St. Elisabeth of Portugal

St. Elizabeth of Portugal

July 4th, reminder
Position: queen, TOR
Death: 1336
Patron: Portugal, Coimbra, and Zaragoza; various women’s associations; charity workers; invoked in marital difficulties and false accusations; helper in wartime hardships
Attributes: crown, rose, nun, beggar
CURRICULUM VITAE

She came from the Spanish royal family. At the age of 12, she was married to the Portuguese King Dionysius, with whom she had two children and by whose side she experienced much suffering, not only because of his infidelity. She excelled in patience, love, the ability to forgive and reconcile. She lived with love for the poor with many works of mercy and settled disagreements in the country. During a terrible plague, she was a refuge for the general public. After the death of her husband, she became a tertiary, continued her charity work and finally died at the age of 65 as a sister of St. Clare.
CV FOR MEDITATION

ANGEL OF PEACE
She was born in Spain around 1270-1271 as the daughter of the later King Peter III of Aragon and his wife Princess Constance of Sicily. At baptism, she was given the name of her deceased aunt, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. In Spanish, she is often called Isabella. Her birth is said to have contributed to the reconciliation of Peter with his father, James I. Elizabeth stayed with him before his death, when she was about five or six years old. She then returned to her parents, who provided her with an education by good teachers. She had three brothers: Alfonso, who reigned after her father, James and Ferdinand, and a sister, Yolanda. Already in her childhood, Elizabeth was distinguished by extraordinary piety and interests in charity.

Before she was 12 years old, her marriage to the young Portuguese king Dionysius, who had reigned since 1279, was arranged. She is said to have married him in 1282. She considered her royal rank and wealth to be entrusted hryvnias and tried to use them for works of Christian mercy. She became a mother of the poor, a comforter of the suffering, a nurse of the lonely sick and a protector of the persecuted. She helped impoverished families and orphans. Later, she established a home for women who had gone astray and a foundling for abandoned infants.

In her private life, she had a certain order, especially when it came to spiritual activities. She also prayed the church hours and regularly attended Holy Mass. In her daily schedule, she remembered those who needed her help. On more than one occasion, the sick were healed under her touch. For example, a woman full of unsightly ulcers suddenly disappeared. On Thursday, Mandy washed the feet of beggars and kissed the feet of a sick woman, who immediately recovered. She was also detained by her husband when she had alms ready in her apron, and he asked her what she was carrying. The queen replied with a smile: “roses”, thinking that God liked them as a symbol of love. Her husband immediately checked the contents of the apron, because it was not the time for roses, but they suddenly really were in it, her biographies state.

King Dionysius was said to have been originally good and only later became reckless. He was often unfaithful to his wife, kept two concubines at court and had illegitimate children with them, whom his good wife took care of. In solitude, she grieved greatly and wept over her husband’s sins, but did not complain about him to people. She treated him kindly and forgave him for his infidelity and unkind behavior. She often prayed and fasted for him so that he would convert.

With him she had a son, Alfonso, to whom the succession belonged, and a daughter, Constance, who married Ferdinand IV, King of Castile.

Biographies of Elizabeth tell of an incident involving her squire, whom she had entrusted with distributing alms to the poor. Another of the king’s servants noticed the queen’s private conversations and accused the squire of being unfaithful to him. The king plotted to have Elizabeth’s squire burned to death in a lime kiln. He allegedly ordered the keeper of the lime kiln to throw any man who came in the morning with the question of whether the king’s order had been carried out into the kiln. The king sent the squire to the lime kiln with this question in the morning, but he stopped at the church for a short prayer. Holy Mass was about to begin and they needed an altar boy, so the squire was persuaded. The impatient king wanted to be sure and sent the accuser to find out how his order had been carried out. He arrived before the squire and barely asked whether the king’s order had been carried out before he found himself in the kiln. The squire then received a positive answer and returned unharmed. The king was later convinced of his wife’s innocence and behaved better from then on. He saw God’s judgment in the incident.

In later years, the queen repeatedly made efforts to bring about peace in the disputes that shook the Portuguese kingdom.

In the last years of King Dionysius, the queen clung to her son Alfonso, and the aging king was more inclined to one of his illegitimate sons, Sancho. This gave rise to suspicions that the king wanted to hand over the throne to Sancho, against the laws and rights of the land. Alfonso, who had married Beatrice, began to rule with her in Coimbra. Dionysius’s advisors urged the king to limit his son’s power, and his son was in turn urged by his friends to rebel against his father, who wanted to deprive him of his succession.

Elizabeth tried to beg for a gift of reconciliation from both of them, but the situation escalated to the point that the king decided to raise an army against his son Alfonso and marched with him to the city of Sintra to capture him. Elizabeth sent messengers to her son with a warning that he should flee. The king found out about this and, on the advice of bad advisors, dismissed his wife and deprived her of all her pensions. She bore it patiently, but not her friends. They grumbled with reproaches against the king that he was at war with his son and had banished his wife. This perhaps led to him at least accepting her back.

The enmity between father and son was once again exacerbated by the siege of his father’s army at Coimbra. Elizabeth visited her husband and son in their camp and only managed to achieve a four-day truce. She prayed, cried and begged for a cessation of war, which she finally succeeded in doing. Soon after, the feud over Sanches recurred, and the queen made great efforts to reconcile the two armies at Lisbon and averted a second bloody clash. Father and son separated. Not long after, Dionysius fell seriously ill, and the queen proved her generous and kind heart not only by caring for his physical needs, but also by reconciling with her son, who, at her request, came to apologize to his father.

The king died penitently in 1325. The words of Scripture proved true that “an unbelieving man is sanctified by marriage to a believing woman” (1 Cor 7:14) . Elizabeth even made a barefoot penitential pilgrimage to Compostela, to the tomb of the Apostle James on his behalf, but perhaps in the tertiary habit. There, as a votive offering, she handed over her crown and royal jewels to the bishop.

In Lisbon, she built the first shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the history of the Church.

In Coimbra she decided to enter the convent of the Order of St. Clare, the construction of which she had just finished. However, she was persuaded to continue living in the world, where she was greatly needed. Elizabeth therefore settled in a dwelling attached to the convent, lived the life of a tertiary and did much good. She used her widow’s pensions to build churches, hospitals, almshouses and, where necessary, to build bridges.

She proved herself again as a peacemaker when her son Alfonso IV. was about to wage war with her daughter’s husband, King Ferdinand of Castile. Sick with influenza, she set out on a journey to prevent war. In the town of Estremoz on the Castilian border, she managed to secure peace, but in a fever she knew her end was coming. At that time, she is said to have taken her religious vows, and finally died in the arms of her son and daughter-in-law, calling on the heavenly Mother. She was called the “angel of peace” and venerated as a saint from the moment of her death.

She was buried in Coimbra, and her tomb became a place of pilgrimage and a place of extraordinary graces. In 1516 the canonization process began. Leo X then allowed her to be venerated as blessed in Coimbra. In 1612, her tomb was opened, and her body was found intact, with no signs of decomposition. The solemn canonization took place on 25 February 1625 by Pope Urban VIII, who tightened the canonization procedure.