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The Catholic Defender: St. Margaret of Antioch


According to tradion, Saint Margaret was an early Christian convert who was tortured and put in jail when she refused to renounce her Christian beliefs. While in jail, she prayed to God to show her the enemy who was fighting her, and a great dragon appeared and swallowed her whole.


While Western iconography typically depicts St. Margaret emerging from the dragon, Eastern Byzantine iconography tends to focus on her battle with the demon in her cell and depicts her grabbing him by his hair and swinging a copper hammer at his face. Reliquary Bust of Saint Margaret of Antioch.


The best known miracle associated with St Margaret was the preservation of her gospel book which had fallen into a river, and her shrine at Dunfermline was the scene of several miracles of healing.


Margaret was an incredibly pious Catholic. One of her most significant achievements was to establish a crossing point on the Firth of Forth for pilgrims on their way to St Andrew's Cathedral. Boats worked the “Queen's Ferry” from the 11th century all the way through to 1964, when the Forth Road Bridge was opened.


Her designation as patron saint of expectant mothers (particularly in difficult labour) and her emblem, a dragon, are based on one of her trials: Satan, disguised as a dragon, swallowed Margaret; his stomach, however, soon rejecting her, opened, and let her out unharmed.


Margaret of Antioch. Virgin and martyr whose story is know to us from a tradition, but no contemporary history know available. Her father was a pagan priest in Pisidian Antioch, Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Her mother died when Margaret was an infant, and the girl was raised by a Christian woman.


In 1250, the year of her canonization, her body and that of her husband were exhumed and placed in a new shrine in the Abbey. In 1560, Mary, Queen of Scots had Margaret's head removed to Edinburgh Castle as a relic to assist her in childbirth.


Saint Margaret grew in popularity throughout the Middle Ages – especially in England – where her image and scenes of her life adorn the walls of over 250 churches. She was reputed to have offered powerful indulgences to anyone who wrote or read her life story – or who invoked her intercession.


Saint Margaret of Antioch was the patron of childbirth and pregnant women. The Latin Catholic church honors her with a feast day on July 20th.


Margaret is often depicted in art carrying the Black Cross as she goes about her works of mercy. In 1346, David II took the Black Cross into battle with him, and it fell into English hands. For many years, it was exposed for veneration in Durham Cathedral, but it disappeared during the Reformation.


O God, grant us through the intercession of Thy holy virgin and martyr Margaret, undauntedly to confess the Faith, carefully to observe the chastity of our state of life, and to overcome the temptations of the world, the devil, and the flesh, and thereby escape the punishments of eternal damnation. Amen.

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