Transcript
Host (0:02)
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
Dr. Elizabeth Klein (0:20)
Welcome back to form now. I am Dr. Elizabeth Klein, here with Dr. Jessica Murdaugh. We are both professors who teach here at the Augustine Institute. And this is the second episode on a series of holy women you've never heard of. So slightly more obscure female saints from the tradition, but ones that we think are important and cool and want to talk about. So in this episode, we're going to be talking a little bit about Saint Mary of Egypt. So Saint Mary of Egypt is, as her name says, from Egypt, and she lived during the fourth century. So her approximate dates are 344 to 421. I know in our previous episode with Saint Macrena, I think I, like, buzzed over that really quick. So the previous saint we did, Saint Macrina, the Younger, was also from the fourth century, but lived a little bit earlier. So we're kind of just going through time, going to do some early saints and then a few medieval saints and then one modern saint. So this is number two in the fourth century. So have you ever heard of St. Mary of Egypt?
Dr. Jessica Murdaugh (1:15)
I have. And St. Mary has quite the story and the dramatic conversion, doesn't she?
Dr. Elizabeth Klein (1:20)
Yeah. So Dr. Barrot thought that including St. Mary of Egypt was maybe like, not quite. Quite PG enough for the formed audience. So just so you know, There are some PG13 elements of the life of St. Mary of Egypt if anyone's watching or listening to this saint's life with young kids. But she must be okay for general consumption because although Mary of Egypt is sort of not necessarily very well known in the Western church, she's a very important saint in the Eastern church. So some form watchers may know that. I go to a Byzantine church and my husband is a Byzantine rite Catholic. And so St. Mary of Egypt is actually. Her feast day is on the fifth Sunday of Lent in the Eastern calendar. So during the penitential season of Lent, all Eastern Catholics would hear the story of Saint Mary of Egypt. So she's kind of like this model of radical penance. And so she's kind of more famous in the Eastern church. But now you will know if you ever go to a Byzantine church during Lent on the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt, you know who she is. Okay, so here goes St. Mary's story. So St. Mary of Egypt was a prostitute. But more than that, it seemed like she liked being a prostitute. She enjoyed it. And so she lived a very wild dissolute lifestyle. And her story tells us that she would not accept pay sometimes because she was enjoying herself so much. And so this is kind of like the setting and then there's a kind of. There's a very interesting element of her life where she takes this almost what you would call like an anti pilgrimage. So she decides she's going to go to Jerusalem, but not in order to sort of see the holy places. This is very popular thing to do in the early church, especially around this time, would be to make great sacrifices to visit the Holy Land for spiritual purposes. But Mary of Egypt decided she was going to basically whore her way down to Jerusalem to party and have a great time and see a new place. And so there's this very interesting.