St. Margaret of Cortona

Who they were

Margaret was a Tuscan farmer's daughter who ran away at seventeen with a young nobleman, lived openly as his mistress for nine years, and bore his son, which was a standing scandal in a small world, and she knew it. The turn came brutally: his dog led her to the ditch where he lay murdered.

Margaret returned everything to his family, walked to Cortona with her boy, and asked the Franciscans for a penitent's life. Wary of her past, they made her wait three years. What Cortona got was one of the great second acts of the medieval Church: a Franciscan tertiary who nursed the sick poor in her own rented room, founded a hospital and a community of women to staff it, established a confraternity to feed the town's destitute, and raised her son, who became a friar. The Franciscans came to call her their Third Light, after Francis and Clare. She died at fifty, and Cortona buried her as its mother.

Why people turn to St. Margaret of Cortona

Single mothers: the patron who raised a boy alone under a whole town's stare and outlived the stare. Anyone rebuilding after public failure. Midwives and the homeless by her works.

How to ask their intercession

For a single mother by name, for tonight's logistics and the long arc both.