Katharine Tarvainen
St. Gregory the Great & St. Bede Writing Groups
Lately it seems that the whole world is fighting. Politicians are fighting in the news, keyboard warriors are fighting in the comments section, and my children are fighting in the living room. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, our Lord warned us that an enemy “sowed weeds among the wheat” in this world, but what should we do when the wicked weeds appear to outnumber the good wheat? When everything around me is in shambles, I find it helpful to turn to a heavenly intercessor named Margaret Clitherow whose life was quite literally in Shambles, a neighborhood in York.
St. Margaret lived in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which was not a particularly pleasant time to be a Catholic in England. It speaks a great deal to her faith that St. Margaret converted to Catholicism during a period of increasingly brutal persecution of that religion. As historian Carlos Eire writes in his book Reformations, during this time “the Catholics of England had few choices: dissembling, exile, martyrdom, or resistance.” St. Margaret’s fate would be martyrdom. On March 25, 1586, Good Friday that year, she was pressed to death for refusing to plead to charges of harboring priests and attending Mass. As St. Margaret did not see forfeiting her Catholic faith as an option, her death was all but inevitable. However, by not entering a plea, she ensured that there could be no trial, meaning her family and friends were spared from either perjuring themselves to save her, or feeling complicit in her death by providing evidence against her.
St. Margaret’s heroic act of complete self-giving seems so outrageously beyond anything I would be brave enough to do, and yet I can’t help but feel inspired, rather than discouraged, by the witness of the “Pearl of York.” As a wife and mother like myself, St. Margaret must have died a thousand tiny deaths in the years before she gave that ultimate sacrifice. St. Margaret’s biographer Margaret Monro notes, “The high charity of her death was all of a piece with her life.” Her martyrdom, therefore, was not the beginning of her heroic virtue, but rather the culmination of countless small acts of sacrifice, offered with love. It is here, in St. Margaret’s earthly life, that we can learn a great lesson in combating the evils of our own time: leave the weeds to God and focus on the wheat.
As St. Margaret heard news of martyrdoms, imprisonments, and apostasy among her fellow Catholics, it would have been easy for her to give in to anger or self-pity. Yet Fr. Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints describes St. Margaret as being “full of wit and very merry,” despite being imprisoned herself multiple times. That collection also describes her pious habits, including starting the day with prayer, twice-weekly confessions when possible, and barefoot pilgrimages to the sites of priests’ executions. Although her husband remained a Protestant, St. Margaret instructed her children in the Catholic faith and risked her life to offer fugitive priests safe harbor in her home. Through every act of love and sacrifice, St. Margaret was cultivating a hardy crop of living wheat amid encroaching plots of deadly weeds. In the end, St. Margaret allowed herself to be crushed by the hatred of the world for love of God and his Church, trusting that death would not have the final say: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24).
Over four hundred years later, that grain of Yorkshire wheat continues to bear fruit as a heavenly friend to all who are fighting to sow truth, goodness, and beauty in a weed-choked world. When I catch myself viewing my circumstances with bitterness and debating which nasty little weed I should fight with first, I call upon my merry friend St. Margaret to set me right. Through her intercession, I have been able to embrace even the most mundane of household martyrdoms with peace and, dare I say, cheerfulness. By her example, I strive to nurture rather than destroy, to joyfully cultivate love in my own home and community, and to trust God to raise up any seeds I may plant along the way. When the weight of the world seems ready to crush me, St. Margaret reminds me not to rely upon my own pitiful efforts. Rather, I can cry out, as she did in her final moments, to the one who gives us hope and strength to bear all trials: “Jesu! Jesu! Jesu! Have mercy on me!”
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Unless otherwise noted, biographical information was drawn from St. Margaret Clitherow by Margaret T. Monro.