St. Margaret of Castello

Who they were

Margaret was born to a noble family of the Italian hill country: blind, with severe curvature of the spine, one leg shorter than the other, and a stature the records describe as dwarfism. Her parents' response was concealment. For years they kept her walled in a room beside a chapel with food passed through a window, so that no visitor would see her. When a shrine famous for cures failed to produce one, they left her there, in the city of Castello, abandoned outright: a blind teenager alone in a strange town.

What happened next is the reason for her canonization. The poor of Castello took her in, family by family, and discovered what her parents had never looked at, a mind and heart of extraordinary quality. She became a Dominican tertiary, taught children, visited prisoners no one else visited, and nursed the dying, and she was so universally loved that at her death at thirty three the town simply refused the ordinary burial and demanded, with the clergy objecting and the crowd insisting, that she be buried in the church like the saint they knew her to be. She has been venerated continuously since, and was canonized in 2021. The people who abandoned her are forgotten. The town that received her built her a shrine.

Why people turn to St. Margaret of Castello

People with disabilities and their families, from inside the experience rather than observing it. Adoptees, and anyone abandoned by the people who owed them love. Her disabilities are facts of her life here, never tragedy ornaments, and the failure in the story belongs to those who hid her, not to her body.

How to ask their intercession

By name, for a person with a disability, and for what they actually need, which her own life suggests is usually to be received rather than fixed. Families who have just heard a hard diagnosis have a particular claim on her.