Who was St. Mary Magdalene?
Start with what the Gospels say, because a great deal has been said about her that they do not. Luke names her among the women who traveled with Jesus and the Twelve: "Mary who is called Magdalen, out of whom seven devils were gone forth" (Luke 8:2), one of the "many others who ministered unto him of their substance" (Luke 8:3). Mark says Jesus "had cast seven devils" out of her (Mark 16:9). Her name, the Catholic Encyclopedia says, comes either from Magdala, near Tiberias, or from a Talmudic expression. Franciscan Media reads the seven demons as a severe affliction, not an immoral life.
She followed him from Galilee to the cross: "there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalen" (John 19:25). Then comes the scene the Church reads at her Mass. She reaches the tomb "early, when it was yet dark" (John 20:1), finds it empty and runs for Peter. "But Mary stood at the sepulchre without, weeping" (John 20:11). A man she takes for the gardener asks her why. "Jesus saith to her: Mary. She turning, saith to him: Rabboni (which is to say, Master)" (John 20:16). He sends her to his brothers, and "Mary Magdalen cometh, and telleth the disciples: I have seen the Lord" (John 20:18). The Catholic Encyclopedia calls her "the first recorded witness of the Resurrection."
The Gospels never say she was a prostitute. The woman who washed Jesus' feet with her tears in the house of Simon the Pharisee is "a woman that was in the city, a sinner" (Luke 7:37), and Luke does not name her. Western tradition, "especially since the time of Gregory the Great," Archbishop Arthur Roche wrote in 2016, made Mary Magdalene, that woman and Mary of Bethany "one and the same person." Here the sources disagree. The Greek Fathers, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, kept the three apart. That Encyclopedia's own 1910 article, by Hugh Pope, grants that the identity "is impossible to demonstrate" and still argues that "it was one and the same woman." Franciscan Media says most Scripture scholars reject the link, and the liturgy has followed them: after Vatican II the memorial of July 22 was kept "solely to Mary of Magdala," and her Mass, which in the 1962 Missal read Luke 7, now reads John 20.
Of her later life Scripture says nothing. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports two traditions that cannot both be true: the Greek Church held that she died at Ephesus, and a French tradition has her doing penance for thirty years at La Sainte-Baume in Provence and dying at Aix. Franciscan Media gives her death as around the year 63.
Why Catholics pray to St. Mary Magdalene for forgiveness and grief
No pope has declared her patron of anything. Franciscan Media lists her as patron of penitents and perfumers; the patronage is traditional, and it rests on two things. The first is that Jesus freed her. Whatever the seven devils were, she had been held by something and then was not. The second is the centuries in which the West prayed to her as the forgiven sinner of Luke 7, the woman of whom Jesus said, "Many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much" (Luke 7:47). That identification is not Scripture, but the devotion it produced is real, and St. Gregory the Great, from whose time the West read the three women as one, called her a "witness of Divine Mercy."
Pope Francis raised her feast, Archbishop Roche wrote, "precisely in the context of the Jubilee of Mercy." The new preface for her Mass praises the Father "whose mercy is no less than your power." That is the sentence a person ashamed of the past needs: the mercy is not smaller than the thing you did.
Grief is the other reason. She stood at a tomb before dawn, weeping, because she could not find the one she loved. Christ, Roche wrote, "showed special consideration and mercy to this woman who showed her love for Christ by seeking him in her anguish and suffering in the garden," and let himself be known as her Master, "thus transforming her tears into paschal joy." He said her name. A Catholic who has buried a husband, a mother or a child asks her prayers because she has stood exactly there.
How to pray to St. Mary Magdalene
Her feast is July 22, and since 2016 it is a Feast on the General Roman Calendar, the rank the apostles have. The nine days before it, July 13 to 21, are the natural time for a novena; any day will do. Read John 20:1-2 and 11-18, the Gospel of her feast, slowly, and put yourself in the garden.
Then pair the prayer with what the Church gives you. If the weight is sin, go to Confession; the forgiveness you ask her to pray for is given there, in words you can hear. If the weight is grief, go to Mass, have a Mass offered for the person you lost, and let the Church's funeral and mourning prayers carry you when you cannot pray. Grief that has stopped letting you eat, sleep or want to live is a medical matter as well as a spiritual one: see a doctor, and if you are in danger tonight call a crisis line or emergency services. Her prayer accompanies that help and never replaces it. Say the prayer below once, slowly, and then tell her in your own words what happened.
Why Pope Francis made her day a Feast
On June 3, 2016, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, the Congregation for Divine Worship issued a decree, signed by Cardinal Robert Sarah and Archbishop Roche, raising her July 22 celebration from an obligatory memorial to a Feast. The decree says that Pope Francis so decided; Roche's accompanying article says it was done "by the express wish of the Holy Father." The date and the Mass texts stayed the same, and a proper preface was added under the title "de apostolorum apostola." St. Thomas Aquinas, and before him a twelfth-century Life attributed to Rabanus Maurus, called her the apostle of the apostles, Roche explained, "because she announces to the apostles what in turn they will announce to the whole world." So it was right, he wrote, that her day should have "the same rank of Feast as that given to the celebration of the Apostles."