St. Casimir

Casimir of Poland is one of the princes who demonstrated that royal birth and genuine holiness are not incompatible, though such qualities are rarely combined. Casimir was the second son of King Casimir IV of Poland and his queen Elizabeth of Austria, born at Cracow in 1458. From an early age his character diverged conspicuously from the world of dynastic politics into which he had been born.

The episode that proved most revealing came when Casimir was thirteen. An embassy of Hungarian nobles, dissatisfied with their king Matthias Corvinus, offered the Hungarian crown to the young prince, and his father assembled an army to press the claim. Casimir was given command and marched into Hungary. But when the soldiers began to desert — partly from cold, partly from the news that Matthias was rallying opposition — Casimir refused to proceed with an enterprise he had concluded was unjust. He turned the army around and returned to Poland, earning his father's serious displeasure and a period of confinement at Dobzki. The prince who gave back a kingdom rather than fight for it on terms he found morally unacceptable is a figure more interesting than the merely pious adolescent.

The remaining years of his life, to his death at twenty-six in 1484, were spent in prayer, in the care of the poor, in the governance of Poland as regent during his father's absences, and in the kind of court life that managed to be publicly present without being corrupted by it. He was particularly devoted to the Blessed Virgin and to the daily Mass, walking to it barefoot in all weathers. A long Latin hymn to the Virgin — Omni die dic Mariae — is associated with his name in the tradition, though the attribution to him personally is uncertain. He died of tuberculosis at Grodno and was canonized in 1521.