Saint Margaret of Hungary

Margaret was a king’s daughter. Her father, Béla IV of Hungary, and her mother, Maria Lascaris of Nicaea, placed her in a monastery when she was four: it was 1246, and the Dominican monastery was the one in Veszprém. Six years later they moved her to another, founded by her own parents on an island in the Danube near Buda — Hare Island, which today is called Margaret Island precisely because of her, and where the ruins can still be seen. At first, this isn’t a story of a chosen vocation: it’s a little girl put where her parents had decided. What matters is what she made of it. At eighteen, in 1260, she took her solemn vows, and from that moment the princess disappears. She spent the rest of her life within those walls doing the humblest kitchen work and caring for the contagious sick — that is, precisely the ones everyone ran away from. Hard fasts, nights spent in prayer. She died at twenty-eight. She was the niece of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, another woman who had left a court to be with the poor: in that family, it seems, it was a tradition. Her cult began right after her death, but the Church took centuries to give it its stamp: approved by Pius VI in 1789, canonized by Pius XII only in 1943. Today is the name day of every Margaret, and there are quite a few: it’s a name that never gets old, and in Italian it has the merit of also being a flower, since margherita means daisy. A king’s daughter who asked to wash the dishes. The gesture is eight hundred years old, but it hasn’t lost a thing.