Saint francis borgia biography

Francis Borgia Span. September 30, The future saint was unhappy in his ancestry. His grandfather, Juan Borgia, the second son of Alexander VI, was assassinated in Rome on June 14, , by an unknown hand, which his family always believed to be that of Caesar Borgia.

St francis borgia church

Rodrigo Borgia, elected pope in under the name of Alexander VI, had eight children. The eldest, Pedro Luis, had acquired in the hereditary Duchy of Gandia in the Kingdom of Valencia , which, at his death, passed to his brother Juan, who had married Maria Enriquez de Luna. Having been left a widow by the murder of her husband, Maria Enriquez withdrew to her duchy and devoted herself piously to the education of her two children, Juan and Isabel.

After the marriage of her son in , she followed the example of her daughter, who had entered the convent of Poor Clares in Gandia, and it was through these two women that sanctity entered the Borgia family, and in the House of Gandia was begun the work of reparation which Francis Borgia was to crown. This monarch had procured the appointment of his natural son, Alfonso, to the Archbishopric of Saragossa at the age of nine years.

By Anna de Gurrea, Alfonso had two sons, who succeeded him in his archiepiscopal see, and two daughters, one of whom, Juana, married Duke Juan of Gandia and became the mother of our saint. By this marriage Juan had three sons and four daughters.

St francis borgia miracles

By a second, contracted in , he had five sons and five daughters. The eldest of all and heir to the dukedom was Francis. Piously reared in a court which felt the influence of the two Poor Clares , the mother and sister of the reigning duke, Francis lost his own mother when he was but ten. When the disturbance was suppressed, Francis was sent to Saragossa to continue his education at the court of his uncle, the archbishop, an ostentatious prelate who had never been consecrated nor even ordained priest.

Although in this court the Spanish faith retained its fervor, it lapsed nevertheless into the inconsistencies permitted by the times, and Francis could not disguise from himself the relation in which his grandmother stood to the dead archbishop, although he was much indebted to her for his early religious training.