Anniversary of canonization of Agnes of Bohemia

A mass was held at Prague's Saint Vitus Cathedral on Saturday to mark the 15th anniversary of the canonization of Saint Agnes, the 13th century daughter of the King and Queen of Bohemia. She was canonized just days before the beginning of the Velvet Revolution, and the bishop and former dissident Vaclav Maly, who led the mass, warned that the ideals of that time were rapidly fading or being trivialized. Her canonization in 1989 in Rome was attended by 10,000 Czech and Slovak believers, in open defiance of the then regime's atheist ideology. Saint Agnes is remembered in particular for helping the poor and rejecting a life of privilege.