Saint Agnes of Montepulciano

Saint Agnes of Montepulciano was a Tuscan nun. At fifteen she became superior of the community at Proceno, and years later she founded in her native town a monastery that she bound to the Order of Saint Dominic. The Church commemorates her on April 20.

She was born at Gracciano near Montepulciano, into a noble family. The bull of canonization gives the year 1268, but the exact date is not certain and is sometimes placed as late as 1274. At the age of nine she put on the habit in a community of virgins known in Montepulciano as the Sisters of the Sack. A few years later she set out with her novice mistress, Sister Margaret, for Proceno, in what is now the province of Viterbo, to found a new monastery there. Although she was only fifteen, she was made its superior against her will.

She spent about twenty years at Proceno. According to the bull, for fifteen years she fasted on bread and water and slept on the bare ground, and she eased these penances only at the command of her superiors. The bull also tells of graces that accompanied her prayer: of manna that covered her habit like snow, of a vision of the Child Jesus in his Mother’s arms on the night of the Assumption, and of Communion brought to her by an angel. The Roman Martyrology recalls above all her true humility.

The people of Montepulciano long begged her to return to them. Agnes decided to build there a monastery with a church in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on a site where a house of ill repute had stood. The bishop approved the foundation on July 3, 1306; in August the first sisters made their vows, and on September 23 they elected Agnes superior. The community adopted the Rule of Saint Augustine and was later entrusted to the Dominicans.

She governed the monastery until the end of her life, and she called the townspeople to peace and concord. She bore grave illnesses with patience. She died on April 20, 1317, among her sisters, whom she herself consoled. According to tradition, she said before dying: “My Beloved belongs to me; I will never leave him again.”

The faithful came in great numbers to her body, which according to the bull did not suffer corruption. About fifty years after Agnes’s death, Blessed Raymond of Capua, later master general of the Dominicans, was confessor at her monastery, and it was he who wrote her life. Saint Catherine of Siena, whose life Raymond also wrote, venerated her; she called Agnes a glorious mother. Tradition says that when Catherine bent down to kiss the foot of the dead saint, it rose of itself toward her lips.

Pope Clement VII permitted the feast of Agnes to be celebrated in Montepulciano and in the Dominican Order, and Gregory XIII ordered her to be entered in the Roman Martyrology. Pope Benedict XIII, himself a Dominican, canonized her on December 10, 1726, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, together with Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo and Saint James of the Marches.