Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi was born in Renaissance Florence on 2 April 1566, into the noble family of Camillo di Geri de' Pazzi and Maria Buondelmonti, and was baptized Caterina Lucrezia. From childhood she was drawn to intimate conversation with God. At about nine she learned mental prayer on the Passion from the family confessor; she practiced severe penances, received First Communion at ten, vowed virginity soon after, and experienced her first ecstasy at twelve. Educated among the nuns of San Giovanni dei Cavalieri, she refused marriage and, at sixteen, entered the Carmelite monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence in December 1582. Clothed on 30 January 1583, she took the name Maria Maddalena.
After a year as a novice she fell critically ill. On Trinity Sunday 1584 she professed her vows while seated on a cot before the altar of the Virgin. At once an intense mystical season began: for forty mornings after Communion she was rapt in ecstasy; her sisters recorded the experiences in volumes such as The Forty Days, The Colloquies, and Revelations and Intelligences. She urged the return of love for Christ's Passion, received the mystical marriage and exchange of hearts, invisible stigmata, and, according to the accounts, the inscription by Saint Augustine of the words "Et Verbum caro factum est" upon her heart. She re-enacted scenes of the Passion visibly before the community.
From 1585 to 1590 she passed through a dark night of desolation, dryness, and demonic assaults, feeling herself "like Daniel in the lions' den," experiences gathered in The Probation. In that very trial she burned for the reform of the Church after the Council of Trent. In ecstasy she dictated twelve letters to Pope Sixtus V, cardinals, and the Archbishop of Florence, insisting on the "renovation of the Church" against the tepidity of the baptized and declaring that she wrote "to be a spouse and not a servant" of God. Freed at Pentecost 1590, she devoted herself with new strength to the formation of novices, becoming their mistress and the community's reference point, continually inviting them: "Come and love Love!" She later served as subprioress and superior.
Around 1604 tuberculosis and other afflictions confined her to bed for three years of atrocious pain—headaches, paralysis, hypersensitivity, sores—which she embraced as "naked suffering" for love of God, desiring only to suffer more. Anointed on 13 May 1607, she died on 25 May at about three in the afternoon, aged forty-one, while the sisters prayed; an unusual joy filled the house. Her last recorded words included "Benedictus Deus." Her fame of holiness spread at once. Pope Urban VIII beatified her in 1626; Pope Clement IX canonized her on 28 April 1669. Her body, found incorrupt, rests today in the monastery dedicated to her in Careggi, Florence. She taught the centrality of the Trinity and the interior life as a deep love of God: she was, in the end, a woman in love with Love.
May Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi obtain for us a pure, spousal love of Christ that seeks only to return His love and to renew His Church.
