Saint Margaret of Castello

Saint Margaret of Castello was a Dominican tertiary, blind from birth. Rejected by her parents, she spent her short life in the Umbrian town of Città di Castello in prayer and in quiet service to the poor and the suffering. The Church commemorates her on April 13.

She was born around 1287 in the castle of Metola near Mercatello sul Metauro. Her father, Parisio, was lord of the castle, and her mother’s name was Emilia. The girl came into the world blind and with bodily deformities, which her parents saw as a stain on the family’s honor. Her father shut his daughter in a cell beside the castle church to hide her from people. There, in solitude and prayer, she spent her early childhood.

After some time her parents took her to Città di Castello, to the tomb of Brother James, a Franciscan who had died in 1292 with a reputation for holiness. They were hoping for a miraculous cure, and when none came, they left their daughter in the strange town, as her fourteenth-century biographer writes, “without mercy, alone, without means, deprived of all human help.” For a time she begged for bread in the streets. Then the nuns of the small monastery of Saint Margaret took her in, but they soon sent her away: her austere way of life and her admonitions stirred their resentment.

She found a home with a devout married couple, Venturino and Grigia, who gave her a small room on the upper floor. Margaret repaid them by teaching their children the truths of the faith. Despite her blindness she visited prisoners and the sick and cared for the poor. She received the penitential habit of the Friars Preachers and belonged to the Mantellate, laywomen attached to the Dominicans who were later called tertiaries. She was not a nun: to the end of her life she lived in the house of those who had taken her in.

Every day she went to the Dominican church, made her confession, and took part in Holy Mass. She prayed the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the psalms, which she also taught to other women, and meditated on the mystery of the Incarnation. To prayer she joined severe penance: fasting, vigils, and a hair shirt. Healings and mystical experiences were attributed to her.

She died on April 13, 1320, at the age, it is said, of thirty-three. The townspeople demanded that she be buried in the church of the Friars Preachers. Her Life relates that, when her body was being embalmed, three small stones were found in her heart bearing the images of the Child Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Her body rests today in the church of San Domenico in Città di Castello.

In 1609 Pope Paul V permitted her liturgical veneration in Città di Castello, which is regarded as her beatification, and in 1675 Clement X extended it to the whole Dominican Order. On April 24, 2021, Pope Francis enrolled her in the catalog of saints by way of an equipollent canonization and extended her veneration to the whole Church. In the decretal letter he wrote that her story is a warning against the “throwaway culture.” The faithful invoke her as patroness of the blind and the rejected.