Tradition places the birth of María Toribia at Caraquiz, a hamlet in the district of Uceda in the present province of Guadalajara, at the end of the eleventh century or the beginning of the twelfth; other villages of the Jarama valley — Cobeña, Talamanca de Jarama, Torrelaguna, Uceda itself — have long disputed the honor of being her birthplace, and each preserves memories of wonders worked on its soil. No documents fix her birth or her death; her story comes to us through the steady voice of popular tradition and through the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers who gathered it, among them Jerónimo de Quintana, who in 1629 concluded that she must have been born at Caraquiz or Uceda, and Francisco Serrano, who in 1752 recorded the testimonies given in her beatification process.
In those years the lands around Uceda had been freed from Moorish rule, but the Almoravid sultans from Morocco were fighting to recover what they had lost. In that unsettled time Isidore, a farm laborer of Madrid in the service of Iván de Vargas, fled the city to Torrelaguna. There he met María, and there they were married. Their life was the life of the poor: rigorous work in the fields, the endless household labors that fell to a medieval countrywoman, and a home so humble that its chief furniture was a pot of stew over the fire. Isidore's master is said to have sent the holy couple to care for the Vargas estate known as La Eraza at Talamanca.
God gave them one child, called by tradition Illán. It is told that the little boy fell into a deep well, and his parents, having no help but prayer, knelt and begged God together; the water rose miraculously to the mouth of the well and bore the child up unharmed. From that day, according to the same tradition, husband and wife bound themselves to continence as an offering of thanksgiving, living in separate dwellings while remaining one in charity. The child died in infancy, and María carried that sorrow as a mother who had already given her son back to God.
Her charity was famous in the village. Knowing that Isidore never came home from the road without some hungry stranger at his side, María kept the stew pot always ready. One day he brought more poor men than the pot could hold; when she told him there was nothing left, he bade her look again, and she drew out enough to feed them all. Her piety was as simple as her poverty: she loved the Lord, she loved the Blessed Virgin — invoking her especially under the Madrid titles of the Almudena and Atocha — and she loved her family. Tradition says that every night she dreamed of Our Lady crossing the river Jarama by spreading her most pure mantle upon the waters.
Isidore died in 1130, and María long outlived him. She withdrew to her native Jarama country and lived as a hermit, caring for the hermitage of La Piedad near Torrelaguna, in the territory of Uceda, given wholly to prayer and contemplation. Even in that hidden life she was not spared: some neighbors slandered her, whispering that she was guilty of adultery, and the talk reached Isidore, who resolved to see the truth for himself. Hidden, he watched his wife cross the Jarama upon her spread mantle as though upon dry ground, and was convinced of her innocence; the spot beside the river is still pointed out at Caraquiz. In her solitude she was granted heavenly lights, visions, and miracles.
She died about the year 1175 and, as she had desired, was buried in the hermitage of La Piedad. Her relics were later translated to the Franciscan convent of Torrelaguna, and in 1654, by order of King Philip IV, they were secretly exhumed — secretly, because the people of Torrelaguna would never have consented — and carried to Madrid to rest beside her husband. Since the eighteenth century, gathered together in 1769, they have been venerated in the Real Colegiata de San Isidro in Madrid, laid beside the incorrupt body of Saint Isidore. Her chief relic was her skull, kept in a reliquary and borne in procession through parched countrysides, from which the title "de la Cabeza," Mary of the Head, is derived, for again and again the heavens gave rain at her intercession.
The Church confirmed her cult by the apostolic brief of Pope Innocent XII on 11 August 1697. Her feast is kept on 9 September, a local holiday at Uceda and Torrelaguna, and she shares 15 May with her husband. She is patroness, together with Saint Isidore, of La Orotava on Tenerife and of Sabina Alta in Fasnia, where a popular pilgrimage is held in their honor each May, and she is revered by farm workers throughout the Catholic world. Since the thirteenth century the Royal Congregation of Saint Isidore has held up this married pair as proof that marriage is not merely an institution for affection or for the continuing of a family line, but a vocation through which husband and wife become saints; in Madrid her name is borne by streets and by statues on the Toledo Bridge over the Manzanares, and in 2011 three rural parishes of the Diocese of Rochester were united under the patronage of Saints Isidore and María Toribia.
May Blessed María de la Cabeza obtain for us her spirit of hidden, laborious charity, and teach us today to keep something in the pot for the next hungry stranger God sends to our door.
