Praise be Jesus and Mary.
Amen.
St. Margaret of Cortona was born in 1247 in Labiano, a little town on Lake Trasimeno, which today is in the province of Perugia.
This was one of the first areas where St. Francis went to preach, about 35 years before Margaret was born.
In Cortona, he acquired new disciples and founded a friary called the Cells, the Cells of Cortona.
When Lent came, he withdrew to an island in the lake to prepare himself for Easter in solitude and penance.
Although St. Francis died 21 years before she was born, the friars who knew him were still around.
There was a Franciscan spirit in the air, and eventually Margaret would catch it, but first there would be a detour.
When she was eight, her mother died, and her father remarried.
So at that time, bitter days began for Margaret.
She was pretty, and she was sensitive, and her stepmother was hostile and jealous.
The maltreatment lasted for ten years.
She was starved for love, and so when a young nobleman of nearby Montepulciano told her that he loved her and wanted to marry her, she ran away with him.
She slipped out into the darkness, both literally and morally, literally because she snuck away at night, and morally because she began a life of sin.
You see, Arsenio, that was his name, Arsenio, might have wanted to marry her, but he wasn't about to get disowned to do it, and his family would never let him marry a poor commoner.
But they would let him live with her, and so she did, year after year.
She had dresses and fine jewelry, and rode through town on a splendid horse.
Everyone knew who she was and why she had those things.
They seemed to prove that sin pays.
She gave birth to Arsenio's son, but that didn't convince him to marry her.
She knew that she was living in sin, but she did have great respect for religion, she just didn't manage to put it into practice.
She knew that she had to go off and dedicate her days to prayer and penance, but she lacked the willpower to leave Arsenio.
She did have a soft heart for the poor and needy, and she did what she could to help them, and this went on for nine years.
Then one day in 1274, Arsenio didn't come home, but his dog did, and whining and prodding her, the dog got her to follow him.
The dog led her into the woods and to a pile of leaves and branches at the foot of an oak.
He dug and uncovered the head of his murder master, and Margaret screamed and fainted.
When she came to, she didn't think of herself, but of him, of where he must be now, dead without the sacraments after nine years of living in sin with her.
Like the prodigal son, she resolved to get up and go to her father's house.
First she went back to Montepulciano to tell Arsenio's parents what had happened and to leave them the clothes and the jewels.
Then she went back to Laviano.
She threw herself at her father's feet, sobbing and begging to be taken back in.
Her father was touched and embraced her, but her stepmother demanded that he send her away.
Just think how people will talk if you take that sinful girl back into your house.
The cruel stepmother prevailed once again, and Margaret was without a home.
She had nowhere to go.
She sat down at the base of a fig tree and wept for a long time.
She begged God to help her.
The devil began to suggest to her that she was still young and beautiful, that she could find herself another man, and really, she would surely be forgiven for doing so.
After all, what choice did she have?
She had no home.
She had to do something.
But she rejected that diabolical suggestion and received the inspiration to go to Cortona and ask the Franciscans to receive her as a tertiary.
They had pity on poor sinners.
When she entered Cortona, she immediately ran into two devout women, two countesses, who were particularly devoted to St. Francis.
She told them her story, and they took her into their home and introduced her to the Franciscans.
She made her confession to Fr.
Junta, the friar, who would be her spiritual director for the next 16 years, and would write the story of her life.
They didn't allow her to become a tertiary right away.
First, she had to prove that her virtue was stable, that she was going to persevere.
She began a life of harsh penance in reparation for her sins.
And after three years of this, finally, the Franciscans were convinced, and in 1277, admitted her as a tertiary.
The countesses paid for her son to go study at what we could call a boarding school in Arezzo.
He grew up to become a Franciscan.
She dedicated her time to work to charity, especially toward the sick.
The woman who hosted her built a hospital called St. Mary of Mercy in June 1278, not like a modern hospital with machines and fine medicines, but a place where the sick could be taken in and cared for, a place of love where they were cared for simply with the remedies of the time.
Another woman joined Margaret in this work.
Her prayer became more intense.
She conversed with God.
She had raptures.
God assured her, fear not, Margaret.
In your tribulations and temptations, I will always be with you.
The devil tried to win her back, telling her that her penance was too much, or appearing in frightening forms, or trying to drive her to despair by saying that her sins would never be forgiven, or that she wouldn't persevere and would wind up in hell all the same.
That girl who looked, but God consoled her, that girl who had looked in vain for a lasting love, found it in God who said to her, I love you more than any other woman in the world, more than you could believe.
Love me, therefore.
And she did.
Her spirituality was typically Franciscan, prayer and penance with everything centered on Christ, on the Passion, on the Eucharist.
Every day she went through a sort of Way of the Cross mentally, before there was a Way of the Cross that was formalized.
She was also devoted to the name of Christ well before St. Bernardine and his companions preached about it.
She spent her last years as a recluse, living as a recluse at the base of the fortress of Cortona near the ruins of the Church of St. Basil, which she had rebuilt by her benefactors.
She brought peace to the city of Cortona, which had been divided into Guelph and Ghibelline factions.
Are you for the Pope or against the Pope in a political sense?
But she brought peace between these two factions, which had feuded for so many years.
And she died, assisted as she had predicted by Fr.
Junta, her spiritual director, after 17 days spent in complete fasting and in the most intimate union with God on the 22nd of February, 1297.
She was immediately venerated as a saint, at least informally, not liturgically, and called the third light of the Seraphic Order.
The first two lights are Francis and Clare.
St. Margaret is the third light, a light of penance like Francis and a light of purity like Clare.
The Lord told her that she would have a high place in the Choir of Virgins, even though she was not a virgin, but her penance had completely purified her.
And the Choir of Virgins is really about heroic exercise of the virtue of chastity.
In 1634, her body was examined for the, in view of her canonization, and it was found to be completely incorrupt, a sign of her purity.
And even today it remains incorrupt, though somewhat mummified.
So she was finally canonized on May 17th, 1728, and perhaps that's why we're celebrating her peace today.
February 22nd is the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, so that wouldn't work.
And May 17th is another Franciscan saint, who you'll hear about tomorrow.
So May 16th is close to the date of her canonization, and so that day was given to her.
And so she is a model for us of prayer and penance.
She proves to us that penance can purify us of whatever we have done, that we need only to turn back to the Lord with great love and in reparation, and doing penance in reparation for our sins, and we can have a high place in heaven.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.
 Amen.