“Master Richard, Bishop of Trivento, having been adjured in the name of the Holy Ghost, the holy Gospels lying open before him, affirmed that he had seen the blessed Odo and knew him to be a God-fearing man, modest and chaste, given up night and day to watching and prayer, clad only in rough garments of wool, living in a tiny cell, which he hardly ever quitted except to pray in the church, obeying always the sound of the bell when it called him to office. Without ceasing, he poured forth his soul in sighs and tears; there was no one he came across to whom he did not give new courage in the service of God; he constantly read the divine Scriptures, and in spite of his advanced age, as long as he stayed in his cell, he laboured with his hands as best he could that he might not fall a prey to idleness.”

The bishop then goes on to give a brief sketch of Odo’s life, noting that after he became a Carthusian he had been appointed prior in the recently founded monastery of Geyrach in Slavonia, but had there been so cruelly persecuted by the bishop of the diocese, Dietrich, that, being forced to leave his community, he had travelled to Rome to obtain the pope’s permission to resign his office. He had then been given hospitality by the aged abbess of a nunnery at Tagliacozzo, who, struck by his holiness, got leave to retain him as chaplain to the community. Numerous other witnesses, who had been the spectators of Odo’s edifying life, spoke of his austerities, his charity and his humble self-effacement.

One of these, the Archpriest Oderisius, deposes that he was present when Odo breathed his last, and that “as he lay upon the ground in his hair-shirt in the aforesaid little cell, he began to say, when at the point of death, ‘Wait for me, Lord, wait for me, I am coming to thee’; and when they asked him to whom he was speaking, he answered, ‘It is my King, whom now I see, I am standing in His presence.’ And when the blessed Odo spoke these words, just as if someone were offering him his hand, he stood straight up from the ground, and so, with his hands stretched out heavenwards, he passed away to our Lord.”

This happened on January 14 in the year 1200, when Odo was believed to be nearly a hundred years old. He worked many miracles both during life and after death, but it horrified him to think that people should attribute to him any supernatural power. “Brother”, he said to one who asked his aid, “why dost thou make game of me, a wretched sinner, a bag of putrid flesh ? Leave me in peace; it is for Christ, the Son of the living God, to heal thee”; and as he said this he burst into tears. But the man went away permanently cured of an infirmity which, as the witness who recounts this attests from personal knowledge, had tortured him for many years. The cultus of Bd Odo was confirmed in 1859.

An account of this good brother is given both in Le Couteulx, Annales Ordinis Cartusiensis vol. iii, pp. 293—302 and in the Analecta Juris Pontificii, vol. v, 1861, cc. 129-134. In both, the greater part of the space is taken up with attestations of miracles alleged to have been worked at the intercession of Bd William many centuries after his death.

1209 St. William of Bourges canon monk Cistercian many miracles deaf and dumb, the blind, the mentally ill became sound.
 Bitúricis, in Aquitánia, sancti Willhélmi, Epíscopi et Confessóris, signis et virtútibus clari; quem Honórius Papa Tértius in Sanctórum cánonem adscrípsit.
       At Bourges in Aquitaine, St. William, archbishop and confessor, renowned for miracles and virtues.  He was canonized by Pope Honorius III.

Eudo accordingly, having made his prayer, drew first the name of the abbot William, to whom also the majority of the votes of the clergy had been already given. It was on November 23, 1200. This news overwhelmed William. He never would have acquiesced had he not received a double command in virtue of obedience, on~ from Pope Innocent III, the other from his superior, the Abbot of Citeaux. He left his solitude with tears, and soon after was consecrated.

In this new dignity St William’s first care was to bring both his exterior and interior life up to the highest possible standard, being very sensible that a man’s first task is to honour God in his own soul. He redoubled his austerities, saying it was now incumbent on him to. do penance for others as well as for himself. He always wore a hair-shirt under his religious habit, and never added or diminished anything in his clothing whatever the season of the year; and he never ate any flesh-meat, though he had it at his table for guests. The attention he paid to his flock was no less remarkable, especially in assisting the poor both spiritually and corporally, saying that he was chiefly sent for them. He was most gentle in dealing with penitent sinners, but inflexible towards the impenitent, though he refused to have recourse to the civil power against them, the usual remedy of that age. Many such he at last reclaimed by his sweetness and charity. Certain great men abusing his leniency, usurped the rights of his church; but William strenuously defended them even against the king himself, notwithstanding his threats to confiscate his lands. By humility and patience he overcame, on more than one occasion, the opposition of his chapter and other clergy. He converted many Albigensian heretics, and was preparing for a mission among them at the time he was seized with his last illness. He persisted, nevertheless, in preaching a farewell sermon to his people, which increased his fever to such a degree, that he was obliged to postpone his journey and take to his bed. The night following, perceiving his last hour was at hand, he desired to anticipate the Nocturns, which are said at midnight; but having made the sign of the cross on his lips and breast, he was unable to pronounce more than the first two words. Then, at a sign, which he made, he was laid on ashes, and thus St William died, a little past midnight, on the morning of January lo, 1209. His body was interred in his cathedral, and being honoured by many miracles it was enshrined in 1217, and in the year following he was canonized by Pope Honorius III.

What lends great interest to the account preserved of this maiden is the fact that it was written, while she was yet living, by one who knew her well, and that it finds confirmation in contemporary chronicles and in some still existing public records. The text of the biography is printed in the Acta Sanctorum (November, vol. ii) from a collation of four manuscripts, and the editor has cited in full the passages referring to Bd Alpais, which occur in the chronicles of Robert of Auxerre and Ralph Coggeshall. Alpais seems to be the earliest person of whom it is recorded on reliable evidence that she lived for years upon the Blessed Eucharist alone. A careful and sober study was written by L. H. Tridon, La vie merveilleuse de Ste Alpais de Cudot (1886). See also the Analecta Juris Pontificii for 1874, pp. 1029—1076, and two works by M. Blanchon (1893 and 1896).  

1231 St Elizabeth of Hungary, Widow; a reputation for miracles.
In óppido Marpúrgi, in Germánia, deposítio sanctæ Elísabeth Víduæ, Regis Hungarórum Andréæ fíliæ, ex tértio Ordine sancti Francísci, quæ, pietátis opéribus assídue inténta, miráculis clara migrávit ad Dóminum.
    At Marburg in Germany, the death of St. Elizabeth, widow, daughter of King Andrew of Hungary, and member of the Third Order of St. Francis.  After a life spent in the performance of works of piety, she went to heaven, having a reputation for miracles.

IT is related by Dietrich of Apolda in his life of this saint that on an evening in the summer of the year 1207 the minnesinger Klingsohr from Transylvania announced to the Landgrave Herman of Thuringia that that night a daughter had been born to the king of Hungary, who should be exalted in holiness and become the wife of Herman’s son; and that in fact at that time the child Elizabeth was born, in Pressburg (Bratislava) or Saros-Patak, to Andrew II of Hungary and his wife, Gertrude of Andechs-Meran. Such an alliance as that “foretold” by Klingsohr had substantial political advantages to recommend it, and the baby Elizabeth was promised to Herman’s eldest son. At about four years of age she was brought to the Thuringian court at the castle of the Wartburg, near Eisenach, there to be brought up with her future husband. As she grew up she underwent much unkindness from some members of the court, who did not appreciate her goodness, but on the other hand the young man Louis (Ludwig) became more and more enamored of her. We are told that when he had visited a city he would always bring back a present for her, a knife or a bag or gloves or a coral rosary. “When it was time for him to be back she would run out to meet him and he would take her lovingly on his arm and give her what he had brought.”
   In 1221, Louis being now twenty-one and landgrave in his father’s place, and Elizabeth fourteen, their marriage was solemnized, in spite of attempts to persuade him to send her back to Hungary as an unsuitable bride; he declared he would rather cast away a mountain of gold than give her up. She, we are told, was “perfect in body, handsome, of a dark complexion; serious in her ways, and modest, of kindly speech, fervent in prayer and most generous to the poor, always full of goodness and divine love”. He also was handsome and “modest as a young maid”, wise, patient and truthful, trusted by his men and loved by his people. Their wedded life lasted only six years and has been called by an English writer “an idyll of enthralling fondness, of mystic ardor, of almost childish happiness, the like of which I do not remember in all I have read of romance or of human experience.”

They had three children, Herman, who was born in 1222 and died when he was nineteen, Sophia, who became duchess of Brabant, and Bd Gertrude of Aldenburg. Louis, unlike some husbands of saints, put no obstacles in the way of his wife’s charity, her simple and mortified life, and her long prayers. “My lady”, says one of her ladies-in-waiting, “would get up at night to pray, and my lord would implore her to spare herself and come back to rest, all the while holding her hand in his for fear she should come to some harm. She would tell her maids to wake her gently when he was asleep—and sometimes when they thought him sleeping he was only pretending.” *

Elizabeth’s material benefactions were so great that they sometimes provoked adverse criticism. In 1225 that part of Germany was severely visited by a famine and she exhausted her own treasury and distributed her whole store of corn amongst those who felt the calamity heaviest. The landgrave was then away, and at his return the officers of his household complained to him of her profusion to the poor. But Louis, without examining into the matter, asked if she had alienated any of his dominions. They answered, “No”. “As for her charities”, said he, “they will bring upon us the divine blessings. We shall not want so long as we let her relieve the poor as she does.”
   The castle of the Wartburg was built on a steep rock, which the infirm and weak were not able to climb (the path was called “the knee-smasher”). St Elizabeth therefore built a hospital at the foot of the rock for their reception, where she often fed them with her own hands, made their beds, and attended them even in the heat of summer when the place seemed insupportable. Helpless children, especially orphans, were provided for at her expense. She was the foundress of another hospital in which twenty-eight persons were constantly relieved, and she fed nine hundred daily at her gate, besides numbers in different parts of the dominions, so that the revenue in her hands was truly the patrimony of the distressed. But Elizabeth’s charity was tempered with discretion; and instead of encouraging in idleness such as were able to work, she employed them in ways suitable to their strength and ability. There is a story about St Elizabeth so well known that it would hardly need repeating here but that Father Delehaye picks it out as an example of the way in which hagiographers so often embellish a tale to make a greater impression on their readers.

Everyone is familiar with the beautiful incident in the life of St Elizabeth of Hungary when, in the very bed she shared with her husband, she laid a miserable leper,...The indignant landgrave rushed into the room and dragged off the bedclothes. “But”, in the noble words of the historian, “at that instant Almighty God opened the eyes of his soul, and instead of a leper he saw the figure of Christ crucified stretched upon the bed,” This admirable account by Dietrich of Apolda was considered too simple by later biographers, who consequently transformed the sublime vision of faith into a material apparition. Tunc aperuit Deus interiores principis oculos, wrote the historian.

provision was made for Elizabeth by her relatives; and on Good Friday in the church of the Franciscan friars at Eisenach she formally renounced the world, later taking the unbleached gown and cord which was the habit of the-third order of St Francis.

An influential part was played in all these developments by Master Conrad of Marburg, who benceforward was the determining human influence in St Elizabeth’s life. This priest had played a considerable part therein for some time, having succeeded the Franciscan Father Rodinger as her confessor in ins. The Land­grave Louis, in common with Pope Gregory IX and many others, had a high opinion of Conrad, and had allowed his wife to make a promise of obedience to him, saving of course his own husbandly authority.
  But the conclusion can hardly be avoided that Conrad’s experience as a successful inquisitor of heretics and his domineering and severe, if not brutal, personality made him an unsuitable person to be the director of St Elizabeth. Some of his later critics have been moved in their adverse criticism by emotion rather than thought and knowledge; on the other hand, his defenders and apologists have not always been free from special pleading. Subjectively, it is true that Conrad, by giving to Elizabeth obstacles which she overcame, helped her on her road to sanctity (though we cannot know that a director of more sensibility would not have led her to yet greater heights) had acquired a love of poverty which she could put into action only to a limited extent all the time she was landgravine of Thuringia.

 Now, her children having been provided for, she went to Marburg, but was forced to leave there and lived for a time in a cottage at Wehrda, by the side of the River Lahn. Then she built a small house just outside Marburg and attached to it a hospice for the relief of the sick, the aged and the poor, to whose service she entirely devoted herself.

In some respects Conrad acted as a prudent and necessary brake on her en­thusiasm at this tim : he would not allow her to beg from door to door or to divest herself definitely of all her goods or to give more than a certain amount at a time in alms or to risk infection from leprosy and other diseases. In such matters he acted with care and wisdom. But “Master Conrad tried her constancy in many ways, striving to brcak her own will in all things. That he might afflict her still more he deprived her of those of her household who were particularly dear to her, including me, Isentrude, whom she loved; she sent me away in great dis­tress and with many tears. Last of all he turned off Jutta, my companion, who had been with her from her childhood, and whom she loved with a special love. With tears and sighs the blessed Elizabeth saw her go. Master Conrad, of pious memory, did this in his zeal with good intentions, lest we should talk to her of past greatness and she be tempted to regret. Moreover, he thus took away from her any comfort she might have in us because he wished her to cling to God alone.”
  For her devoted waiting-women he substituted two “harsh females”, who reported to him on her words and actions when these infringed his detailed commands in the smallest degree. He punished her with slaps in the face and blows with a long, thick rod “whose marks remained for three weeks.” No plea of “other times, other manners” can take the sting from Elizabeth’s bitter cry to Isentrude, “If I am so afraid of a mortal man, how awe-inspiring must be the Lord and Judge of the world!”

  Conrad’s policy of breaking rather than directing the will was not completely successful. With reference to him and his disciplinary methods St Elizabeth compares herself to sedge in a stream during flood-time the water bears it down flat, but when the rains have gone it springs up again, straight, strong and unhurt. Once when she went off to pay a visit of which Conrad did not approve, he sent to fetch her back. “We are like the snail”, she observed, “which withdraws into its shell when it is going to rain. So we obey and withdraw from the way we were going.” She had that good self-confidence so often seen when a sense of humour serves submission to God.

  “Between me and the wall there was a little bird singing so gaily to me, and it was so sweet that I had to sing too.” At midnight before the day of her death she stirred from her quietness and said, “It is near the hour when the Lord was born and lay in the manger and by His all-mighty power made a new star. He came to redeem the world, and He will redeem me.” And at cock-crow, “It is now the time when He rose from the grave and broke the doors of hell, and he will release me.”

   For three days her body lay in state in the chapel of the hospice, where she was buried and where many miracles were seen at her intercession. Master Conrad began collecting depositions, touching her sanctity, but he did not live to see her canonization, which was proclaimed in 1235. In the following year her relics were translated to the church of St Elizabeth at Marburg, built by her brother-in-law Conrad, in the presence of the Emperor Frederick II, and “so great a concourse of divers nations, peoples and tongues as in these German lands scarcely ever was gathered before or will ever be again”. There the relics of St Elizabeth of Hun­gary rested, an object of pilgrimage to all Germany and beyond, till in 1539 a Protestant landgrave of Hesse, Philip, removed them to a place unknown.

1232 BENTVOGLIA great charity; zeal for souls; inspiring earnestness of his sermons;  levitating

BENTVOGLIA a native of San Severino in the Marches, joined the Franciscan Order in the lifetime of the founder, and though his family was well-to-do a number of his near relatives subsequently followed his example. The imperfect records preserved to us do not seem to supply anything very characteristic or personal regarding this beatus. He, no doubt, shared in full measure the love of poverty and simplicity which was so conspicuous in the first generation of the Friars Minor. We are told of his great charity, his zeal for souls and of the inspiring earnestness of his sermons. The parish priest of San Severino is said in the Fioretti to have been brought to the order by witnessing a rapture of Bd Bentivoglia when praying in a wood, in the course of which he saw this holy brother raised for a long time high above the ground. In the same source we read how, “while sojourning once alone at Trave Bonanti in order to take charge of and serve a certain leper, he (Bentivoglia) received commandment from his superior to depart thence and go unto another place, which was about fifteen miles distant, and, not willing to abandon the leper, he took him with him with great fervour of charity, and placed him on his shoulders, and carried him from the dawn till the rising of the sun all the fifteen miles of the way, even to the place where he was sent, which was called Monte San Vicino, which journey, if he had been an eagle, he could not have flown in so short a time, and this divine miracle put the whole country round in amazement and admiration”. He died, where he was born, at San Severino on Christmas day, 1232.

Their children were the occasions of a good deal of trouble for them. For example, in 1212 Duke Henry made a partition of his estates between his sons Henry and Conrad, but on terms dissatisfying to them. The two brothers with their factions came to an open rupture, and, notwithstanding their mother’s efforts to reconcile them, a battle was fought, in which Henry routed his younger brother’s army. This was one of those crosses by which the duchess learned more bitterly to deplore the miseries and blindness of the world, and more perfectly to disengage her heart from its slavery. After 1209 she made her principal residence near Trebnitz monastery, often retiring into that austere house, where she slept in the dormitory and complied with all the exercises of the community. She wore the same cloak and tunic summer and winter, and underneath them a hair-shift, with sleeves of white serge that it might not be seen. With going to church barefoot over ice and snow her feet were often blistered and chilblained, but she carried shoes under her arm, to put on if she met anyone. An abbot once gave her a new pair, insisting that she should wear them, which she promised to do. When he met her some time after she was still unshod, and he asked what had become of them. Hedwig produced them from under her cloak, brand-new. “I always wear them there“, she said.

In 1240 the Mongol Tartars swept through the Ukraine and Poland. Duke Henry II led his army against them and a battle was fought near Wahlstadt, in which, it is said, the Tartars used a sort of poison-gas, for “a thick and nauseating smoke, issuing from long copper tubes shaped like serpents, stupefied the Polish forces“. Henry was killed, and his death was known to St Hedwig three days before the news was brought to her. “I have lost my son“, she told her com­panion Dermudis. “He has gone from me like a bird in flight, and I shall never see him again in this life.” When the messenger arrived, it was she, the old woman, who comforted the younger ones, Henry’s wife Anne and his sister Gertrude. The example of her faith and hope was honoured by God with the gift of miracles. A nun who was blind recovered her sight by the blessing of the saint with the sign of the cross, and her biographer gives an account of several other miraculous cures wrought by her and of several predictions, especially of her own death. In her last sickness she insisted on being anointed before any others could be persuaded that she was in danger. She died in October 1243, and was buried at Trebnitz. St Hedwig was canonized in 1267, and her feast added to the general Western calendar in 1706.

There is a Latin life or legend of St Hedwig which seems to have been compiled towards the close of the thirteenth century by an unknown writer who claims to have based his narrative in the main upon memoirs provided by a Cistercian, Engelbert of Leubus. There is a shorter as well as a longer form of the story, which is printed in the Acta Sanctorum, October, vol. viii, as well as elsewhere. A manuscript copy written in 1353 and preserved at Schlackenwert is of great interest on account of the miniatures with which it is decorated they have often been reproduced, as for example in the book of H. Riesch, Die hi. Hedwig (1926). There are several lives in German, e.g. by F. H. Gorlich (1854), F. Becker (1872), E. Fromnitz (1926), K. and F. Metzger (1927), and a few in French, notably that by G. Bazin (1886). See also G. Morin in the Revue Bénédictine, vol. vii (1890), pp. 465—469; and H. Quillus, Konigen Hedwig von Polen (1938). There is a popular American account of St Hedwig, with a fancy title, The Glowing Lily, by E. Markowa (1946).