Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi

Caterina de’ Pazzi was born in Florence in 1566, into one of the most powerful families in the city — the Pazzi of the conspiracy against the Medici. At sixteen she entered the Carmelite monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in Borgo San Frediano, and took the name Mary Magdalene. She never left it. Her inner life was out of the ordinary from the start: very long ecstasies, during which she spoke. Her fellow nuns began writing down what she said, and that’s where her books come from — not written by her, but transcribed as she spoke, often in a rush, by six nuns taking turns. It’s one of the few cases where we have a mystic’s words just as they came out. There were also five years, between 1585 and 1590, that she called her “trial”: a time of total dryness, when she no longer felt anything and was tormented by violent temptations. She wrote about it, and those pages are among the most honest you can read about that experience. In the monastery she served as novice mistress and subprioress. She wrote letters to popes and cardinals calling for the reform of the Church, with a bluntness that recalls Catherine of Siena. She died in Florence on May 25, 1607, at forty-one, after three years of illness. She was proclaimed a saint in 1669. If your name is Magdalene, today is your name day — though many wait for July twenty-second.