April 20 - Saint Agnes of Montepulciano
Quick Facts- Born wealthy.
- A pious child, at age six she began nagging her parents to join a convent.
- Admitted to the convent at Montepulciano at age nine.
- When her spiritual director was appointed abbess at Procena, she took Agnes with her.Agnes's reputation for holiness attracted other sisters.
- Abbess at age fifteen after receiving special permission from Pope Nicholas IV.
- Agnes insisted on greater austerities in the abbey; she lived off bread and water, slept on the ground, used a stone for a pillow.
- In 1298 she returned to Montepulciano to work in a new Dominican convent.
- Prioress of the house the last seventeen years of her life.
- Pilgrim to Rome.
- Many stories grew up around Agnes.
- Her birth was announced by flying lights surrounding her family's house.
- As a child, while walking through a field, she was attacked by a large murder of crows; she announced that they were devils, trying to keep her away from the land; years later, it was the site of her convent.
- She was known to levitate up to two feet in the air while praying.
- She received Communion from an angel, and had visions of the Virgin Mary.
- She held the infant Jesus in one of these visions; when she woke from her trance she found she was holding the small gold crucifix the Christ child had worn.
- On the day she was chosen abbess as a teenager, small white crosses showered softly onto her and the congregation.
- She could feed the convent with a handful of bread, once she'd prayed over it.
- Where she knelt to pray, violets, lilies and roses would suddenly bloom.
- While being treated for her terminal illness, she brought a drowned child back from the dead.
- At the site of her treatment, a spring welled up that did not help her health, but healed many other people.
