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The Catholic Church has recognized over ten thousand saints. Most people couldn't name five. Everyday Saints tells the real stories — not the stained-glass versions. Every week, host John O'Connor sits down with the life of one saint, told in plain language for regular people with real jobs, real doubts, and real lives. No theology degree required. Just honest stories about flawed, complicated humans who somehow became extraordinary. Whether you're a lifelong Catholic, a curious skeptic, or somewhere in between — pull up a chair. These stories are worth knowing.
A little girl is standing at the entrance of
a church in a town she has never been to before.
She is somewhere between 14 and 17 years old.
She is blind. She walks with a severe limp.
Her spine curves sharply, leaving her hunched.
She is small, even for a child her age, significantly
smaller than anyone around her. Her parents
brought her here on a pilgrimage. They had
been told there was a miracle worker buried
at this church, a holy man whose intercession
has healed people. They came hoping their daughter
would be healed. And unfortunately, she was
not healed. So her parents did what they had
been wanting to do for years. They left. They
walked out of that church. got on their horses
and rode away, and they did not take her with
them. She stood there, blind, disabled, alone
in a city she did not know, and listened to
the sound of her parents leaving. That is where
this story begins, and what she became in the
years after that moment is one of the most
unexpected things I have come across. in building
the show.
Welcome to our porch. Hi, my name is John O'Connor.
This is Everyday Saints. And if you are new
here, welcome. Stick around and if this connects
with you, subscribe so you don't miss next
week. We drop a new saint every Thursday. Every
other week on this show, we tell the story
of an unknown saint. Someone history almost
completely forgot. This is one of those weeks.
And I want to warn you. The beginning of this
story is genuinely hard to hear, but stay with
me, because where this story ends is something
no one who knew the beginning could have predicted.
Her name was Margaret of Castello. She was born
in 1287. She died in 1320 at the age of 33.
She was canonized, officially declared a saint
by Pope Francis, and 2021, over 700 years after
her death. This is her story. We are starting
in the year 1287. The castle of Metola, a fortified
stone fortress in the rugged hill country of
central Italy, near the border of what is now
Umbria and Marcae. Cold stone walls, the smell
of wood smoke. and the sounds of soldiers.
A military household run by a man named Perisio,
a captain of some regional standing who had
recaptured this castle from an enemy and been
given it as a reward. Perisio and his wife
Amelia are expecting their first child and Perisio
has prepared celebrations. Two feasts, one
at the castle for the servants. one in the town
for the dignitaries. He is expecting a son,
an heir, a child who will carry the family name
and standing forward into the next generation.
The child is born a girl. Not only a girl, but
a child with severe physical disabilities.
Blind, her spine curves sharply from birth,
leaving her hunched and unable to walk normally.
One leg shorter than the other. Her growth significantly
restricted. Everything that Perisio had imagined
when he pictured his heir, strong, capable,
impressive. This child was, in his eyes, the
complete opposite. There were no feasts. Instead,
Perisio and Amelia told people the child was
sickly and unlikely to survive. They hid her.
For the first years of her life, they kept
her below stairs among the servants, not acknowledging
her publicly as their own, not introducing
her to guests, not allowing her existence to
be known to the world beyond their household
walls. And then, when she was about six years
old, something happened that forced their hand.
A guest at the castle nearly discovered her.
The secret was about to become untenable. So,
Perisio made a decision. He had a small cell,
a single room, barely larger than a closet,
built adjacent to the chapel of the castle.
Stidone walls, a small opening through which
food could be passed, and through which she
could hear Mass being celebrated on the other
side of the wall. And Margaret, six years old,
blind, disabled, and the daughter of a man
who could not bear to acknowledge she existed
was placed inside. The door was sealed. She
would live in that cell for approximately a
decade. I want you to sit with that for a moment.
Not the physical conditions, though those are
hard enough. The psychological reality of it.
A child growing up knowing that the people who
were supposed to love her most had decided
Her existence was a problem to be managed rather
than a person to be raised. That her value
in their eyes was so low that the solution
was simply to make her invisible. What that
does to a child, what it would do to almost
any child is obvious. You would expect bitterness,
rage, a deep and permanent wound that shaped
everything about who you became. That is not
what happened to Margaret. Her father's chaplain
visited her frequently, instructed her in
the faith, brought her the sacraments. And in
that small stone cell with nothing but time
and silence and prayer, Margaret built an interior
life of extraordinary depth. She memorized
prayers. She meditated for hours. She developed
what her later biographers described as a profound
and unshakable sense of being loved. Not by
her parents, who had made their feelings clear,
but by God, who apparently had not. She came
out of that cell years later, not broken. but
radiant. Eventually, the castle became militarily
unsafe. The threat of invasion meant the family
needed to move, and this created a logistical
problem for Perisio. He could no longer simply
keep Margaret sealed away in a cell adjacent
to his chapel. He had to do something with
her. What he chose to do reveals exactly who
he was. He had heard about a Franciscan shrine
in the city of Castello where a holy man was
buried whose intercession had reportedly produced
miracles. Perisio and Amelia decided to take
Margaret on a pilgrimage to this shrine. Not
out of devotion, no, but out of calculation.
If she could be healed, if God would simply
fix her, then the problem would be solved. She
would become the heir they had always wanted,
or at least someone they could acknowledge
without shame. Now picture the journey, a family
traveling to a holy site, bringing their disabled
daughter they had hidden from the world for
a decade, hoping that at the end of the road,
she would become someone different, someone
they could love. They arrived at the church
of San Francesco in Castello. They prayed.
They placed Margaret before the shrine. They
waited. Nothing happened. No vision, no healing,
no miracle. Just a blind girl with a curved
spine standing in a church exactly as she
had arrived. And in that moment, standing before
the tomb of a holy man who had not healed their
daughter, Precio and Amelia made the decision
they had apparently been building toward for
years. They left. They simply walked out of
the church, mounted their horses, and rode
away. Without her. Without a word of explanation.
Without making any arrangement for her care
or her survival. They abandoned their disabled,
blind teenage daughter in a city she had never
been to among people she did not know. with
no money, no shelter, and no idea what just
happened. The historical record does not tell
us what Margaret felt in that moment. She never
recorded it. Her later biographers describe
her as having accepted it with peace. I find
that hard to fully believe and also somehow
completely consistent with who she was becoming.
What the record does tell us is what happened
next. The people of Castello found her. Not
the wealthy people. Not the powerful people.
Not the kind of people who could have offered
her comfort and ease and a soft place to land.
The poor people. The beggars. The people who
slept in doorways and knew what it meant to
be discarded by a world that had decided they
didn't count. They recognized something in her
immediately. and they took her in. She learned
to beg. She slept in doorways and empty buildings.
She moved through the streets of Castello
with a walking stick, blind and hunched and
small, entirely dependent on the charity of
people who had almost nothing themselves. And
here is the thing the record keeps returning
to, the thing that every person who has encountered
her in those early years in Castello mentioned
when they later described her. She was joyful,
not performing joy, not the brittle cheerfulness
of someone who had decided that optimism is
a survival strategy. Genuine, deep, inexplicable
joy, the kind that made people stop and stare.
Because it did not fit. It did not make sense.
A girl abandoned by her parents, begging in
the streets. blind and disabled and without
a single material comfort. And she was the
most at peace person most of them had ever
encountered. People began seeking her out, not
to help her, to be near her, to talk to her,
to ask her for her prayers. Word spread through
Castello the way word spreads in a small city
when something unusual is happening, quietly,
persistently. and from neighbor to neighbor.
Eventually, a group of nuns offered her a place
to live. She moved into their convent. And
almost immediately, to the nuns' great credit
in recognizing it, even if they couldn't handle
it, they realized she was more devout than they
were. More disciplined, more serious about
prayer and fasting and the interior life than
the community the nuns had built. It made them
uncomfortable. Eventually, The nuns asked her
to leave and she left without complaint. She
went back to the streets. The poor people of
Castello took her in again, this time more
permanently rotating her between their homes.
A community of people who had nothing were
taking care of someone who also had nothing
and finding out in the process that she was
giving them far more than they were giving her.
She eventually joined the Dominicans, not as
a nun living in a convent, but as a lay member.
So think of it like this, being part of a team
without being on the full-time roster. She followed
their way of life, their prayer schedule, their
rule, but she lived out in the world among the
people of Castello. She went to mass daily.
She went to confession daily. She prayed for
hours. She visited prisoners in the city jail,
sitting with people in darkness because darkness
held no terror for someone who had never seen
light. She was, by every account that survives,
one of the most genuinely happy people anyone
in Castello had ever met. Margaret died on April
13th in the year 1320. She was 33 years old.
She had been ill for some time. Her body, which
had never been strong, finally gave out. She
received the last sacraments. Dominican friars
chanted psalms and procession outside her door.
And she died according to the accounts of those
present in complete serenity. No fear, no bitterness,
no last minute reckoning with everything that
had been done to her. Just peace. The same
peace she had carried her entire life. And then,
The city of Castello did something extraordinary.
When word spread that Margaret had died, the
townspeople, the ordinary, poor, working people
of Castello, flooded into the streets. They
came to her funeral in such numbers that the
parish priest, who had not been particularly
attentive to her during her life, tried to
have her buried in a simple grave outside the
church. The crowd refused. They demanded she
be buried inside with honor in a place where
they could come to pray. The priest, well,
he resisted. But at the funeral in front of
the crowd, a disabled girl was miraculously
healed. He immediately allowed the burial inside.
When her body was examined years later, two
remarkable things were documented and recorded
by the local bishop. Her remains were incorrupt,
preserved decades after her death without the
decay that should have occurred. And inside
her heart, when it was examined, three small
pearl-like stones were found on which appeared
to be carved images that witnesses described
as religious figures. The Greek root of margarite,
margaron, means pearl. So margarite, means pearl.
And a kind maid, if you think back to the
beginning of the story, had given her that
name at birth, when her parents could not bring
themselves to name her. She was finally canonized
by Pope Francis in April of 2021, 700 years
after her death. Her incorrupt body still lies
under the main altar of St. Dominic's Church
in Castello. people still come to pray there.
All right, back on the porch. I've been sitting
on Margaret's story for quite a bit now. And
the one thing I keep returning to is the joy,
not the abandonment as devastating as that is,
not the miracles as remarkable as those are,
the joy, the specific documented inexplicable
joy. of a woman who had been given every possible
reason to be bitter and wasn't. Because here's
what I notice. Margaret did not achieve joy
in spite of what was done to her. She achieved
it in the middle of it. In a sealed cell. On
the streets of Castello. In a convent that asked
her to leave. In a city of strangers who had
become, through no design of her own, her family.
She did not wait for her circumstances to improve
before she allowed herself to be at peace. She
found peace inside the circumstances. And I
think that is the harder and more useful thing
because most of us are waiting for something
to change before we let ourselves be okay. We
are waiting for the relationship to work out
for the career to stabilize. for the family
situation to resolve, for the wound from the
person who was supposed to love us and didn't,
the parent, the partner, the friend, to stop
hurting before we allow ourselves to move forward.
Margaret had a wound that never healed in the
conventional sense. Her parents never came back.
There was never any reconciliation scene. No
letter of apology. No moment where Parisio and
Amelia appeared at the gates of Castello and
said, Hey, I was wrong. As far as the historical
record shows, they simply disappeared from
her life the day they rode away from that church.
And she built something extraordinary anyway.
In a city of strangers. With a body that never
worked the way bodies are supposed to work.
With nothing. No money, no family, no status,
no advantages of any kind. She built joy. From
the inside out. In the only place that joy can
actually be built. So, the practical challenge
this week is this. Find 10 quiet minutes in
the car, before bed, wherever works for you.
And ask yourself one honest question. What condition
have I placed on my own piece? Not a rhetorical
question, a real one. Write it down if that
helps. Say it out loud if nobody's listening.
What is the thing you are waiting on before
you allow yourself to be fully okay? When the
relationship heals, when the career stabilizes,
when the person who hurt me finally says, they're
sorry. When my circumstances look different
than they do right now. Name it specifically.
Not things need to get better. No, what specifically
needs to get better before you give yourself
permission to be at peace? Margaret's answer
to that question was nothing. There was no
condition. Her parents never came back. Her
body never healed, the nuns never apologized,
and she built something extraordinary anyway,
from the inside out, again, in the only place
it can be built. You don't have to have her
answer yet. Just be honest about what yours
currently is. That's the whole challenge. Just
name it. And now it is time for the closing
prayer. Lord, thank you for Margaret. Thank
you for a girl born into a family that could
not see her worth. And who found in a sealed
cell with nothing but silence and your presence,
something so solid that no amount of rejection
could shake it. For everyone listening who
has been made to feel like a problem to be managed
rather than a person to be loved, remind them
of Margaret. Remind them that the people who
failed to see their value were simply wrong.
That worth is not assigned by parents or circumstances
or the world's judgment of what is useful and
impressive. And for anyone carrying a bitterness
they feel completely entitled to, because they
are, because what has been done to them was
genuinely wrong, give them just a glimpse of
what Margaret found on the other side of it.
Not to minimize the wound, no, just to show
them what is possible. We love you, even when
the people who were supposed to show us what
love looks like didn't. Amen. One more thing
before we go. Margaret of Costello is the patron
saint of the unwanted, the disabled, the blind,
the abandoned, the homeless, and people rejected
by religious orders. Now, that last one is a
specific nod to the nuns who asked to leave
their convent. She was canonized in 2021. making
her one of the newest saints in the Catholic
Church, though her beatification happened all
the way back in 1609. Beatification is the
official church declaration that a deceased
person is in heaven and can be publicly venerated
as blessed. It took 400 more years for the formal
canonization. Some things just move slowly.
Her feast day is April 13th, the day she died.
Her incorrupt body is still in Castello, in
St. Dominic's Church, under the main altar.
If you ever find yourself in that part of Umbria,
and you should, it is extraordinarily beautiful
countryside. She is worth visiting. The girl
her parents named Pearl, but could not yet see
the value of, is still there, still drawing
people in. hundred years later. That is episode
eight of Everyday Saints. If Margaret's story
moves you, share it. One person, someone who
might need to hear that the people who failed
to see their worth were simply wrong about them.
Leave a review if you have a minute. It genuinely
helps more people find the show. Next week,
we go back to a known saint. One of the most
dramatic stories in the entire New Testament,
a man who didn't just drift from faith. He
actively hunted down the people who had it,
and then had the most sudden, complete,
and world-changing reversal of direction in
the history of the early church. I'm John
O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on our porch with
us, and I will see you next week.