Saint Leopold III

Saint Leopold III, margrave of Austria from the house of Babenberg, was a husband and the father of a large family, a founder of monasteries, and a ruler who governed his land in peace for forty years. Already in his lifetime he was called the Pious. He is the patron saint of Austria, and the Church commemorates him on November 15.

He was born around 1075. The exact date is not known, and Melk is named as his birthplace. He was the son of Margrave Leopold II, and after his father’s death in 1095 he took over the rule of the margraviate. Almost nothing is known of his youth and the first years of his reign.

In 1105, when Emperor Henry IV was at war with his own son, Leopold sided with the future Emperor Henry V, and in 1106 he married the latter’s sister Agnes, the widow of the duke of Swabia. Agnes bore him more than a dozen children. Among them were his successors Leopold IV and Henry II, the bishop and chronicler Otto of Freising, and Agnes, the wife of the Polish duke Władysław II the Exile. After the death of Henry V in 1125 Leopold was among the candidates for the German crown, but he declared that he would not accept it.

While the Empire was shaken by wars, Leopold kept clear of the quarrels and, as the bull of canonization stresses, preserved the land entrusted to him in a long peace. He moved his residence to Klosterneuburg near Vienna. There, together with his wife, he founded a collegiate church on June 12, 1114, which he handed over in 1133 to the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine; they live there to this day. According to legend, the site of the foundation was shown by Agnes’s veil, carried off by the wind on their wedding day and found by the margrave during a hunt. In 1133, on the advice of his son Otto, Leopold also founded the Cistercian abbey of Heiligenkreuz.

The bull of canonization says of him that amid the cares of his household, his marriage, his children, and his principality he kept his distance from the world and administered temporal things in such a way as not to lose sight of eternal ones. He supported the weak and the poor and held the clergy in honor, and Pope Innocent II called him a special son of Saint Peter. The Roman Martyrology remembers him as a promoter of peace and a friend of the poor and the clergy.

He died on November 15, 1136, probably as the result of a hunting accident, less than two months after the consecration of the church at Klosterneuburg. He was buried there, and his tomb became a place of pilgrimage.

As early as the fourteenth century Duke Rudolf IV asked Pope Innocent VI for his canonization, but the cause came to a standstill for more than a hundred years. It was taken up again at the request of Emperor Frederick III under Popes Paul II and Sixtus IV. Pope Innocent VIII enrolled Leopold among the saints on January 6, 1485, and set his feast on November 15. In 1663 Emperor Leopold I proclaimed him patron of Austria. In Lower Austria November 15 is to this day the state holiday.