St. Mary Magdalene

July 22 is the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, raised by Pope Francis in 2016 from a memorial to a feast — the same rank as that of the apostles. She is the first witness of the Resurrection (John 20:11-18) and the one Christ sent to tell the others: "Go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father." St. Thomas Aquinas called her the apostolorum apostola, the apostle to the apostles, and the title has become the Church's.

The Gospels give her as the woman from whom Christ cast out seven demons (Luke 8:2), and as one of the women who stood at the foot of the Cross when the apostles had fled. Medieval Western tradition, from the time of Pope Gregory the Great's homily 33 (591), identified her with Mary of Bethany and with the penitent woman of Luke 7 — a conflation the Eastern churches never adopted. The modern Roman calendar has kept the feast on July 22, distinct from the feast of St. Martha on July 29.

The principal shrine of Mary Magdalene in the West is the basilica at Vézelay, which claimed her relics from the 11th century and was one of the great pilgrimage destinations of medieval Christendom — the starting point of the Second Crusade. The Provençal tradition, dominant since the 13th century, places her last years in a cave at La Sainte-Baume, in Provence, and her tomb at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, where the basilica holds a skull reliquary said to be hers.