"God loved him, and so He took him away soon." — Saint Stephen of Hungary, on hearing of his son's death
Feast Day: November 4 (November 5 in Hungary)
Canonized: 1083 — Pope Gregory VII (his relics were raised on November 5 of that year)
Order / Vocation: Layman — Crown Prince of Hungary, married, lived in continence
Patron of: Youth · Princes · Chastity · Hungarian young people
There are saints whose lives are full of deeds. Emeric did not have time for deeds. He built no abbey, wrote no book, and led no army. The Church remembers him anyway, and the reason says something uncomfortable and consoling about holiness. Sometimes the whole work is the person.
This is a saint for the young person who is told that purity is outdated, and for anyone who has had a clear future taken away. He is for the heir who never got to inherit, the student whose degree is never finished, the person whose best years went into preparation for something that did not come. He is also for parents, because Emeric's father, Saint Stephen, had to bury him.
What he left was a way of living. He took the Gospel more seriously than the court around him did, he did it quietly, and he did it young. That turned out to be enough.
A note on the record: the earliest life of Emeric was written down about a century after his death, so some of what is told is tradition and not documented fact. This article keeps to what the Church has handed down and says plainly where the record is thin.
The Kingdom His Father Built
To understand Emeric you have to understand what his father had done. Stephen was the man who made Hungary a Christian kingdom.
The Magyars had arrived in the Carpathian basin as pagan horsemen, feared across Europe. Stephen was baptized, married Gisela, a princess of Bavaria and sister of the future emperor Henry II, and set about turning a federation of tribes into a Christian state. He was crowned king around the year 1000. He founded dioceses and monasteries, brought in priests and missionaries, and put down the pagan resistance in his own country, sometimes by force.
It was precarious work. Hungary was a new kingdom with powerful neighbors and old rivals. Stephen needed an heir he could trust to carry it on, and he did not have many to choose from. Emeric was the son who survived.
He was born around 1007. The sources do not agree on where, and some name VeszprΓ©m and some SzΓ©kesfehΓ©rvΓ‘r. His Hungarian name, Imre, comes from the Latin Henricus, the name of his mother's brother, the emperor.
The Teacher from Venice
Around the age of fifteen, Emeric was placed under the care of Gerard Sagredo, a Benedictine monk from Venice who had come to Hungary. Gerard taught him for about eight years.
Gerard was a stern, austere man, and a serious one. He would later become bishop of CsanΓ‘d and die a martyr, killed in a pagan uprising in 1046. For a boy who would someday be king, he was an unusual choice. He did not teach Emeric how to rule. He taught him how to pray, to fast, and to take the faith as a rule of life and not an ornament.
Tradition says Stephen also gave his son written counsel for the task ahead, a book of fatherly instruction on how to govern as a Christian king. Scholars dispute how much of it is Stephen's own. What it shows, either way, is the kind of ruler Hungary's first king hoped to raise: one who was just, merciful, humble, and devoted to the Church.
Emeric took in all of it. By every account he was a serious, devout young man, and unlike many royal sons, he seems not to have chafed against that.
The Wedding and the Vow
At some point in his teens, Emeric married. The tradition says his bride was a foreign princess, though the sources give different accounts of her name and origin, and none of them is certain. Marriages like this were the way kingdoms made alliances. It was a political match, and he was a prince.
What happened inside the marriage is the center of his legend. The earliest life says that Emeric had vowed his virginity to God, and that he and his wife lived together in perfect continence. They were husband and wife in law and in affection, and they lived as brother and sister.
That deserves a plain word. The Church does not hold this up as the model for marriage, which is a vocation to fruitfulness as well as to love. But the Church has always honored those who, for the sake of the Kingdom, make a vow of total chastity, and there are saints who lived it inside a marriage by mutual consent. What distinguishes Emeric's case is the setting. He was the sole heir to a throne that needed a dynasty, and he made that choice anyway. It was a choice made at the cost of what every adult around him expected.
The lily in his iconography comes from here. He is often shown as a young man in armor, with a crown and a lily, the flower of purity.
What a Prince Could Do
There was no time for a grand career, and the record does not say much about his work. What the sources give is a picture of the sort of prince he was.
He worked with his father. He took part in the Christianizing of the country, which at that point was still a work in progress. In a land where the old customs and the new faith were still competing, a prince who lived the faith openly was a kind of sermon.
He was known for justice, for mercy, and for humility. Those are general virtues, and they appear in the account of almost every holy ruler. In his case they have one concrete feature. He lived them while young, rich, and heir to a crown, which is the hardest time of life to do so.
Stephen, for his part, began to prepare for a handover. He did not give up the crown, and the claim that he abdicated in his son's favor is not true. But he wanted Emeric to share the responsibilities of rule. He was an aging king with one son he could rely on, and he wanted that son beside him.
The Offer He Was Never Asked to Refuse
One story from these years shows the world Emeric lived in.
The emperor Conrad II planned to strip the diocese of Bamberg of some of its property. Bamberg had been founded by Henry II, Emeric's own uncle, so the church was in a sense family property. Conrad's plan was to give the young Hungarian prince a share of the spoils.
Stephen would not allow it. He refused on his son's behalf, and Emeric took no part in the plunder of a church.
The record does not tell us what Emeric himself thought. That is the honest limit of the sources. But the offer is a reminder of the kind of pressure a prince lived with. People approached him constantly with deals, favors, and shares of someone else's loss. Saying no to them was not an event in his life. It was the daily climate.
The Boar
On September 2, 1031, Emeric went hunting, as princes did. He was killed by a wild boar. He was twenty-four.
The sources do not say more than that, and the many details that later accounts supply are not reliable. What we know is the outline: a young man, a hunting party, an animal, a death that came with no warning.
Stephen received the news, and his response was recorded. He said: God loved him, and so He took him away soon.
It is a strange sentence to read, and a hard one. A father says it over the body of the only son who might have carried on his life's work. It does not explain anything. It does not make the loss smaller. It is a man putting what he believes about God above what he feels, in the worst hour of his life, and staying faithful with a broken heart.
Emeric was buried in the church at SzΓ©kesfehΓ©rvΓ‘r, the royal city.
Stephen outlived him by seven years. He died on August 15, 1038, the Feast of the Assumption. The kingdom he had built then fell into a long and violent struggle over the succession. The plan that was meant to prevent exactly that had died in a hunting accident.
The Tomb and the Lily
Soon after the burial, people began to report healings and conversions at Emeric's grave. The reports kept coming, and by the end of the century the pressure to recognize him was strong.
In 1083, King Ladislaus I opened the tomb and raised the relics in a great ceremony. On the same occasion, Pope Gregory VII canonized Emeric, together with his father, Stephen, and his teacher, Gerard. The three of them, the king, the prince, and the bishop, were declared saints together. They are the founding saints of Christian Hungary.
His feast is November 4 in the Church's calendar and November 5 in Hungary, the day his relics were raised.
His patronages follow from what is known of his life.
Youth. He died young, and he lived a serious spiritual life in the years when most people are still figuring out what to do with themselves. Hungary in particular holds him as a patron of its young people.
Princes. He was the heir to a throne, and he took the demands of that position seriously, in a court full of temptations to do otherwise. Those who are born into power or responsibility have an example in him.
Chastity. This is the best known. He kept a vow of purity inside a royal marriage, at great cost, for the sake of God. Those who are trying to live chastely, married or single, in an age that does not understand it, can look to him.
A Prayer to Saint Emeric
O God, you called your servant Emeric to the throne of a young kingdom and to a purity that the world thought foolish. Keep our young people faithful to you, strengthen those who are called to lead, and grant courage to all who have vowed themselves to chastity. Comfort those whose plans have ended in sorrow, and teach us to trust that no life given to you is ever wasted. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Emeric, Pray for us.
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