her remaining years in Marburg, living in self-denial and caring for the sick and needy. She died from exhaustion, November 17, 1231, and was canonized by Pope Gregory IX four years later. With Louis of France she shares the title of patron of the Third Order of St. Francis.

Excerpted directly from “Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2022,” p. 518-519.