Saint Margaret of Cortona

St. Margaret was born in 1247 AD to poor farmers at Laviano, a hamlet about ten miles from Cortona. Her mother taught her a prayer for the salvation of everyone God wished her to pray for.

When she was about seven her mother died, and two years later her father married again. There was little affection between the girl and her stepmother. At about sixteen she left her father's house to live with a young nobleman of Montepulciano, who had a villa near Laviano.

St. Margaret lived with the nobleman for nine years and bore him a son. She asked him often to marry her; he promised each time and never did. Pope John Paul II gave the reason: she was a peasant's daughter and he a nobleman.

She went about Montepulciano in fine clothes, with pearls and gold in her hair. She was tender toward the poor and often gave them what they needed. When her companions teased her about her dress, she answered that they would one day call her a saint and come as pilgrims to her tomb.

After nine years the nobleman was killed while away from home. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, his dog came home alone, pulled at St. Margaret's dress and led her to some oaks, where it dug up part of his buried body. The sight of the decaying body filled her with fear of God's judgment, and she blamed herself for the way he had lived.

She went back to Montepulciano and changed her fine clothes for a plain black dress. She gave his relatives back the jewels and property he had given her, and sold a few ornaments for the poor she had been helping. Then she left the town on foot, leading her small son by the hand.

St. Margaret went back to her father's house at Laviano, threw herself at his feet and begged his pardon. Her father, urged on by her stepmother, turned her out. She sat down with her son under a fig tree in a garden nearby and wept.

There a voice within her told her to go to Cortona and ask the Franciscan friars to guide her. She set out at once on foot with the boy, who was seven or eight, and entered Cortona by the gate called Porta Berarda. Two noblewomen, Marinaria and Raneria, met her there and took mother and son into their house.

The two women brought St. Margaret to the Franciscan friars, and she asked them for the habit of the Third Order of St. Francis, whose members lived as penitents under the friars' direction. The friars doubted she would keep to it, thought her too attractive and too young, and made her wait three years. She supported herself and her son by nursing the women of Cortona through childbirth.

In time the boy went to school at Arezzo, and later he became a friar. One Sunday she walked into Mass at Laviano with a rope round her neck and asked the people's pardon for the scandal of her past life. She meant to disfigure her face, believing her beauty had harmed other souls; her confessor, the friar Fra Giunta Bevegnati, forbade it.

After three years the friars received her into the Third Order and gave her its habit. St. Margaret told Fra Giunta that she had asked Christ to call her his daughter and was told she must first confess her whole life again. St. Margaret's confession to Fra Giunta took eight days; she told him that at Communion on the eighth, the feast of St. John the Evangelist, she heard Christ call her his daughter.

St. Margaret told her confessor that she was praying before the crucifix in the friars' church when she heard Christ ask what she wished. She answered that she wanted nothing but him.

In 1277 AD Cortona was at war with the Bishop of Arezzo, who pressed claims on the city. St. Margaret told Fra Giunta that on May 5 Christ commanded her to send the bishop word to make peace; she held back, and sent the message only after a second summons. Two months later, on July 17, the bishop gave up his claims, lifted the Church penalties he had laid on Cortona and made peace.

When she had no food for the poor she found them shirts, knives, belts, jugs, cups, firewood and bed coverings. In 1286 AD the hospital she founded for the sick poor of Cortona opened as the Hospital of Our Lady of Mercy, with the city council's backing.

In 1288 AD St. Margaret left the hospital for a cell below Cortona's citadel, away from the noise and the crowds. That year the friars of the region, at their governing meeting in Siena, limited Fra Giunta to one visit to her every eight days, because some of them suspected she was deluded. In 1290 AD she had the ruined church of St. Basil beside the cell rebuilt, and it reopened for worship; the same year Fra Giunta was moved to Siena.

He came back late in 1296 AD; she had told him he would be with her when she died. From February 5, 1297 AD she could eat nothing, and she died with joy in her cell just before daybreak on February 22. The town's General Council went up at once to St. Basil's, where her body was dressed in purple and buried in a new tomb.