St. Margaret of Antioch

Who they were

Margaret of Antioch is the roster's most extreme case for honesty, and it belongs in the first sentence: even the Golden Legend, the thirteenth century's own bestselling collection, flagged her most famous episode as apocryphal.

The tradition runs like this. A shepherd's daughter of Antioch in Pisidia, a Christian denounced by the official whose advances she refused, was imprisoned, where a dragon swallowed her whole, and the cross in her hand split the beast open and she stepped out unharmed. From that image, of emerging whole from the thing that engulfed her, medieval Europe drew her patronage of childbirth, and for a millennium she was among the most invoked saints in the world, her name on hundreds of churches and her voice one of the three Joan of Arc named at her trial. What history can hold is this: a martyr named Margaret or Marina venerated very early in both East and West, real enough that the devotion never needed the dragon. Both truths get their full weight here, because a thousand years of labouring women were not wrong about what the image is for.

Why people turn to St. Margaret of Antioch

Women in labour and the people pacing outside, with St. Gerard Majella, St. Gianna, St. Raymond Nonnatus, and St. Anne. And anyone facing the engulfing thing, the diagnosis or the bankruptcy or the case, with her image as the prayer: through, and out.

How to ask their intercession

In the delivery room's waiting hours, for mother and child by name. Hers is the old prayer for exactly that night.