St. Mary Magdalene and the sale of bodies and souls

Did Mary of Magdala, who is celebrated by the Church on July 22nd, sell her body as a prostitute before she sold her soul to the devil?

We don’t have a lot of details about the life of Saint Mary Magdalene. We do know from the Gospels that she was exorcised by seven demons by our Lord.¹ We know that her name—Mary of Magdala—probably means that she came from a town in Israel now called Migdal, which is located on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. We know that she was the first public witness to the Resurrection.² Over the centuries, many Christians have also assumed that she was the sinful woman who wiped Jesus’s feet with her hair, the woman whose mere presence scandalized the Pharisees with whom Jesus was eating dinner.

Although we don’t have Scriptural certainty that Mary Magdalene was that sinful woman at the dinner party described in Luke 7:36-50, we can make some reasonable assumptions about her character. For example, it’s hard to believe that she was a pious Jewish girl, a wife, a wealthy matron, or even just an upstanding member of the community. Otherwise, the Gospel writers would surely have told us so. It would have been much easier to explain the Resurrection of Jesus to other Jews if the first witness was a respectable woman.

That’s why many Catholics have assumed that Mary Magdalene was indeed that sinful, unnamed woman, that is, a woman who had sexual relations with men for pay. Despite Hollywood’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, our basic human nature inherently knows that such behavior is wrong. A child may grow up wanting to be a firefighter or a doctor or a teacher, but no child wants to grow up selling his or her body to others.

That’s what makes the recent movie Sound of Freedom so powerful. Although the makers of that movie were careful to omit graphic scenes, they included plenty of vivid images designed to make viewers think more deeply about the reality of sex trafficking. There is a particularly poignant scene of a scared little girl, the young heroine of the film, as she sits on a bed in a dreary hotel. The drunken man who enters the hotel room to abuse her never even notices the profound sadness in her eyes, but we, the audience, cannot avoid seeing it.

The producers of Sound of Freedom focused their story on one particularly vile aspect of the world trade in human beings: child sex trafficking in countries located not too far from our own. But human trafficking affects people of all ages, all over the world. Every man, woman, and child forced into prostitution surely experiences the same sadness shown by that little girl, pain that no quantity of illegal drugs can take away. This film gives a voice to all of these trafficked people and their trauma.

But the Catholic Church has recognized the tragedy of sex trafficking from the start.

During the early centuries of the Church, Roman authorities mocked consecrated virginity by forcing Christian women into brothels. It is unlikely that all of them escaped rape by a miracle, as did Saint Agatha of Sicily. Some Christians were brave enough to speak against the mistreatment of consecrated virgins, as did Saint Aedesius, who confronted an Egyptian judge in the fourth century. The judge was unmoved by his argument for compassion and justice, and Aedesius died a martyr.

Over the centuries, Catholics have established homes for women and girls who have been forced into lives of prostitution, along with those who might be easy prey for such a choice because they were orphans, unmarried mothers, or living in poverty. The famous Saint Faustina Kowalska, for example, was a religious sister at a home for “troubled” young women;³ obviously, the troubles these young women faced in the 1930s were not cell phone addiction and eating disorders. Homes like these provided vulnerable women with a place to live and food to eat, but they also taught them skills so they could earn an honest living.

How many women have turned to Jesus Christ and found the strength they needed to leave such a life? Only God knows. But some of these women have become saints.

Saint Afra was a former prostitute who had not yet been baptized when the Roman empire renewed its persecution of Christians in the year 304. She refused to give up her faith and died a martyr in Augsburg, Germany.

In the fifth century, a Catholic priest discovered a woman who was living in the Palestinian desert. The woman, whose name was Mary, eventually told him her life story. She explained that she had been born in Egypt but that she had run away from home as a rebellious teenager. She had spent years living as a singer and a prostitute (which were virtually the same thing at the time) in the great city of Alexandria. At one point, she decided to travel to the Holy Land, perhaps for pious reasons or perhaps for the sake of a change in her clientele. While trying to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, she received a moment of grace, recognized the depths of her sins, and repented. According to tradition, the Blessed Mother appeared to Mary and pointed her toward the desert. Mary obediently spent the rest of her life there, doing penance for her sins. She has been known ever since as Saint Mary of Egypt.

As the Second Vatican Council reminds us, “Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity.”⁴ Our bodies are not something that we carry around like coats or caps; they are part of who we are. That’s why it’s simply wrong for a man to try to buy or sell a woman to use for his personal pleasure.⁵ That’s also why it has been easy for Catholics to imagine that the woman who was exorcised of seven demons needed to be exorcised of bodily sins as well.

Only God knows what sins Mary of Magdala committed which led to her to be possessed by demons. But whatever those sins were, our Lord paid the price to redeem her, just as He did for the rest of us. When we think of the tragedy of children and adults being bought and sold in the next country or in the next room, we can remember the price that He paid. And we can look for ways to lead even one of God’s children to freedom.

• If this problem seems too overwhelming for you to make a difference, see what these secular and Catholic organizations are doing to address the problem of human trafficking.

Endnotes:

Catholic World Report