St. Elizabeth of Portugal, painting is in the Museo Colonial de San Francisco in Santiago, Chile.
St. Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal, had nothing so much at heart as the promotion of those outward signs and ceremonies which are the ornaments of God’s worship.
“To enable men to whom God has given a body as well as a soul to fix their minds on heavenly things,” she used to say,” it is necessary that outward ceremonies be employed, and that they be performed with all possible decorum and majesty.”
She used her influence also in causing them to praise God in hymns and spiritual canticles, as St. Paul advises, that they might be thus enabled to join their voices to the heavenly choirs of the saints and angels, whose happiness for all eternity consists in singing the praises of God. She frequently, also, related what St. Augustine acknowledges in his “Book of Confessions” that the sweetness of the hymns of the Church contributed much to bring about his conversion.
In these pious canticles she took care that everything should tend to edification, and carefully excluded anything that savored of the frivolity of the world, or might in any way tend to gratify sensuality.
The Catechism in Examples Vol.3, Pg. 70-71 by Rev. D. Chisholm
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 455
