St. Margaret of Castello/Image: The Vatican
Guest Post by Pro-life Leader Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life
Protecting our children, always a priority for people with a conscience, has been thrust into our awareness more than ever by tragic events in the news.
So what would you do if you knew of a child who was being abused by cruel parents, kept hidden from the world because her infirmities were an embarrassment?
If you lived early in the 13th century in Italy, would you have stood up for St. Margaret of Castello, patron saint of the unwanted?
Her story is almost too hard to contemplate. Born around 1287 blind, lame and apparently with dwarfism, her socially prominent parents, who had wanted a boy, were horrified thinking word would get out that their baby was less than perfect. They spread the lie that she had died at birth.
They gave her to a servant who loved and cared for her, but the servant slipped up once and almost let guests at her parents’ castle catch a glimpse of Margaret. To ensure that never happened again, her father had a single-room cell built next to a church in the forest and walled her into it. An interior window allowed Margaret to hear Mass; another window on an exterior wall let servants pass food into the girl.
The priest there discovered Margaret had a fine mind and loved God, so he spent time teaching her the faith. When her family fled from their home when she was a teenager, they took Margaret with them, only to lock her away in an underground vault near their new home.
A year later, her parents brought her to a tomb in Castello where people were said to be receiving miraculous cures of various ailments. But when their daughter was not healed, her parents literally and physically abandoned her there.
Instead of despairing, Margaret was taken in by the poor people of the city. She chose to live a life of deep faith, eventually joining the Third Order of St. Dominic, a lay religious community. She was canonized a saint on April 24, 2021.
Had they known their daughter would be born less than physically perfect, they may well have ignored the Church’s strong condemnation of abortion and sought out one of the ways to kill the child in her mother’s womb. The world never would have known St. Margaret of Castello, and we all would be poorer for it.
But if we had lived in St. Margaret’s time, and were aware that she was spending her life banished to a single-room cell, would any of us have spoken up for her? Might we have kept vigil outside her window, praying for her deliverance, or challenged her parents to end this cruel charade?
Or would we have done what so many do today both in the civil and ecclesiastical arenas, and stepped back in silence, paralyzed with fear of the elite and powerful?
It’s a key fork in the road, and it doesn’t require the drama of a 13th century saint for this choice to present itself to us. It’s there more often than we’d like, whether it’s speaking up against abortion, the Islamic terrorism of the deranged Iranian regime, transgender mutilation, the tyranny of the Democrat Party, or the complicity of compromised bishops.
What happens with this fork in the road is not hard to understand. When we see the injustice, a voice of protest (a well-formed conscience) arises within us. “No!” it shouts, “this is unjust and cannot be tolerated!”
Then, either we heed the voice and do something about it, keeping in mind that we will suffer as a result, or we mute the voice of protest and begin giving ourselves all kinds of reasons why we cannot intervene.
And in either case, the choice we make becomes easier to make the next time we face such a decision.
The Church canonizes saints in order to have us follow their example of heroic virtue, and Margaret of Castello is no exception. But when I think of this Patron of the Unwanted, it seems to me that the challenge flows even more from considering what was done to her, and what the appropriate reaction to it should have been.
Because we face that fork in the road every single day.
Prolife Leader Frank Pavone (@frfrankpavone) is the National Director of Priests for Life, the President of the National Pro-life Religious Council, and the Pastoral Director of Rachel’s Vineyard and Silent No More. See www.ProLifeCentral.org.
For detailed information on the Bible’s teaching on abortion, see www.TheBibleAndAbortion.com, a website of the author and of Priests for Life.
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