St. Mary Magdalene

Who they were

Mary of Magdala appears in all four gospels. Luke records that seven demons had gone out of her, and that she was among the women who travelled with Jesus and supported the work from their own resources. She is present at the crucifixion when most of the others have gone. She is at the burial. She goes to the tomb.

In John's account she finds it empty, stays weeping outside it, and is the first person to whom the risen Christ appears. She does not recognise him until he says her name. She is then sent to tell the others, which is why the early Church called her the apostle to the apostles, and why Pope Francis raised her memorial to a full feast in 2016.

One thing needs correcting, because it has shaped every popular image of her. She is not the prostitute. The identification of Mary Magdalene with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7, and with Mary of Bethany, was made in a sermon by Pope Gregory the Great in 591 and stuck for fourteen centuries in the west. The eastern churches never made it. The Roman calendar separated them in 1969. Almost every painting, and the word maudlin, come from the conflation rather than from the text.

The eastern churches kept a different tradition of her later life, in which she travelled to Ephesus and died there. A western legend has her arriving by boat in Provence and spending thirty years in a cave, which is where the great pilgrimage sites in southern France come from. Neither has any support in the earliest sources.

What the earliest sources do preserve is her name in every gospel and her presence at every point where it mattered most, which in a culture where a woman's testimony carried little formal weight is itself striking. Early critics of Christianity used exactly that against it, arguing that a resurrection reported first by a woman was not worth taking seriously. The gospels kept the detail anyway.

Why people turn to St. Mary Magdalene

She is asked for by converts, by penitents, and by anyone hoping for a second chance, and the patronage survives the correction above rather than depending on it. What the gospels actually say is that something was badly wrong with her, that it was dealt with, and that she then stayed when almost everyone else left, and was trusted with the first news of the resurrection. That is the shape people recognise: not a lurid past, but a life that turned and was then given something important to do.

How to ask their intercession

Ask her about the thing you would rather not be defined by. She is a good saint to ask when returning to practice after a long time away, and when the obstacle is shame rather than disbelief.