Margherita Colonna

Margherita Colonna belonged to the Colonna, one of the great baronial houses of thirteenth-century Rome, whose power rested both in the city and in the hill country of Latium, above all at Palestrina (ancient Praeneste). She was born about the middle of that century, conventionally dated around 1255, and is generally associated with Palestrina as her place of origin. Her father was Oddone Colonna. Left fatherless while still young, she grew up under the authority of her brothers, among them Giovanni Colonna, who later wrote a Latin life of his sister, and Giacomo Colonna, who was created a cardinal in 1278. In a world in which noblewomen were expected to serve dynastic politics through marriage, her early reputation was for prayer, fasting, and generosity to the poor rather than for the alliance-making role her family might have preferred.

She refused the marriages proposed for her and chose consecrated virginity. After a period of austere life in a domestic setting, she gathered companions and, with the protection of Cardinal Giacomo, established a small community of women at the church of San Silvestro on the heights above Palestrina. They lived in poverty according to Franciscan ideals, in a manner closely related to the Poor Clares, though the exact canonical status of the house during her lifetime is not always sharply distinguished in the sources. Two medieval lives—one by her brother Giovanni and another connected with a companion named Stefania—present her as devoted to prayer, penance, and care of the needy, and as seeking to imitate the poverty associated with Francis of Assisi and Clare of Assisi.

In her last years she suffered a severe and painful disease, described in the hagiographical tradition as an ulcer or cancer of the face, which she endured without abandoning her way of life. She died at Palestrina on 30 December 1280, still in her twenties, and was buried in the church of San Silvestro attached to her community. The later history of the Colonna, including their conflict with Pope Boniface VIII and the destruction of Palestrina at the end of the thirteenth century, disrupted the original monastery, yet a local cult of Margherita continued in the region and in Franciscan and family memory.

In the nineteenth century the Holy See examined this long-standing veneration. On 17 July 1847 Pope Pius IX confirmed her cult, an equipollent beatification that authorized public liturgical honour as Blessed. She has not been canonized. Her feast is kept on 30 December. She is remembered as a Roman noblewoman who turned from baronial politics to a Franciscan form of religious life, and as a local beata of Palestrina and of the Colonna lineage, without a widely attested list of official patronages.