Soon Elizabeth began to stand out by her virtues and, just as she had been a consoler for the poor during all her life, she later on became the complete remedy for the hungry. She ordered that a hospital be built close to one of her castles and sheltered there a large number of sick and invalid people. To all who resorted to her demanding alms she generously gave all the benefits of her charity; and not only at that place, but also in all the places subject to the jurisdiction of her husband. She did this to the point of exhausting all of the income from the rents originating from his four principalities, to the point that she saw herself obligated to sell, for the benefit of the poor, all her jewels and luxurious dresses.

Elizabeth had the custom, twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, to personally visit all her sick; personally curing the most repugnant, to whom she gave food, made their bed, carried them and exerted many more duties of humanity; and her husband, in grateful memory, did not see all these things in any negative way. Finally, when her husband died, she, aspiring to ultimate perfection, asked me with abundant tears that I allow her to go begging for alms, from door to door.

On Good Friday of that year, when the altars had been stripped, she laid her hands on the altar in a chapel in her own town, where she had established the Friars Minor, and before some people who had gathered as witnesses, she voluntarily renounced all worldly pomp and all the things that our Saviour in the gospel advises us to abandon. After this, seeing that she could still be absorbed by the agitation of the world and the mundane glory of that territory in which, while her husband lived, had surrounded her with so much ostentation, followed me to Marburg, against my will. There, in that city, she built a hospital where she gathered together the sick and the invalid. There she kept table for the most miserable and unappreciated.

I affirm before God that rarely have I seen a woman with such an active intense activity able to live such a contemplative life; this is so as some religious have seen more than once Elizabeth come out of the intimacy of prayer with her rostrum resplandecent in an admirable manner and her eyes brilliant like the rays of the sun.

Before her death I heard her confession. When I asked how should I dispose of her goods and trousseau (dowry), she replied that everything that was hers belonged in fact to the poor. She asked me to distribute everything except the humble tunic she dressed in and in which she wished to be buried. She then received the body of our Lord, and then, until vespers, spoke of the good things she had heard in predication (sermons). Then, having commended herself to God with great devotion, before all who were assisting her, she expired like one who falls asleep peacefully.



PRAYER
Our God, who granted to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary the gift of recognizing and venerating Christ in the poor, grant to us, by her intercession, that we always serve the needy and afflicted with an untiring charity. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You in the Unity of the Holy Spirit and is God, for ever and ever. Amen