Saint Louis IX, King of France & Confessor

Saint Louis was born in 1214 and became King of France as Louis the Ninth. He was formed in piety from his earliest years by his devout mother, Blanche of Castile, who is remembered for telling him that she would rather see him dead than guilty of a single mortal sin — words that he took to heart for the whole of his life. Coming young to the throne, he grew into a ruler who sought above all to govern as a Christian and to make his crown serve God and his people.

A just and charitable king

As king, Saint Louis was renowned for his justice. He laboured to give his subjects upright laws and honest judgments, and the account of his life remembers how he would sit beneath an oak at Vincennes to hear the petitions of his people and to render justice even to the poorest. He sought peace among the princes of Christendom and was so trusted for his fairness that rival rulers chose him as their arbiter. In his own person he lived simply and devoutly, hearing Mass daily, given to prayer and penance, and reverent toward all that pertained to the worship of God.

His charity to the poor and suffering was unwearied. He founded and endowed hospitals, monasteries, and houses of mercy; he fed the hungry at his own table and served them with his own hands; he cared for lepers and for the sick whom others shunned. He gathered relics of the Lord’s Passion and built to enshrine them a chapel of surpassing beauty in his capital. A member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, he united the spirit of penance to the duties of his royal state.

The crusading king

Moved by zeal for the faith and for the holy places, Saint Louis twice took the cross and set out upon crusade. The hardships of these expeditions were great, and on the first he endured captivity, which he bore with patience and royal dignity. It was upon the second of these undertakings, while encamped near Tunis in North Africa, that he was struck down by sickness. He met death as he had met life, in prayer and resignation to the will of God, and died on the twenty-fifth of August, 1270.

He was canonised within a generation. The collect of his feast praises God who raised Saint Louis from an earthly kingdom to the glory of the heavenly realm, and asks that we may be made fellow-heirs of the King of kings. In Saint Louis the Church honours a sovereign who counted the service of God above the glory of his throne, and who showed that the highest earthly power may be sanctified by justice, charity, and the fear of God.

Patronage

He is venerated as a patron of France, of the Secular Franciscan Order, of monarchs and rulers, and of the city of Saint Louis; he is honoured as the model of a Christian king.