Welcome to St. Mary Magdalen Church

FAITH WORSHIP SERVICE

St. Mary Magdalen Parish is a Catholic Community,
United in Faith and Joined in Worship
Connecting People to Christ and Living to Serve Others.

A study of the life of Saint Mary Magdalene is a source of profound encouragement.  We can only marvel to see such a poor broken sinner rising from darkness in an explosion of love for Christ and then running with the greatest confidence along the way of perfection.  She emerges from the desperate ruins of her life and becomes heaven’s champion of love.  So pleasing was she to the heart of Christ that she is chosen to announce His Resurrection to the apostles themselves… If Jesus chose her for this singular privilege it was to give us all hope.  The first apostle of the Resurrection is not a soul who had been pure and perfect from childhood but rather a poor broken sinner from whom were expelled seven demons… She is hope for sinners and thanks to her we know that though our sins be as scarlet, in Christ we can become whiter than snow.  If we follow the path of love traced out by the Apostle to the Apostles then at the moment of death we will be able to go in peace to the One who is the friend of sinners.

Even joyful meditation upon the resurrection… could never entirely erase the bitter memory of the price paid for her sins… On His risen glorious body she had noticed that there were still some trace of His wounds, as though to remind her not to forget them.  Although she was profoundly happy and at peace in the depths of her heart, her life became a bittersweet contemplation of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.  She saw this as the natural extension of her vocation to love Christ in a radical way during His mortal life.  She was powerless to repay the Lord for His goodness to her; all she could do was to continue to love Him radically through prayer.  For the remaining decades of her holy existence and amidst the activities and adventures life threw at her, she would try to spend as much time as possible contemplating the memory of Jesus with all the fervent love of her undivided heart.  This would permit her to bear the burden of earthly life, in anticipation of the life of heaven.  Eventually this love for Christ led her away from the crowds and to the lonely grotto of Sainte Baume where she could peacefully end her days in a life of perpetual pondering of the Paschal Mystery.  She passed from an earthly ecstasy to the heavenly ecstasy… Such a soul needed no more purification, for she had been dead to the world for decades.

For Magdalene, life was Christ and death was gain (Phil. 1:21)

Whom have I in heaven but thee?

And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides thee.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever…

But for me it is good to be near God. (Ps 73:25-28 RSV)

The life of Saint Mary Magdalene, which once seemed to be the greatest of failures to all of Israel, was in the eyes of all heaven a success of the highest order.  In heaven her life is remembered and honored as that of an earthly angel of love.

-Fr. Sean Davidson, Saint Mary Magdalene, Prophetess of Eucharistic Love,

Ignatius Press, pp. 197, 203-204.