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St. Margaret of Castello — Her Parents Sealed Her in a Room. Then Left Her With Strangers. · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

• 0:00
  A little girl is standing at the entrance of a church in a town she has never been to before.
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  She is somewhere between 14 and 17 years old. She is blind. She walks with a severe limp.
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  Her spine curves sharply, leaving her hunched. She is small, even for a child her age, significantly
• 0:25
  smaller than anyone around her. Her parents brought her here on a pilgrimage. They had
• 0:32
  been told there was a miracle worker buried at this church, a holy man whose intercession
• 0:38
  has healed people. They came hoping their daughter would be healed. And unfortunately, she was
• 0:47
  not healed. So her parents did what they had been wanting to do for years. They left. They
• 0:55
  walked out of that church. got on their horses and rode away, and they did not take her with
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  them. She stood there, blind, disabled, alone in a city she did not know, and listened to
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  the sound of her parents leaving. That is where this story begins, and what she became in the
• 1:20
  years after that moment is one of the most unexpected things I have come across. in building
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  the show.
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  Welcome to our porch. Hi, my name is John O'Connor. This is Everyday Saints. And if you are new
• 1:45
  here, welcome. Stick around and if this connects with you, subscribe so you don't miss next
• 1:51
  week. We drop a new saint every Thursday. Every other week on this show, we tell the story
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  of an unknown saint. Someone history almost completely forgot. This is one of those weeks.
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  And I want to warn you. The beginning of this story is genuinely hard to hear, but stay with
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  me, because where this story ends is something no one who knew the beginning could have predicted.
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  Her name was Margaret of Castello. She was born in 1287. She died in 1320 at the age of 33.
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  She was canonized, officially declared a saint by Pope Francis, and 2021, over 700 years after
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  her death. This is her story. We are starting in the year 1287. The castle of Metola, a fortified
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  stone fortress in the rugged hill country of central Italy, near the border of what is now
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  Umbria and Marcae. Cold stone walls, the smell of wood smoke. and the sounds of soldiers.
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  A military household run by a man named Perisio, a captain of some regional standing who had
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  recaptured this castle from an enemy and been given it as a reward. Perisio and his wife
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  Amelia are expecting their first child and Perisio has prepared celebrations. Two feasts, one
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  at the castle for the servants. one in the town for the dignitaries. He is expecting a son,
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  an heir, a child who will carry the family name and standing forward into the next generation.
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  The child is born a girl. Not only a girl, but a child with severe physical disabilities.
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  Blind, her spine curves sharply from birth, leaving her hunched and unable to walk normally.
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  One leg shorter than the other. Her growth significantly restricted. Everything that Perisio had imagined
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  when he pictured his heir, strong, capable, impressive. This child was, in his eyes, the
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  complete opposite. There were no feasts. Instead, Perisio and Amelia told people the child was
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  sickly and unlikely to survive. They hid her. For the first years of her life, they kept
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  her below stairs among the servants, not acknowledging her publicly as their own, not introducing
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  her to guests, not allowing her existence to be known to the world beyond their household
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  walls. And then, when she was about six years old, something happened that forced their hand.
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  A guest at the castle nearly discovered her. The secret was about to become untenable. So,
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  Perisio made a decision. He had a small cell, a single room, barely larger than a closet,
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  built adjacent to the chapel of the castle. Stidone walls, a small opening through which
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  food could be passed, and through which she could hear Mass being celebrated on the other
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  side of the wall. And Margaret, six years old, blind, disabled, and the daughter of a man
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  who could not bear to acknowledge she existed was placed inside. The door was sealed. She
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  would live in that cell for approximately a decade. I want you to sit with that for a moment.
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  Not the physical conditions, though those are hard enough. The psychological reality of it.
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  A child growing up knowing that the people who were supposed to love her most had decided
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  Her existence was a problem to be managed rather than a person to be raised. That her value
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  in their eyes was so low that the solution was simply to make her invisible. What that
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  does to a child, what it would do to almost any child is obvious. You would expect bitterness,
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  rage, a deep and permanent wound that shaped everything about who you became. That is not
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  what happened to Margaret. Her father's chaplain visited her frequently, instructed her in
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  the faith, brought her the sacraments. And in that small stone cell with nothing but time
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  and silence and prayer, Margaret built an interior life of extraordinary depth. She memorized
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  prayers. She meditated for hours. She developed what her later biographers described as a profound
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  and unshakable sense of being loved. Not by her parents, who had made their feelings clear,
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  but by God, who apparently had not. She came out of that cell years later, not broken. but
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  radiant. Eventually, the castle became militarily unsafe. The threat of invasion meant the family
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  needed to move, and this created a logistical problem for Perisio. He could no longer simply
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  keep Margaret sealed away in a cell adjacent to his chapel. He had to do something with
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  her. What he chose to do reveals exactly who he was. He had heard about a Franciscan shrine
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  in the city of Castello where a holy man was buried whose intercession had reportedly produced
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  miracles. Perisio and Amelia decided to take Margaret on a pilgrimage to this shrine. Not
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  out of devotion, no, but out of calculation. If she could be healed, if God would simply
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  fix her, then the problem would be solved. She would become the heir they had always wanted,
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  or at least someone they could acknowledge without shame. Now picture the journey, a family
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  traveling to a holy site, bringing their disabled daughter they had hidden from the world for
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  a decade, hoping that at the end of the road, she would become someone different, someone
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  they could love. They arrived at the church of San Francesco in Castello. They prayed.
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  They placed Margaret before the shrine. They waited. Nothing happened. No vision, no healing,
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  no miracle. Just a blind girl with a curved spine standing in a church exactly as she
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  had arrived. And in that moment, standing before the tomb of a holy man who had not healed their
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  daughter, Precio and Amelia made the decision they had apparently been building toward for
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  years. They left. They simply walked out of the church, mounted their horses, and rode
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  away. Without her. Without a word of explanation. Without making any arrangement for her care
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  or her survival. They abandoned their disabled, blind teenage daughter in a city she had never
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  been to among people she did not know. with no money, no shelter, and no idea what just
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  happened. The historical record does not tell us what Margaret felt in that moment. She never
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  recorded it. Her later biographers describe her as having accepted it with peace. I find
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  that hard to fully believe and also somehow completely consistent with who she was becoming.
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  What the record does tell us is what happened next. The people of Castello found her. Not
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  the wealthy people. Not the powerful people. Not the kind of people who could have offered
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  her comfort and ease and a soft place to land. The poor people. The beggars. The people who
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  slept in doorways and knew what it meant to be discarded by a world that had decided they
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  didn't count. They recognized something in her immediately. and they took her in. She learned
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  to beg. She slept in doorways and empty buildings. She moved through the streets of Castello
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  with a walking stick, blind and hunched and small, entirely dependent on the charity of
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  people who had almost nothing themselves. And here is the thing the record keeps returning
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  to, the thing that every person who has encountered her in those early years in Castello mentioned
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  when they later described her. She was joyful, not performing joy, not the brittle cheerfulness
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  of someone who had decided that optimism is a survival strategy. Genuine, deep, inexplicable
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  joy, the kind that made people stop and stare. Because it did not fit. It did not make sense.
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  A girl abandoned by her parents, begging in the streets. blind and disabled and without
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  a single material comfort. And she was the most at peace person most of them had ever
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  encountered. People began seeking her out, not to help her, to be near her, to talk to her,
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  to ask her for her prayers. Word spread through Castello the way word spreads in a small city
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  when something unusual is happening, quietly, persistently. and from neighbor to neighbor.
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  Eventually, a group of nuns offered her a place to live. She moved into their convent. And
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  almost immediately, to the nuns' great credit in recognizing it, even if they couldn't handle
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  it, they realized she was more devout than they were. More disciplined, more serious about
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  prayer and fasting and the interior life than the community the nuns had built. It made them
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  uncomfortable. Eventually, The nuns asked her to leave and she left without complaint. She
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  went back to the streets. The poor people of Castello took her in again, this time more
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  permanently rotating her between their homes. A community of people who had nothing were
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  taking care of someone who also had nothing and finding out in the process that she was
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  giving them far more than they were giving her. She eventually joined the Dominicans, not as
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  a nun living in a convent, but as a lay member. So think of it like this, being part of a team
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  without being on the full-time roster. She followed their way of life, their prayer schedule, their
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  rule, but she lived out in the world among the people of Castello. She went to mass daily.
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  She went to confession daily. She prayed for hours. She visited prisoners in the city jail,
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  sitting with people in darkness because darkness held no terror for someone who had never seen
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  light. She was, by every account that survives, one of the most genuinely happy people anyone
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  in Castello had ever met. Margaret died on April 13th in the year 1320. She was 33 years old.
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  She had been ill for some time. Her body, which had never been strong, finally gave out. She
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  received the last sacraments. Dominican friars chanted psalms and procession outside her door.
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  And she died according to the accounts of those present in complete serenity. No fear, no bitterness,
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  no last minute reckoning with everything that had been done to her. Just peace. The same
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  peace she had carried her entire life. And then, The city of Castello did something extraordinary.
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  When word spread that Margaret had died, the townspeople, the ordinary, poor, working people
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  of Castello, flooded into the streets. They came to her funeral in such numbers that the
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  parish priest, who had not been particularly attentive to her during her life, tried to
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  have her buried in a simple grave outside the church. The crowd refused. They demanded she
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  be buried inside with honor in a place where they could come to pray. The priest, well,
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  he resisted. But at the funeral in front of the crowd, a disabled girl was miraculously
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  healed. He immediately allowed the burial inside. When her body was examined years later, two
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  remarkable things were documented and recorded by the local bishop. Her remains were incorrupt,
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  preserved decades after her death without the decay that should have occurred. And inside
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  her heart, when it was examined, three small pearl-like stones were found on which appeared
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  to be carved images that witnesses described as religious figures. The Greek root of margarite,
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  margaron, means pearl. So margarite, means pearl. And a kind maid, if you think back to the
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  beginning of the story, had given her that name at birth, when her parents could not bring
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  themselves to name her. She was finally canonized by Pope Francis in April of 2021, 700 years
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  after her death. Her incorrupt body still lies under the main altar of St. Dominic's Church
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  in Castello. people still come to pray there. All right, back on the porch. I've been sitting
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  on Margaret's story for quite a bit now. And the one thing I keep returning to is the joy,
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  not the abandonment as devastating as that is, not the miracles as remarkable as those are,
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  the joy, the specific documented inexplicable joy. of a woman who had been given every possible
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  reason to be bitter and wasn't. Because here's what I notice. Margaret did not achieve joy
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  in spite of what was done to her. She achieved it in the middle of it. In a sealed cell. On
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  the streets of Castello. In a convent that asked her to leave. In a city of strangers who had
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  become, through no design of her own, her family. She did not wait for her circumstances to improve
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  before she allowed herself to be at peace. She found peace inside the circumstances. And I
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  think that is the harder and more useful thing because most of us are waiting for something
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  to change before we let ourselves be okay. We are waiting for the relationship to work out
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  for the career to stabilize. for the family situation to resolve, for the wound from the
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  person who was supposed to love us and didn't, the parent, the partner, the friend, to stop
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  hurting before we allow ourselves to move forward. Margaret had a wound that never healed in the
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  conventional sense. Her parents never came back. There was never any reconciliation scene. No
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  letter of apology. No moment where Parisio and Amelia appeared at the gates of Castello and
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  said, Hey, I was wrong. As far as the historical record shows, they simply disappeared from
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  her life the day they rode away from that church. And she built something extraordinary anyway.
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  In a city of strangers. With a body that never worked the way bodies are supposed to work.
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  With nothing. No money, no family, no status, no advantages of any kind. She built joy. From
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  the inside out. In the only place that joy can actually be built. So, the practical challenge
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  this week is this. Find 10 quiet minutes in the car, before bed, wherever works for you.
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  And ask yourself one honest question. What condition have I placed on my own piece? Not a rhetorical
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  question, a real one. Write it down if that helps. Say it out loud if nobody's listening.
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  What is the thing you are waiting on before you allow yourself to be fully okay? When the
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  relationship heals, when the career stabilizes, when the person who hurt me finally says, they're
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  sorry. When my circumstances look different than they do right now. Name it specifically.
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  Not things need to get better. No, what specifically needs to get better before you give yourself
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  permission to be at peace? Margaret's answer to that question was nothing. There was no
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  condition. Her parents never came back. Her body never healed, the nuns never apologized,
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  and she built something extraordinary anyway, from the inside out, again, in the only place
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  it can be built. You don't have to have her answer yet. Just be honest about what yours
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  currently is. That's the whole challenge. Just name it. And now it is time for the closing
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  prayer. Lord, thank you for Margaret. Thank you for a girl born into a family that could
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  not see her worth. And who found in a sealed cell with nothing but silence and your presence,
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  something so solid that no amount of rejection could shake it. For everyone listening who
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  has been made to feel like a problem to be managed rather than a person to be loved, remind them
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  of Margaret. Remind them that the people who failed to see their value were simply wrong.
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  That worth is not assigned by parents or circumstances or the world's judgment of what is useful and
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  impressive. And for anyone carrying a bitterness they feel completely entitled to, because they
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  are, because what has been done to them was genuinely wrong, give them just a glimpse of
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  what Margaret found on the other side of it. Not to minimize the wound, no, just to show
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  them what is possible. We love you, even when the people who were supposed to show us what
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  love looks like didn't. Amen. One more thing before we go. Margaret of Costello is the patron
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  saint of the unwanted, the disabled, the blind, the abandoned, the homeless, and people rejected
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  by religious orders. Now, that last one is a specific nod to the nuns who asked to leave
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  their convent. She was canonized in 2021. making her one of the newest saints in the Catholic
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  Church, though her beatification happened all the way back in 1609. Beatification is the
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  official church declaration that a deceased person is in heaven and can be publicly venerated
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  as blessed. It took 400 more years for the formal canonization. Some things just move slowly.
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  Her feast day is April 13th, the day she died. Her incorrupt body is still in Castello, in
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  St. Dominic's Church, under the main altar. If you ever find yourself in that part of Umbria,
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  and you should, it is extraordinarily beautiful countryside. She is worth visiting. The girl
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  her parents named Pearl, but could not yet see the value of, is still there, still drawing
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  people in. hundred years later. That is episode eight of Everyday Saints. If Margaret's story
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  moves you, share it. One person, someone who might need to hear that the people who failed
• 23:28
  to see their worth were simply wrong about them. Leave a review if you have a minute. It genuinely
• 23:35
  helps more people find the show. Next week, we go back to a known saint. One of the most
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  dramatic stories in the entire New Testament, a man who didn't just drift from faith. He
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  actively hunted down the people who had it, and then had the most sudden, complete,
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  and world-changing reversal of direction in the history of the early church. I'm John
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  O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on our porch with us, and I will see you next week.