St. Wenceslaus

A devout duke of Bohemia raised by his Christian grandmother Ludmila, Wenceslaus brought clergy and books from Germany, built churches, and treated the poor with the famous generosity remembered in the Christmas carol that bears his name. He was murdered at twenty-eight by his pagan brother Boleslaus on the way to Mass. He is the patron saint of the Czech people.

Born around 907, Wenceslaus inherited the duchy as a boy after the murder of his father and the regency of his fiercely pagan mother Drahomíra. His grandmother Ludmila — herself later martyred — raised him in the faith, and he was educated by a priest at Budec. When he assumed full power, he pursued peace with the neighboring German kingdom and devoted himself to the evangelization of his people, personally ransoming captives and carrying firewood to the homes of the destitute.

His brother Boleslaus, pressured by a pagan faction among the Bohemian nobility, ambushed Wenceslaus at the door of a church on September 28, 935. According to the oldest accounts, Wenceslaus said to his brother, "God forgive you," before falling under the swords. Almost immediately the people acclaimed him a martyr, and his cult spread rapidly across Central Europe. The famous English carol, written in the nineteenth century, captures his spirit faithfully: a ruler who went out into the cold and the dark to bring warmth to those who had none.