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The saints

St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi

A Florentine noblewoman and Carmelite mystic who went through five years of spiritual darkness.

Feast: 25 May · 1566 to 1607 · Reformation and missions · Florence, Italy

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A plain typographic plate: St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, with the feast day.

Typographic plate by Stone & Incense: we found no public-domain image of this saint we could verify.

Home / The saints / St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi

The Carmel of Florence

Catherine de’ Pazzi was from one of the great families of Florence, and joined the Carmelites as a young woman.1

Her sisters wrote down what she said in prayer and ecstasy.1

Then for five years she felt nothing but dryness and temptation.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers her as a Carmelite mystic of Florence.

01St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi

Not to die, but to suffer

She came through it, and spent her last years in painful illness, saying she wanted not to die, but to suffer for love.1

Live it this week

Pray when you feel nothing

Mary Magdalene went five years feeling nothing in prayer, and kept praying. Pray ten minutes every day this week at a set time, whether you feel anything or not.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.