The Crazy Joy of Christ

Here's a Saint I want to learn from

Each day, I receive a free email by The Catholic Company called the “Morning Offering.” (Highly recommended, so go sign up for it!). It features the prayer of the same name, quotes from Saints, Bible verses, the Saint of the Day, and some related merchandise.

One recent Saint of the Day was Blessed Margaret of Castello. Her life story will blow you away, so I’ll quote it here in its entirety. Note especially the three boldened (by me) parts:

Bl. Margaret of Castello (1287–1320) was born to noble Italian parents who were awaiting the birth of the child of their dreams. Instead, they bore a daughter who was blind, dwarfed, lame, and hunchbacked. Margaret's parents were horrified by the physical appearance of their newborn child, so they hid her and kept her existence secret. A servant had her baptized and named her Margaret, meaning, "Pearl."

When she was six years of age she was nearly discovered, so that her father confined her to a cell inside the wall of a church with her necessities given through a window. The parish priest took it upon himself to educate Margaret. She lived in this way until age sixteen, when her parents took her on pilgrimage to a shrine famous for miraculous healings. There they prayed earnestly for their daughter to be cured of her deformities, which they loathed. When no cure came, her parents abandoned her in the streets and returned home, never to see her again. Margaret begged for food and was helped by the town's poor who took turns sheltering her in their homes.

She became a Dominican Tertiary and took up the work of serving the sick, dying, and imprisoned. Margaret was known for her great joy, sanctity, and profound mystical experiences. She died at the age of 33, and hundreds of miracles were credited to her intercession both before and after her death. Her body is incorrupt. She is the patron against poverty, and of the disabled, handicapped, and unwanted. She was beatified in 1609. In 2021, recognizing her life of heroic virtue, Pope Francis declared her a saint through an equipollent canonization. Her feast day is April 13.

So, to sum this up, her parents are so ashamed of Margaret that they keep her in a cell inside the wall of a church, basically in a dungeon, and the only human contact she has is by a small window through which they hand her food and water.

And then, to add insult to injury, when their prayers at the shrine don’t bring the results they’d hoped for—that is, the miraculous beautification and cure of their daughter—they abandon her in the streets of this foreign town. Good riddance.

BUT, and here comes the doozy: