St. Margaret's father shuts his door on her and her son

CORTONA, Tuscany, early 1270s AD — A woman in a plain black dress walked up the hill road into Cortona in the early 1270s AD with a boy of seven or eight beside her. They had come on foot from Laviano, where her father had turned them both out of his house. She knew no one in the town, and two women there took her and the child into their house.

She was Saint Margaret of Cortona, then in her mid-twenties, a farmer’s daughter. The nobleman she had lived with for nine years was dead. She had a son, no husband and no house, and she went back to her father to ask him to take them in.

St. Margaret was born in 1247 AD at Laviano, a village on a small hill in the valley of the Chiana, a short distance from Lake Trasimeno. Her mother died when she was seven, and two years later her father married again. The girl and her stepmother had little affection for each other, and the stepmother’s dislike grew with the years. At sixteen St. Margaret left home to live with a young nobleman of Montepulciano. They had a son. She asked the man often to marry her; he promised each time and never did.

After nine years he was murdered while on a journey. Tradition holds that his dog came back alone and led her to his body, buried under some oaks. The sight of the dead man made her so afraid of how God would judge her that she repented then and there. She gave back to his relatives the jewels and property he had given her. She sold a few ornaments and gave the money to poor people she had been helping, and she changed her fine clothes for the black dress. Then she left on foot for her father’s house, leading the boy by the hand.

At Laviano St. Margaret knelt at her father’s feet in tears, told him the story of her nine years and asked his pardon. Her stepmother urged her father to send her away, and he drove St. Margaret and the boy out.

She sat down with her son under a fig tree in her father’s garden and wept. She did not know what to do and had no one to advise or help her. Under the tree she asked Christ to be her guide, her father, her spouse and her Lord. Then a temptation came to her. She was young and beautiful, she had been thrown out anyway, and there would be no shortage of powerful men who wanted her as a mistress. She prayed instead. While she prayed she heard inwardly that she was to go to Cortona and obey the Friars Minor, the order founded by Saint Francis of Assisi.

Years later, while St. Margaret was at prayer, Christ reminded her of that day, and her confessor wrote down what she heard. Christ called her poverella (poor little one) and said: “Remember, poverella, how, thy tempter being dead, thou didst return to thy father at Laviano, with thy whole being filled with sorrow, with thy tears and drawn face, clothed in a black robe and utterly ashamed.” Christ told her that what she had heard under the fig tree came from him: “But I, who created the beauty of thy soul, and desired again to restore it — I, who loved thee still, by My inspiration enlightened thee and admonished thy conscience that thou shouldst go into Cortona, and put thyself under obedience to My Friars Minor.”

That day at Laviano St. Margaret got up from under the fig tree and set out at once with the boy. Cortona stood on a hill about ten miles to the north, and the two of them walked there over a mountain road. They entered the town by the gate called the Porta Berarda.

St. Margaret did not know the way to the friars’ house. She was climbing the steep streets inside the gate when she met two noblewomen of the town, Marinaria and Raneria. They were the first people she met in Cortona. They saw a stranger with a child, tired and plainly unhappy, and they went up to her. St. Margaret told the two women what her life had been, that she had repented and that she had come to find the Friars Minor. The two women took her and the boy into their own house.

There St. Margaret at once took on the work of a servant, and the two women saw to her son’s schooling. They also took her where she had been told to go, to the Friars Minor at the church of San Francesco. Christ later reminded St. Margaret of those first days in Cortona: “I placed thee, particularly in the first days, in the company of the noble Ladies Marinaria and Raneria.”

After St. Margaret left the two women’s house she lived by herself in a small, poor room facing the gate she had come in by. By 1793 AD the Porta Berarda had been closed, and a convent of Franciscan nuns stood on the ground where her room had been. People in Cortona called the convent le Poverelle (the poor little ones), from the name Christ used for her.