Margaret lived in the Tuscan region of what is now Italy, during the 13th century. She has been made a saint because of her extreme, disfiguring, wretched and persistent “penitence.”
Butler tells us that Margaret had two strikes against her heading into adulthood: she had a particularly harsh step-mother in her background and she had an “indulged propension to vice.” The third strike came when she stumbled across a former “gallant”–a man who paid her special, shall we say, “attentions”–whose carcass was on the street, half-putrified. This culminated in a total breakdown that she went with non-stop weeping, begging forgiveness in tears and supplications at her father’s feet, going around to churches with a rope around her neck to show what she believed she deserved, and seeking “public pardon” from anyone whom she might encounter (or, perhaps, anyone who could not avoid Margaret).
Margaret next had the (mis)fortune of wandering into the Order of St. Francis where the then-current father so admired her extreme penitence that he gave her additional austerities to practice that were “suitable to her fervour”! WTH?
Even Butler writes, “The extraordinary austerities with which she punished her criminal flesh [Butler’s words, not mine] soon disfigured her body. To exterior mortification she joined all sorts of humiliations; and the confusion with which she was covered at the sight of her own sins, pushed her on continually to invent many extraordinary means of drawing upon herself all manner of confusion before men.”
How does Butler end Margaret’s tale (other than identifying her as a saint)? “This model of true penitents, after twenty-three years spent in severe penance, and twenty of them in the religious habit, being worn out by austerities, and consumed by the fire of divine love, died on the 22nd of February, in 1297.”
MODEL? MODEL?!!! MODEL!?!?! Shame on all of the people who had any hand whatsoever in encouraging Margaret to continue down the path of literal self-mortification. Shame on her father, on every confessor, on the Order of St. Francis. Shame on the Catholic Church for holding Margaret up as a model rather than a cautionary tale. Where were the people to wrap their arms around a traumatized (likely since childhood) young woman and let her know forgiveness? Where the hell was ABSOLUTION when she was 25?
Margaret suffered needlessly and was dis-gracefully encouraged along a path of masochistic self-destruction. No glory to God here. Only the shame of workers nominally dedicated to God who willfully ignored pain, mental illness, and wretched misery in a lonely, scared, and sick woman.
If Margaret is to be remembered, it must be as someone who persevered in doing the best she could, turning to a church that did not help her yet continuing on, trying to find a way to get past the demons that were haunting her. She survived. She persisted.