St. Margaret of Castello

Margaret was born around 1287 near Metola, in the hill country of central Italy, to a noble family, Parisio and Emilia, who had hoped for an heir who would strengthen an important political alliance. She was born blind, with one leg noticeably shorter than the other, a curved spine, and short stature.

Rather than raise her, her parents hid her from public view. Tradition holds that a local hermit was asked to pray for her healing and that, when no cure came, her parents concealed her for years inside a walled-off room attached to a chapel, with only a servant to care for her, so that neighbors and relatives would not learn of her condition.

When Margaret was around six, her parents took her to Città di Castello, reportedly in the hope that a shrine there, associated with reports of healings, would cure her. When it did not, they left her there and returned home without her. She would not see her parents again.

She was taken in first by charitable townspeople and later spent time in the household of a family who, by most accounts, treated her kindly, teaching her to read by touch and allowing her to be present at Mass and instruction, though other households she passed through in these years were far less gentle.

As a young woman, Margaret sought admission to a community of Dominican sisters and, after an initial acceptance, tradition holds she was for a time asked to leave over a disagreement about the strictness of the community's observance; she was later received as a lay member of the Dominican Third Order, living not in an enclosed convent but in a small house in Città di Castello among the townspeople.

She spent her remaining years visiting prisoners, teaching children, and caring for the sick and dying in the town, becoming known for a steady cheerfulness that people who met her frequently remarked on, given everything she had lived through. She died in 1320, likely in her early thirties.

At her death the townspeople of Città di Castello reportedly insisted, against the wishes of some clergy, that she be buried inside the church rather than in the ordinary cemetery, in recognition of what her life had meant to them. Her body has remained a focus of local veneration for seven centuries and is preserved in the church of San Domenico in the town.

For most of that time she was venerated locally without a formal canonization, a common situation for medieval lay holy women whose causes were slow to reach Rome.

Margaret was beatified in 1609. On 24 April 2021, Pope Francis formally canonized her by equipollent canonization, a process that recognizes a person's centuries-old, continuous, and widespread veneration and reputation for sanctity in place of a new investigation and miracle process. It confirmed what the people of Città di Castello had held for seven hundred years.

In thirteenth-century Italy, a child born visibly disabled into a noble family carrying marriage and inheritance obligations was, in the calculus many families of that class applied, a liability: unable to be married off to secure an alliance and a source of possible shame. Concealment and, in extreme cases, abandonment of disabled children were not unheard of, though outright abandonment of a living child at a shrine, as happened to Margaret, was still an extraordinary act even by the standards of the time.

The Church of the period offered Margaret no single, systematic response: some clergy and religious communities that encountered her showed real charity, and at least one community she sought to join for a time turned her away. Her eventual home was found not through an institution's planning but through the informal charity of ordinary townspeople who kept taking her in.

As a lay Dominican in Città di Castello, Margaret visited prisoners in the town jail, a population most respectable people of her era avoided, taught catechism to children, and sat with the sick and dying, often people as poor or poorer than she was.

Concealment by her own parents for years. Abandonment at a shrine by the two people responsible for her. Being handed between households, some kind and some not, with no say in the matter. Rejection, for a time, even by a religious community she sought to join.

The record does not show Margaret's family ever returning for her, apologizing, or providing for her afterward. The Church's veneration of her holiness is not a statement that this abandonment was somehow fitting or necessary; it is a statement about what she built afterward, with people who were not obligated to her by blood.

Margaret's story is sometimes told as though her parents' cruelty is incidental background to a sweet ending. It should not be softened that way: she was a small child left behind at a shrine by people who had the means to care for her and chose not to.

It is also worth naming plainly that the Church's formal recognition of her sanctity took roughly seven hundred years, arriving only through the modern process of equipollent canonization that acknowledges long, grassroots devotion rather than requiring a fresh case to be built. Ordinary people in Città di Castello recognized what she was long before Rome issued a decree confirming it.