Blessed Margaret of Bavaria

Our Blessed one was born in the year 1376, in the Upper Palatinate of Bavaria, to Rupert III of Bavaria-Wittelsbach and Elisabeth of Hohenzollern, Burgravine of Nuremberg. Her father later became Elector Palatine of the Rhine and was elected Emperor of Germany upon the deposition of Wenceslaus IV, nicknamed the Drunkard. But however noble the blood of Wittelsbach and Hohenzollern may have been, from which the royal houses of Bavaria and Prussia still descend today, it was then distinguished much more by holy traditions and brilliant virtues. Margaret of Bavaria, with her six brothers and two sisters, could truly boast, like Tobias, of being of the generation of the Saints: thus she was closely related to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and her niece, Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, who were her great-great-aunts. Closer to her, she saw her father's grandmother, Irmengard of Oettingen, piously end her career in 1389, not far from Worms, at the Dominican convent of Liebenau, where she had retired at the age of twenty-three, upon the premature death of the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, Adolph of Bavaria, her husband. On her mother's side, the princess encountered examples no less touching: three of Elisabeth of Hohenzollern's sisters, the Burgravines Catherine, Anne, and Agnes, had just taken, in the flower of their youth, the humble veil of Saint Clare at the convent of Hof, where Catherine, the eldest of them, was elected abbess in 1393, the very year that Margaret became Duchess of Lorraine. The Blessed one was later to be inspired even more by the virtues of her cousin, Empress Joanna, who had become so perfect in a short time under the heroic direction of Saint John Nepomucene. Finally, in the domestic hearth, the young Palatine princess, contrary to the overly free customs of her time, was raised, like her brothers and sisters, under the vigilant eye of her pious parents, in the fear of God, self-respect, and love of neighbor. She yielded, it is true, to the lure of vain finery and worldly festivities, almost inevitable at the courts of princes; but it was less out of a vice of character than out of condescension to fashion and also by a special permission of Providence, which wished, before making her a vessel of election, to let her undergo something of the enticements of our poor nature. Married at eighteen to the Duke of Lorraine, Charles II, nicknamed the Bold, Margaret co ntinued for some time, on the Charles II, surnommé le Hardi Duke of Lorraine and husband of Margaret. throne, this worldly and unfervent life that she was soon to make forgotten by her heroic virtues.

It is much to be regretted that the few historians who have mentioned Margaret of Bavaria have left us such vague details regarding her conversion. We had initially believed that it had been obtained miraculously through the Duchess's recourse to the practice of the holy Rosary, during a serious illness where she had found herself without hope of recovery from the doctors; but the original texts that we have since had before our eyes do not explain themselves clearly on this subject. Father Dominique, a Carthusian of Trier, a contemporary of the Blessed, whom he had often seen at Sierck, in Lorraine, recounts, however, how God sent mysterious illnesses to the Duchess to detach her completely from herself and from all creatures. "Here is," he says in his *Treatise on True and Humble Obedience*, "what this devout Duchess of whom we hear, thanks be to God, so much good, told a person of her confidence (her director, no doubt): 'The Lord is pleased wonderfully to instruct and enlighten me in the art of dying well: He often afflicts me, mainly in the midst of the darkness of the night, with great and intolerable pains that seem to bring me to the very end; thus suspended between life and death, when I have severely scrutinized my conscience, and have prepared myself to appear before the Lord, He immediately restores my health. By these supreme agonies with which He is pleased to strike me so often, He makes me attentive and vigilant so as not to be surprised by death.'"

Perhaps it was one of these illnesses of the princess that made her have recourse to the lights of the Carthusians of Saint-Alban of Trier, during a stay of the court of Lorraine at the ducal castle of Sierck, located not far from there. At that time lived, at the monastery of Saint-Alban, a holy religious by the name of Adolphe d'Essen, equally ver sed in divine a Adolphe d'Essen Carthusian monk, spiritual director of Margaret, and apostle of the Rosary. nd human letters. He had known by revelation how salutary was the devotion to the holy Rosary, unfortunately fallen into oblivion in that calamitous era. From then on, Father Adolphe had become the apostle of the Rosary and he had even written a booklet under the Latin title: *De Commendatione Rosarii*, to extend the action of his zeal beyon De Commendatione Rosarii A short treatise on the Rosary written by Adolphe d'Essen for the Duchess. d his solitary cell. Not yet being prior at that moment, he addressed, with the permission of his superior, a German translation of his book to the Duchess of Lorraine, as well as a collection of meditations that he had composed on the life of the divine Savior. Such was the ardor of the Duchess to put these salutary teachings into practice that she soon found herself completely transformed, and she had difficulty recognizing herself in the interior splendors with which grace was pleased to adorn her, in return for her renunciation of the vain pomps of the world. In a short time, she penetrated so far into the ways of holiness that no one was known to be comparable to her from afar, in any condition whatsoever, not even in the cloister, where, however, Father Adolphe, who attests to this fact, had met great servants of God. Our Lord himself took charge of making the holiness of the princess shine forth externally through numerous miracles, the mere account of which, according to the testimony of her biographer, would have made a voluminous book. Unfortunately for us, the ordinary confessor of the Duchess, Master Guillaume, a learned doctor of theology and inquisitor of the faith, died before his penitent, without having written anything about her; the very biography that the venerable Carthusian, Adolphe d'Essen, who later became her spiritual director, traced for us of Margaret of Bavaria is less a complete portrait than a rapid sketch of the greatest and holiest of the Duchesses of Lorraine. It is to this writing, recently discovered against all hope, as well as to various manuscripts of a disciple of Father Adolphe, Father Dominique, cited above, that we owe most of the following details that remain to us on the life of the Blessed.

The princess thus soon regained the time lost in her early years. She first applied herself to spiritual combat, according to the method and order indicated in her Rosary manual. Christian virtues erased the traces of her former worldliness: humility and condescension, charity and gentleness, devotion and the mortification of the senses, mercy and an inexhaustible liberality toward the unfortunate came in turn to adorn her soul in a rare degree of perfection. She no longer allowed caprice the slightest influence in the distribution of her time. Rising well before dawn, she would immediately prostrate herself in adoration and thanksgiving before the Author of all good, making a complete surrender of her person to Him and ardently asking Him not to allow the day to find her in any way unfaithful to her resolutions. Then, at the first toll of the bell, when she was alone or had no reason to fear displeasing her husband, she would hasten to the altars, bringing with her only one person of good will, so as not to shorten the rest of her servants too much. After dedicating all her free time to her devotional exercises, she belonged only to her own and to the unfortunate. Finally, when night came, she would fall again at the feet of the divine Master to examine under His jealous eye the entire course of the day. If an imperfection had surprised her, she would accuse herself of it before the sovereign priest Jesus with signs of the deepest contrition; and if she recognized herself as guilty of a more notable infidelity, she would confess it at that very moment, as the occasion allowed, or would never delay beyond the next day the task of unburdening her conscience at the holy tribunal. Already purified in this way almost every day in the sacrament of penance, the Duchess added mortification upon mortification, to subject without truce or rest her slightest appetites to the yoke of Christian perfection. Very simple in her private life, she loved, following the example of her blessed aunt, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, to deprive herself in eating and drinking, without it being apparent: often, for example, after having had the most delicate dishes circulated at the ducal table without touching them, she would withdraw to the side to appease her hunger with some coarse food brought to her by a discreet attendant. In the absence of Charles II, not content with atoning for her vanities of the past under a rough hairshirt, she applied a pitiless rigor to tearing her limbs with bloody disciplines.

With what ardent devotion must our Blessed one have felt consumed towards the adorable Eucharist! She approached it with angelic humility and fervor as often as the rigorism of her time allowed, that is to say, on Sundays and feast days occurring during the week. Our Lord, in order to show her his gratitude for such devotion to the sacrament of his love, wished one day to communicate her in a most wonderful way. The Blessed one had expressed to the venerable Father Adolphe, then prior of the Charterhouse of Marienflos, recently founded near Sierck and transferred shortly after to Bettel, not far from there, the desire that he come to celebrate in her private chapel at the ducal castle of the town of Sierck, where the court of Lorraine sometimes resided. At the moment of receiving holy communion, as the princess had just knelt before the altar, her face suddenly became as resplendent as the midday sun. The sacred host disappeared at the same time from the hands of the venerable prior, whom a religious terror had transported out of himself, and who had not at first noticed this second prodigy. Recovered from his admiration and believing he had dropped the holy species during his confusion, he anxiously cast his eyes around him, when the sight of Margaret of Bavaria, prostrate in thanksgiving, drew him from his perplexity with vivid feelings of gratitude for this new favor granted to his spiritual daughter. Thus did she sometimes share the chalice of the Lord's blessings with Saint Catherine of Siena, her contemporary, whose life she loved to reread; thus did she drink deeply from the torrent of divine graces, and often pass from prayer to ecstasy after communion!

This superabundance of heavenly gifts, poured out upon our Blessed one, bore fruit a hundredfold in the countless works of justice and mercy to which her existence was now irrevocably devoted. In her relations with her husband, it seemed that she was the humble servant rather than the wife of Charles II, so much did she strive to please him constantly and to forget the duke's incredible wrongs toward her, especially in the final years of his reign, when he had left her to cohabit publicly in his palace with a courtesan of the vilest extraction. So cruelly tested in her conjugal affections, our Blessed one had nevertheless known how to keep her soul in perfect resignation to the will of God and thus crown so many other family trials that had made her heart bleed, without any cry of revolt or even of overly bitter pain. She was, in fact, still in the flower of her years when death had taken from her, one after another, two of her brothers, then her two sisters, and finally her parents, Emperor Rupert, who died in 1440, and Empress Elisabeth, who followed her husband to the grave a year later. Of the five sons born to her, not a single one was spared to her. There remained only her two daughters, the princesses Isabelle and Catherine of Lorraine. Without ever yielding to a false tenderness for these two only children, she applied herself above all to giving them the strong education necessary for crowned heads. She was, moreover, through the touching spectacle of her holy life, the best of mistresses for such a great work: simple and modest in her attire, full of restraint in her movements, rising very early for her exercises of piety in order to be sooner at her family duties, prodigal to the point of often finding herself in need for having given everything to the unfortunate, frugal at table, and everywhere observing the most noble reserve, she appeared constantly to the two young princesses as the perfect mirror of the virtues of the throne. Always active at work, because she knew that idleness is the source of all vices, she did not suffer sloth, so ordinary in the homes of the great, neither in her children nor even in her ladies-in-waiting and her serving maids: each had, according to her rank and leisure, to occupy herself with wool work or embroidery, which was then, no doubt, distributed to the churches and the poor. The cares of the holy duchess thus extended to all the people of her household, whom she regarded in reality as her family. More concerned with their inner progress than is common in the world, she watched scrupulously over their instruction, even reading spiritual texts to them herself on Sundays and feast days after the midday meal, not wishing to leave this duty to others unless she was prevented or an ecclesiastic was present for the ministry of the word. For this purpose, she had a good number of chosen books, such as the Old and New Testament, the Explanation of the Epistles and Gospels of the year, sermon collections, the Lives of the Saints, and other works written in Latin, French, or German. This reading finished, the duchess and her suite would return religiously to the offices. The Lord was to grant His blessing to such domestic solicitude. Never was a palace interior calmer or more faithful and devoted. Never, above all, did princesses respond more happily to the expectations of the Church and society. Their lineage was numerous, valiant, and sometimes even crowned with the halo of the Saints. Thus from Isabelle, the eldest of them, who was married to René of Anjou, with the presumptive succession to the ducal throne, descended this blessed Marguerite of Lorraine, Duchess of Alençon and great-grandmother of Henry IV, who died glorified in the habit of Saint Clare at the convent of Argentan; and those brave Dukes of Guise who prevented France from passing to the Huguenot heresy; and those illustrious princes of Lorraine who, after having made the happiness of their duchy for several centuries, arrived at the first crown of Germany, upon the union of Lorraine with France; and it is from the marriage of the great-grandson of Marguerite of Bavaria, Duke Francis, with Empress Maria Theresa that the current House of Austria, known as Habsburg-Lorraine, descends; from the second of the daughters of Marguerite of Bavaria, Catherine of Lorraine, married to the Marquis Jacques of Baden, was born, among others, the Blessed Bernard of Baden, the Louis Gonzaga of the 15th century.

Thus devoted to her domestic duties, our holy duchess was even more so to the service of the infirm and the poor. A special vocation called her to imitate her two holy relatives of Hungary and Portugal, and Saint Catherine of Siena in their boundless love for the suffering members of Our Lord. She was seen hastening to the hospitals as if they were the only palaces to her taste, whenever her obligations as a wife and sovereign allowed her the leisure. While the venerable Father Adolphe, who sometimes accompanied her on her visits to the hospital she founded in Sierck, shuddered with horror at the sight of the holy extravagances of his spiritual daughter, she, usually assisted by one of her attendants named Luce, seemed to find unparalleled happiness in tending to the wounds of the unfortunate, in cleansing their fetid ulcers, and in lavishing upon their most repulsive infirmities the aid that no one in the world dared to render them anymore. From the care of the sick, she passed to that of the poor, even to washing their feet and drying them with her own hair. This inexplicable lowering of herself, before which all the people in her retinue recoiled, with the exception of her faithful Luce, could only have its principle in a very special grace from above. One day, however, the duchess felt that her heart was about to fail her, so horrible were the wounds she had just uncovered: remembering immediately the conduct of Saint Catherine of Siena in a similar temptation, she made a supreme effort upon herself while invoking the divine Master, and immediately her mutinous senses were calmed.

Such a merciful and humble soul was to become a glorious instrument of salvation in the hands of Our Lord. Often, at a simple sign of the cross from the duchess, the most inveterate ailment would disappear. Often, too, to escape public veneration and to hide from her left hand the wonders of her right, she would give the sick some semblance of remedies with which she would dismiss them, and after which they would be completely cured. And such was the crowd of suppliants who came every day on her path to claim her assistance, when she returned from the holy offices, that the approaches to her apartment recalled, by the congestion of the sick, the porticoes of the Probatica pool, besieged by the unfortunate awaiting the descent of the Angel. Three types of sick people, however, remained incurable despite the good will the duchess would have had to assist them: those who came to her without full confidence in being cured, those who counted more on the efficacy of ordinary remedies than on her supernatural intervention, and finally those who, stained by some grave sin, did not have the firm will to convert. As long as these bad dispositions of one or the other lasted, they found themselves incapable of relief from her.

An evil more formidable than all bodily infirmities combined, war was then devastating Christendom. At the sight of so much fatal hatred and so much blood shed to the great detriment of souls, the heart of the holy duchess felt seized with great pity for her people. Through the efficacy of her prayers, she became for Lorraine what Saint Elizabeth of Portugal had been for her adopted homeland: the Angel of peace. She was, according to general opinion, stronger from the depths of her oratory than an army drawn up in battle. God made this understood one day through one of those prodigies of bilocation rare even in the lives of the most famous Saints. It was in 1409, two years after the Battle of Champigneulle, which the Lorrainers had won less through the valor of Duke Charles than thanks to the public prayers held in Nancy under the guidance of our Blessed one; several powerful neighbors, too forgetful of this defeat, had once again raised the standard of war and had come, as before, to put the lands of Lorraine to fire and sword. Charles II went to meet them near Pont-à-Mousson. At the moment when the action was about to begin, the enemies, although far superior in number, were suddenly seized with terror and took flight without even striking a blow. And, as after this shameful flight they were overwhelmed with reproaches by their own, they replied unanimously—the rumor of which, moreover, spread everywhere at the time—that it was certainly not the duke or his troops who had thus routed them, but only the sudden apparition of Duchess Margaret of Bavaria at the head of the Lorrainers, with a face so terrible that they could not stand for an instant before her thunderous gaze. However, our Blessed one had not left Nancy for the day. Prostrate in her oratory at the feet of the divine Master, while the duke marched against the enemy, she had contented herself, as she later confessed in precise terms to the venerable Father Adolphe, with praying for the preservation of her people, with a perfect abandonment of the whole affair to divine mercy. Such was, moreover, her custom, since she had learned to better know Our Lord through the meditation of the mysteries of his life, to always add in her prayers, however just their object might be: « My God, may it happen, however, not as I will, but as You will ». This victory, as peaceful as it was glorious for the duchess, made definitive the peace that Lorraine enjoyed until the end of the reign of Charles II, while abroad, foreign invasions and civil war did not cease to spread their ravages from one country to another, notably in our homeland, which, without Joan of Arc, would have fallen under the yoke of the English.

The Duchess, thus purified to the depths of the crucible like the purest gold, first saw all her gentleness and all her helpless tears fail to withdraw Charles II from the shameful debaucheries of his private life. This prince, otherwise gifted with great qualities that would have raised him above the crowd of princes of his time had he not made it his task to stiffen himself against the salutary action of his holy wife upon him, had not known from his youth how to command his stormy passions. He justified, unfortunately for him, this oracle of the Holy Spirit, that "man usually ends his life by the path practiced in his early years." The youth of Charles II had been licentious, as his first testament bears witness: his old age was without honor and without restraint. The bold remonstrances of

Joan of Arc, urging him to take back his wife, left him unmoved. The death of the Duke, as sad as his life had been, was furthermore fatal to the city complicit in his infidelities: scarcely had he drawn his last breath than the people, impatient to exact justice for themselves, invaded the ducal residence and forcibly tore out the courtesan who had too long profaned the steps of the throne; stripped of her sumptuous garments and dressed in her original clothes, the unfortunate woman was dragged on a cart through the crossroads of Nancy, amidst the curses and outrages of the multitude; out of a remnant of respect for the Duke, she was secretly put to death. The Duchess, whom the people venerated as a saint and had so cruelly avenged, had not had time to prevent this bloody act; she hastened at least to look after the future of the children born of relations so outrageous to her, without ever departing from her accustomed gentleness toward them. To cap her misfortune, she was still lamenting the tragic death of Charles II when the war of succession to the throne of Lorraine broke out and the legitimate heir, René of Anjou, taken prisoner at the very first encounter, was thro wn into iron René d'Anjou Son-in-law of Margaret and heir to the throne of Lorraine. s by the Duke of Burgundy, the ambitious ally of the pretender, Antoine, Count of Vaudémont. Submissive and resigned to the will of the Lord, who so deeply humbled the crown of her daughter, Isabella of Lorraine, but at the same time full of confidence in the justice of her right, the dowager Duchess spared no effort to restore René of Anjou to his subjects: wresting truce after truce from the Count of Vaudémont, adding to the young Duchess skilled advisors, such as the bishops of Metz and Toul, to go and sway the Duke of Burgundy, finally carrying the cause to the tribunal of Emperor Sigismund, who decided the question of principle during the Council of Basel and rendered, on April 24, 1434, a sentence favorable to the just right of Isabella and René. Thus it was proven once again that piety, while safeguarding eternal interests, knows how to watch over those of time in just measure.

Amidst all this mourning, all these misfortunes, and all these disastrous complications, Margaret of Bavaria, whose interior conversation was in the heavens, was completing other conquests more precious than the thrones of the earth; faithful to the providential mission of the holy women of her time, she brought back in crowds to the fold the stray sheep of the Good Shepherd. Her name had become the object of public veneration. Every day one saw running toward her, not only the infirm and the poor, but persons of the most diverse conditions, the great and the small, ecclesiastics and laypeople, princes of the Church and the powerful of the century. Religious, more than others, hastened to visit her to be edified by her pious conversations. She had attained a high degree of the gift of touching hearts: scarcely was a conversation begun than she immediately directed its course toward God and the science of the Saints overflowed in streams from her blessed lips. As she owed much to devotion to the holy Rosary, she did not fear to recommend this salutary practice to everyone, to her lords and barons as well as to ecclesiastics and the least of her subjects. It was rare that one of her listeners resisted her pious urgings; most became better, as did their families; the sacred memory was transmitted to more than one generation, and it would not be rash to believe that these conversations of our Blessed one, as much as the sword of the dukes her grandsons, placed Lorraine, a century later, beyond the reach of Protestantism.

This proselytism was combined, above all, admirably well with the way of life to which the duchess committed herself after the death of Duke Charles II, and in the midst of which she soon gathered the incomparable palm of eternal life. As the monastery begun by Saint Colette was still very little advanced, and as circumstances were not at all favorable for the holy widow to enter religious life, she wished at least to carry out a project about which she had often enjoyed speaking with the venerable Father Adolphe. She left the court as soon as her presence was no longer necessary, retired to her dower of Einville-aux-Jarres (near Lunéville), and built, near her residence, a hospital to serve Our Lord there until her death in his suffering members, just as her holy relatives of Thuringia and Portugal had practiced. There, under a simple and coarse habit, perhaps the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis, to which she was most probably affiliated, she gave her time to her favorite works: gathering the poor and travelers on the public road, washing their feet to dry them with her hair and applying to them her lips burning with the love of Christ; serving her guests at table with exquisite gentleness, and not letting the needy leave until she had given them a generous alms; finally, surpassing herself in the care of the sick, for whom she was ready to sacrifice her health, even her life. Such a ministry had admirably prepared her for death; feeling herself failing, she hastened to dictate her will on August 24, 1434. She exhausted her savings one last time in works of religion and mercy: she took care not to forget her hospital of Einville, nor the Carthusians of Sierck, nor the people she had kept in her service; to her two princess daughters she bequeathed what remained of her jewels and all her books. Three days after this will was made in Einville, she rendered her beautiful soul to God, at the age of fifty-eight.

## CULT AND RELICS.

Her precious body was transported to Nancy to be buried in the collegiate church of Saint-Georges, where the tombs o f the Nancy Capital of the Duchy of Lorraine where the dukes are buried. House of Lorraine were located. According to the historian Wasselbourg and Father Guinet, of the Premonstratensian Order, numerous miracles took place at her tomb. Likewise, when, in 1743, her venerated remains were transferred, along with the ashes of the other princely burials, into the new funeral vault of the Cordeliers church, located under the Chapelle-Ronde, which still exists today, several sick people recovered their health, as they asserted, by the mere contact of the velvet that had on this occasion covered her mortal remains. They still exist, but desecrated, in this same vault where revolutionary vandalism mixed them with the ashes extracted from neighboring graves. A simple inscription in the Chapelle-Ronde is all that recalls, to this day, in the former capital of Lorraine, next to the ducal palace, the memory, nevertheless so pure and so glorious, of Blessed Margaret of Bavaria, nicknamed the miraculous Duchess.

There exists an authentic portrait, we believe, of our Blessed one. It is found in Volume III, Book XXVII, of the History of Lorraine, by Dom Calmet, at the beginning of the reign of Charles II, and opposite the bust of this prince.

We have already cited her biography written by the venerable Father Adolphe, Carthusian of Trier; Father Rader, S.J., in Volume III of his Bavaria Sancta, printed in 1627, devoted several pages to her, under the title of Beata Margarita; Father Arthur de Moustier, Recollect, places her, like Father Rader, on August 27, with the title of Blessed, in his Saurum Gynecaem; the Bollandists say a word about her on the same date, with the remark, which we renew here after them, that no trace of public cult has nevertheless reached us regarding her. This title of Blessed, which we have kept for her following the example of the aforementioned authors, is therefore only the expression of a personal opinion, without prejudice to the definitive judgment of the holy Church, which we call for with all our wishes, on the cause of the illustrious duchess.

This biography is due to the Abbé J.-M. Curioque, priest of Sierck, in the diocese of Metz, who is currently preparing a Life of Blessed Margaret of Bavaria.