(C.D. Stampley Enterprises, Charlotte, NC 2001). Used with permission.

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For single mothers

St. Margaret of Cortona (1247-1297)

Feast day: February 22

St. Margaret of Cortona was originally hailed as "a second Mary Magdalene." Today she is invoked as the patron of single mothers. Margaret's lover refused to marry her, even after she bore him a son. When her lover was murdered, and her father would not let her live with him, Margaret took up nursing to support herself and her little boy.

Margaret was a beautiful child whose parents spoiled and indulged her. She grew up self-centered and headstrong, accustomed to getting her way. At age seven Margaret experienced the first real sorrow of her life: her mother died and her father remarried. Almost from the moment they met, Margaret and her stepmother detested each other.

To escape the unpleasantness at home, Margaret spent more and more of her time outside the house. In the village and the surrounding countryside Margaret found the attention she craved. Adults thought she was precocious and charming. Boys her age and a little older were especially attracted to the pretty girl.

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Margaret was twelve or thirteen years old when she met Arsenio, the fifteen-year-old son of a petty nobleman from the region of Montepulciano. When Arsenio showed an interest in her, Margaret responded. Although his rank made it impossible for Arsenio to marry a peasant girl like Margaret, he could take her as his mistress. Margaret consented and moved into Arsenio's house. She found it was an arrangement that gave her almost everything she wantedÑaffection, privilege, luxuries, and freedom from the drudgery of peasant life and the constant scolding of her stepmother.

Soon Margaret gave birth to a son. (Her biographers never say what she named the child.) She hoped that the baby would strengthen her claim on Arsenio, but he showed no sign that he wanted Margaret as anything other than his lover. In this way, nine years passed.

One day Arsenio went on a routine errand to one of his outlying estates. When Arsenio did not return on the expected day Margaret became anxious. The next day Arsenio's dog appeared alone at the house and ran to Margaret's room. Whining and agitated, the animal walked in circles around Margaret, then grabbed her gown in its teeth and began to pull. Apprehensive and agitated herself, Margaret followed where the dog led.

In the woods not far from the house the dog stopped at a pile of dead wood and began to paw at the branches. Frightened, perhaps even a little frantic, Margaret cleared away the dead tree limbs. Under the wood, lying in a shallow trench, she found the murdered, decaying corpse of Arsenio.

The horror of death and decay was a common sermon topic in Margaret's day. No doubt she had heard at least one preacher describe in grisly detail what a few days of lying in the grave did to even the fairest, strongest, and most pampered bodies. But what she could once have dismissed as a preacher's cliché was now staring her in the face. And this was no nameless corpse, but the body of the man she loved.

At first Margaret grieved only for her loss of Arsenio. Then her conscience began to trouble her, and she grieved at the thought of what might have become of Arsenio's immortal soulÑand what might become of her soul if death should come to her suddenly.

Filled with remorse, Margaret took her son and returned to her father's house. Sobbing she knelt at his feet and begged her father to forgive her, to take her back. Like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, Margaret's father welcomed her home. The stepmother, not surprisingly, did not want Margaret and her bastard in the house, but there was nothing she could do about it for the moment. She waited, certain that in time Margaret would give her a good reason to throw her out.

And Margaret did play into her stepmother's hands, although not in a way anyone would have predicted.

Margaret was in the middle of a violent conversion experience. Where once she had been proud, now she looked for imaginative ways to humiliate herself. She abandoned the fine clothes Arsenio had given her and put on the rough clothes of a penitent. When she went to church she wore a noose around her neck. After Mass she knelt at the church door so none of her old neighbors could help but see her shame.

Margaret's father did not like these public exhibitions, but he endured them, believing they couldn't last long. For Margaret, however, this was only the beginning. One day in the village church she walked to the front of the congregation and recited all the sins she had committed during the past nine years. This was more repentance than Margaret's father would tolerate. He threw his daughter and her son out of his house.

On the road with her little boy, Margaret wondered what she should do next. She could go back to Montepulciano where she still had friends and where she could enjoy, up to a point, the kind of comfortable life she had known with Arsenio. It was a powerful temptation, particularly for one like Margaret who had always sought pleasure. But she was too far along now in her conversion. So she turned her back on her father's village and her lover's castle and headed for Cortona where the Franciscan fathers had a reputation for their kindness to repentant sinners.

The Franciscans listened sympathetically to Margaret's story. Two priests, Giunta Bevegnati and John da Castiglione, became her spiritual directors. She asked to be accepted as a member of the Franciscan Third Order, which would enable her to take the vows of a nun without having to live in a convent. The friars said it was too soon for her to be talking about a religious vocation. They placed her on three years probation and sent Margaret and her son to live with two devout and charitable women, Marinana and Raneria Moscari, who worked with the friars and often opened their home to penitent women.

No sooner had she settled in at the Moscari house than Margaret began a routine of rigorous penances. She slept on the floor and lived on a starvation diet. Her penances left her looking haggard but still beautiful, so she beat her face until it was cut and bruised. Father Giunta and Father John tried to restrain her, but Margaret believed that the only way to atone for her sins was to punish her body. When Father Giunta learned that Margaret planned to go back to Montepulciano and have a woman lead her by a rope through the streets proclaiming her sins, the good man lost his patience and commanded Margaret to give up these public melodramas. Margaret abandoned her plan to humiliate herself in Montepulciano, but she continued her mortifications. In spite of all her prayers and acts of penance, sexual temptations troubled Margaret all her life. She once told Father Giunta, "Do not ask me to come to terms with this body of mine because I cannot afford it. Between me and my body there will be a struggle until death."

At the end of three years Margaret was admitted to the Third Order of St. Francis. About the same time she sent her son to a school in Arezzo. Eventually he became a Franciscan, too.

During her probation, Margaret had supported herself and her son by nursing the sick and the dying. Now she decided to open a hospital for the poor in Cortona. She founded two organizations, one for women, the other for men. The women would operate the hospital and the men would work to support it. Uguccio Casali, one of the Cortona town councilors, supported Margaret's plan and persuaded his fellow councilors to fund the hospital.

Unfortunately, Margaret's bad reputation never left her entirely. Scandalmongers whispered that Margaret was having an affair with her confessor, Father Giunta. Erring on the side of caution, Father Giunta's superiors transferred him to the order's monastery in Siena. Seven years later, when the rumors had faded away, but the Franciscans let Father Giunta return.

After her conversion Margaret had become especially devoted to the Poor Souls in Purgatory, perhaps because she was still uncertain about what might become of her soul after death. As she lay dying, she had a vision of a crowd coming from Heaven to fetch herÑthey were the souls she had ransomed from Purgatory by her prayers and penances.

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Prayer to the saints is a powerful thing.

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