Saint Casimir

Saint Casimir, a prince of the Jagiellonian dynasty, was the son of Casimir IV, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. He is remembered as a man of prayer, chastity, and justice who stood up for the poor. He died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. The Church commemorates him on March 4, the day of his death.

He was born on October 3, 1458, in the royal castle in Krakow. His mother was Elizabeth of the House of Habsburg, called the mother of kings. From the age of nine he was brought up by Father Jan Długosz, a canon of Krakow and a chronicler, and later also by the humanist Filippo Buonaccorsi, called Callimachus.

In 1471 a faction of Hungarian magnates, in revolt against King Matthias Corvinus, offered the crown to the thirteen-year-old Casimir. His father sent him to Hungary with an army, but the expedition ended in failure. After his return the prince prepared for government at his father’s side. From 1481 to 1483, while the king was in Lithuania, he administered the Kingdom of Poland in his name, prudently and justly.

He combined life at court with prayer and penance. He had a special devotion to the Eucharist and to the Mother of God, and accounts recall that at night he would kneel before the locked doors of churches. The author of a Life, almost his contemporary, noted that the prince defended the causes of the poor as his own, for which the people called him the defender of the poor, and that he urged his father to rule justly. Members of his household testified that he preserved his chastity to the end of his life. He also gave up marriage with the daughter of Emperor Frederick III.

In 1483 he went to join his father in Lithuania. His lung disease grew worse, and on March 4, 1484, Casimir died at Grodno, then in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He was buried in the cathedral of Vilnius, where his relics rest to this day. When the tomb was opened at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the text of the Marian hymn “Omni die dic Mariae” was found in it. It used to be attributed to Casimir, but the hymn is much older.

As early as 1501 Pope Alexander VI granted an indulgence to those who visited the chapel where he was buried. The saint’s brother, King Sigismund I the Old, sought his canonization. In 1520 Leo X sent to Vilnius his legate Zaccaria Ferreri, who wrote a Life of Casimir. It is generally held that Leo X enrolled him among the saints around 1521, but the bull was lost and the exact date is not known. What survives is the brief of Clement VIII of November 7, 1602, which, referring to the decision of Leo X, approved his feast on March 4 in Poland and Lithuania. Later it was extended to the whole Church.

Urban VIII declared him patron of Lithuania in 1636, and Pius XII in 1948 named him the special patron of Lithuanian youth. For centuries he has also been venerated as patron of Poland. On the five hundredth anniversary of the saint’s death, March 4, 1984, John Paul II celebrated Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica with the bishops of Europe. He confessed then that he could not think without emotion of the saint’s birth in the castle in Krakow.