Bd Cunegund, or Kinga

Kinga is one of those royal women whose sanctity becomes clearer the more real her position was. Born in 1224, daughter of Bela IV of Hungary and niece of St Elizabeth, she was raised in a courtly world where marriage, alliance, and influence would have seemed the natural measure of a princess. This life mentions the marvels later told about her birth, but quickly turns to the firmer line: she was formed in learning, prayer, and fear of God, and from youth desired to belong wholly to Him. At sixteen she married Boleslaus V of Poland. This life preserves the tradition that on the wedding night she asked him to live with her in continence because she had already offered herself to God, and that after a year he agreed to vow perpetual chastity with her before the bishop of Cracow. Whether every detail of that tradition is equally secure, its place in her received memory is significant. Kinga was remembered not as a worldly queen who later repented, but as a woman who tried to bring court, marriage, and rank under a higher obedience from the beginning. At court she did not become ornamental.

This life shows her wearing a hair-shirt beneath royal dress, relieving the poor and sick, building churches and hospitals, supporting the Friars Minor, and even spending treasure to ransom Christians from the Turks. She also is a figure of courage during the Tartar invasion of Poland in 1287, when the nuns of Sandeck fled to the castle of Pyenin and were said to have been preserved through her prayers. The most revealing part of the life comes later. After Boleslaus died in 1279, the nobles wanted her to continue in government, but Kinga refused the extension of power that many would have considered both honorable and prudent. Instead she entered the convent of Poor Clares at Sandeck, founded through her own devotion, and spent the rest of her life in prayer, austerity, and charity. She died there in 1292. This life finally leaves her in a strong and memorable shape: a princess and queen who treated earthly rank as something to be spent for God, the poor, and finally the cloister, rather than something to cling to.