Saint Mary Magdalene

The detail of the

“seven demons”

is Scripture’s way of describing someone gravely bound by evil and suffering terribly. It does not mean she had been a prostitute, as people mistakenly imagined and embroidered centuries later. Nowhere in the whole New Testament is she called a prostitute. She is also a completely different person from Mary, the sister of Martha in Bethany; and the Gospels never identify her with the nameless sinful woman who wept over the Lord’s feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee, though over the centuries Western imagination and art merged those three women into one.

To set the record straight is to give Mary Magdalene back the dignity Scripture gives her: a woman who had suffered dark torment, but whom the love of Jesus pulled out of the grip of evil into a free and full life. Her painful past was no longer a life sentence.

We do not know how terrible her days were before that healing. There is no need to imagine scenes of depravity to make the Lord’s mercy seem greater. That a suffering woman was rescued and given back her dignity is more than enough to explain a life overflowing with gratitude and love to the very end.

That service took place throughout the years Jesus traveled through the villages, from the late 20s to the early 30s of the first century.

For Vietnamese Catholic grandmothers and mothers who have always toiled over the shopping, the cooking and sweeping the church, Mary Magdalene feels like one of their own. The preaching of the Kingdom rested on very real, practical sacrifices. There were hands that quietly scrimped and shared so that the Apostles’ footsteps could keep going. Mary did not simply receive grace and go home to live comfortably on her own; she bound her whole life to the Savior, never leaving his side.

To know where someone is buried is to know the one place you can still go to be near them. After years of new life since her deliverance, Mary now had to face the shameful death of the very One who had given her life its meaning.

Scripture never says she understood then the full saving mystery of the Cross. Her faithfulness need not be painted as perfect theological understanding to deserve honor. Her greatness lies in this: she stayed steadfast in the depth of sorrow and loss, even when the whole sky was black, without the faintest glimmer of dawn.

The two disciples ran to the tomb, looked, and went back home. Only Mary stayed behind, standing outside the tomb, weeping. Her deep love moved her to bend down and look inside once more. Turning around, she saw someone standing there, but did not recognize him. Choking with tears, she pleaded with the one she took for the gardener:

“Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Her love, at that moment, was still only searching for a body to anoint and mourn one last time.

Mary Magdalene ran at once to the disciples with the news,

“I have seen the Lord!”

, and told them everything he had said to her.

The joy of Easter was not kept as a private gift for her alone. The woman who had just heard her name called was at once given a great mission: to go and call others into that Easter hope. She became the first to announce that the Lord had risen, and she announced it to the Apostles themselves, the very men one would have expected to be first with the news. That is why, since ancient times, the Church has given her a rare title:

“Apostle of the Apostles.”

That title does not make her one of the Twelve, but it recognizes her special place: a woman trusted by the Lord himself with the first witness to the Resurrection, before even those closest to him. A life that began bound by seven demons became a bright torch, proclaiming God’s victory to the whole world.

The Church celebrates Saint Mary Magdalene on July 22 each year. On June 3, 2016, Pope Francis issued a decree raising her celebration from a memorial to a feast, on a par with the Apostles themselves: a late but well-deserved recognition after centuries in which she was misunderstood and wrongly labeled.

For Vietnamese Catholics who bear the name Mary Magdalene, she is a model of faithfulness, of a love that never gave up, even when every hope seemed gone.