A Saint for April: Blessed Margaret of Castello, O.P.
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Rejected by People but Beloved of God
IN our society, where medical testing can be done to assure that only children without defects are born, those who are born with handicaps are often regarded as “tragic” oversights. In this light, the “unwanted” of the world have a patron saint in a medieval woman who was born a crippled, blind and hunchbacked dwarf.
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Blessed Margaret of Castello was born in the fourteenth century in Metola, Italy to noble parents who wanted a s on. When the news was brought to the new mother that her newborn daughter was a blind hunchbacked dwarf, both parents were horrified. Little Margaret was kept in a secluded section of the family castle in the hopes that her existence would be kept secret. However, when she was about six years old, she accidentally made her presence known to guest. Determined to keep her out of the public eye, her father had a room without a door built onto the wall of the parish church and walled Margaret inside this room. Here she lived until she was sixteen, never allowed to come out. Her food and other necessities were passed into her through a window.
When Margareth was seventeedn years old, her parents heard of a shrine in Citta di Castello, Italy, where many sick people were cured. They made a pilgrimage to the shrine so that she could pray for healing. When that failed, the heartless parents abandoned here.
Left to herself, Margaret befriended the beggars, only to become one herself. She joined the Matellate, the first unmarried woman to become a Dominican Tertiary. She devoted herself to tending the sick and the dying, as well as prisoners in the city jail.
How does Margaret’s story apply to our times? Her parents wanted a boy, and if not a boy, at least a perfect girl. In the eyes of the world, she was useless, and what right do useless people have to live? Blessed Margaret helped innumerable others by her life and her good deeds, finding holiness by uniting her sufferings to Christ’s. And now, some 670 years after her death, she teaches us valuable lessons, by her very being.
She lived a life of hope and faith, practicing heroic charity, though little was shown her in return. She came from a home where she was deprived, not because her parents had no wealth, but because they valued their material wealth and status more than their spiritual treasures. Deprived of all human companionship, Margaret learned to embrace her Lord in solitude. Instead of becoming a bitter, she forgave her parents for their ill treatment of her and treated others as well as she could. Her cheerfulness stemmed from her conviction that God loves each person infinitely, for He has made each person in His own image and likeness. This same cheerfulness won the hearts of the poor of Castello, and they took her into their homes for as long as their purses could afford. She passed from house to house in this way, “a homeless beggar being practically adopted by the poor of a city” (Bonniwell, 1955).
She died on April 13, 1320 at the age of 33. More than 200 miracles have been credited to her intercession after her death. She was beatified on October 19, 1609. Thus the daughter that nobody wanted is one of the glories of the Church. She is the Patroness of Pro-Life Philippines. The Blessed Margaret Movement is at Sto. Domingo Church, Quezon Ave., Q.C.
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