Saint Agnes of Prague
Agnes refused to play any more part in a politically arranged marriage. She decided to devote her life to prayer and spiritual works, for which she sought the help of Pope Gregory IX. Emperor Frederick is said to have remarked: "If she had left me for a mortal man, I would have taken vengeance with the sword, but I cannot take offence because in preference to me she has chosen the King of Heaven."
On land donated by her brother, Wenceslaus I, King of Bohemia, she founded the Hospital of St. Francis and two friaries for the Franciscan friars, who had just come to Bohemia at her brother's invitation. Through them, Agnes learned of Clare of Assisi and her Order of Poor Ladies, the monastic counterpart of the friars. She began a correspondence with Clare (which lasted for over two decades).
Agnes built a monastery and friary complex attached to the hospital. It housed the Franciscan friars and the Poor Clare nuns who worked at the hospital. This religious complex was one of the first Gothic buildings in Prague. This was the first Poor Clare community north of the Alps. In 1235, Agnes gave the property of the Teutonic Knights in Bohemia to the hospital. She herself became a member of what became known as the Franciscan Poor Clares in 1234. As a nun, she cooked for and mended the clothes of lepers and paupers, even after becoming abbess of the Prague Clares the following year. As can be seen in their correspondence, Clare wrote with deep maternal feelings toward Agnes, though they never met.
A lay group working at the hospital was organized by Agnes in 1238 as a new military order, dedicated primarily to nursing, known as the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, following the Rule of St. Augustine. That next year, Agnes handed over all authority over the hospital she had founded to these monastic knights. They were recognized as an order by Pope Gregory IX in 1236–37.
Agnes lived out her life in the cloister, leading the monastery as abbess, until her death on 2 March 1282.
The Monastery of the Holy Savior, renamed the Convent of Saint Agnes, began to fall into decline after the Hussite Wars of the 15th century. The community was abolished in 1782. Restored in the 1960s, the building is now a branch of the National Gallery in Prague, featuring the medieval Central European and Bohemian collections.
Though Agnes died in 1282, she is still venerated by Christians around the world more than 700 years later. She was honored in 2011, the 800th anniversary of her birth, as the Saint of the Overthrow of Communism,[15] with a year dedicated to her by Catholics in the Czech Republic.
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