By DEB PIROCH
Why is it that we are commanded to hope? Our Lord promised us salvation. In allowing Himself to be crucified and opening for us the doors to salvation, He makes room for us poor sinners to place our footsteps in the shadows of His. To follow, we must love Him above all things and our neighbors as ourselves.
We all want to believe that life and all it contains, like marriage, are all the stuff of “happily ever after.” But the modern skeptic can also easily pose the question, what if it doesn’t work out? How will I cope with life? This we wonder ourselves. The unbeliever might feel, “Let’s try it”…hoping that a romantic feeling or a religious high lasts forever. Commitment to God and His sacraments are not suits or outfits to try on to see how they feel, or if they fit. Rather they are our “wedding garment” in the words of the Gospel. We commit to our God, come what will. Love of God, of spouse, of neighbor, these are not just feelings but a choice we make.
Fulton Sheen wrote beautifully:
“In the human love of marriage, the joys of love are a prepayment for its duties, responsibilities, and sometimes, its sorrows. Because the crosses lie ahead in human love, there is the Transfiguration beforehand, when the face of love seems to shine as the sun, and the garments are as white as snow….There is always the Lord, speaking through the conscience and saying that to capture love in a permanent form one must pass through a Calvary. The early transports of love are an advance, an anticipation, of the real transports that are to come when one has mounted to a higher degree of love through the bearing of the Cross” — The World’s First Love.
“The world is dead to me! All that was joyous in the world!” These were the words of St. Elizabeth on learning that her husband of six years had died of the plague on his way to fight in the Crusades. She had known him a total of sixteen years, and together, they had a beautiful marriage that brought forth three children.
St. Elizabeth of Hungary was born roughly 800 years ago (died AD 1231), the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary and his wife Gertrude von Andechs-Meran. But as a royal child, she was promised very young in marriage to the son of the king of the most important German court, in Thuringia. So, at age four she was sent there to be educated and raised for her future role.
Surely it must have been hard to leave her parents at such a young age. Two years later, when she was six, she was brought word that her mother had been murdered. We are told that little Elizabeth began to pray more, no doubt for comfort. It also must have reminded her of home. Her aunt and, later, a great-niece were both declared saints. Her own daughter would one day be beatified. Clearly, theirs was a family rich in grace.
Three years later the eldest son of Hermann I died, leaving her espoused to marry the second son, Ludwig. Now she was nine. As she became more pious, hostility to her grew in the court. Some even would try to persuade the prince not to marry Elizabeth but, to him, she was the image of perfection. When he traveled, he tried always to bring her a little gift back, whether a rosary or a comb for her hair. When he reached maturity at 21, and she was 14, they married. Their life was idyllic, for six short years.
Elizabeth would pray at night and her husband would beg her to spare herself but still, hold her hand as she prayed. She would beg her maid to wake her when he slept, so she could arise to pray without bothering him, and likewise in his turn, he would pretend to sleep. Each thought of the other. She fed 900 persons a day from Wartburg Castle and built one, later two, hospitals. This was at the foot of the castle, built so high on a cliff for defense it was called the “knee crusher.” And when her husband was away, she exhausted the treasury during a famine to provide for the hungry. On his return he was told . . . and fully supported her.
Then he left for the Crusades, but his body returned lifeless. She was inconsolable. And as Fulton Sheen writes that “love is inseparable from joy,” he likewise writes that “love is inseparable from sorrow.”
She left Wartburg for Marburg. Her confessor fought for the return of her dowry. Affirming the promise she and her husband had made to one another, that is, never to remarry, her life was devoted to the poor. Her brother-in-law held the throne until her son would come of age. When she received her dowry, part immediately went to the poor. She also built herself a small house, and a hospice, which again she served in herself.
Elizabeth had become friends with a Fr. Rodinger, the first German Franciscan, and corresponded with St. Francis. She determined to follow their ways as best she could and became the first lay Franciscan. Because of this, she remains a patron of the Third Order Franciscans even today. But Fr. Rodinger passed away and her new confessor — not a Franciscan — was a Master Konrad. He was by accounts extremely harsh. His motives may well have been good, to separate her from worldly attachments, but he was mean. And she was misguided in agreeing to obey him in all things. He asked her to send away even her companion of many years — and with no family with her, this was very hard on her. She was even subject to blows from him or slaps from her new female “companions,” who were like harpies. It sounds like she bore all the ills humbly, but with tears and wear on body and soul.
In four years she passed away, aged 24. Those who visited her saw only a woman worn, wearing very simple religious garb, spinning at her wheel or caring for the sick. But her faith bore fruit. Miracles began almost immediately and these records still exist — Germans tend to be good organizers! Master Konrad petitioned Rome for her cause. He did not live to see her canonization, but she was canonized, and in less than five years by Pope Gregory IX.
Her body, later relics, was disinterred by a Protestant descendent who buried the bones in the woods, but some were luckily rescued. The golden reliquary that once held her skull now resides in a museum in Scandinavia. And Martin Luther himself later lived for a time at her castle. Sadly, he did not believe that marriage was a sacrament. Elizabeth would have disagreed; a piece of her wedding gown remains as a relic in Speyer Cathedral in Germany.
Her feast is November 19. Modern doubters in the efficacy of the marriage or the faith should pray to St. Elizabeth so she can set them straight.
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