Agnes of Montepulciano

Saint Agnes of Montepulciano

memorial
20 April

Profile

Agnes was born to a wealthy family. She was quite pious and precocious. At age six she began to insistently nag her parents to let her join a convent. When I was six I nagged my parents to let me stay up to watch Candid Camera. Anyhoo…by the time she was nine years old her parents had had enough and so she was admitted to the convent at Montepulciano, Italy. When I was nine I was having anxiety over playing third base for the John McCord Storer Funeral Home Little League Team, but I digress.

Her spiritual director at the convent was appointed abbess elsewhere and she took Agnes with her. Agnes’s had a big reputation for holiness and as such she attracted a whole bunch of other sisters.

If you can believe this, she became the Abbess at age fifteen after receiving special permission from Pope Nicholas IV to be put in charge. When I was 15 I was nervous that the Clearasil I was using wasn’t going to be effective, again I digress.

Agnes subjected herself to many austerities; she lived off bread and water, slept on the ground, used a stone for a pillow.

I chose Agnes for today’s Saint because she has an inordinate number of stories about her fantastic life, some of them quite ridiculous and implausible. For example, it was said her birth was announced by flying lights surrounding her family’s house this years before area 51 or project Blue Book. 

 Like Joseph of Cupertino it was said that she would levitate in the air while praying. She said she often received Communion from an angel, and had visions of the Virgin Mary who let her hold the infant Jesus. On the day she was chosen abbess as a teenager, small white crosses showered softly onto her and the congregation; she could feed the convent with a handful of bread, once she’d prayed over it. Where she knelt to pray, violets, lilies and roses would suddenly bloom; and every little breeze seemed to whisper Louise. 

 While being treated for her terminal illness, she brought a drowned child back from the dead. At the site of her treatment, a spring welled up that did not help her health, but healed many other people. She died 20 April 1317 of natural causes following a lengthy illness legend says that at the moment of her death, all the babies in the region, no matter how young, began to speak of Agnes, her piety, and her passing.

Agnes died at the age of forty-nine. The Dominican friars attempted to obtain balsam (or myrrh) to embalm her body. It was found, however, to be producing a sweet odor on its own, and her limbs remained supple. Miracles were reported at her tomb and as you might suspect her bodine is pristine, she was bound to be an incorruptible.

Born
1268