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.

Hi, and welcome to Form Now. I'm Taylor Kemp, and with me is Dr. Elizabeth Klein, a professor here at the Graduate School of Theology.

Would you like to introduce what you teach, Dr. Klein?

I teach theology.

You teach all kinds of things, actually.

I wrote my dissertation on St. Augustine, so I guess that's my area of expertise, early Christianity, that's what we're going to be talking about today. Yes. And right now I teach the class on the creed, which is the first pillar of the catechism. Very nice. So today, as you alluded to, we were talking about someone from the early church, St. Marcella. Would you like to share a personal anecdote about St. Marcella? So St. Marcella of Rome is an early Christian saint, and I named my daughter after St. Marcella. So Taylor asked me if there were any saints in January that I wanted to talk about. So I thought, you know, maybe we would talk about St. Marcella, and she's not as well known. So it's fun to share. And it was a tremendous blessing for me because I did not know very much about St.

Marcella, but Dr. Klein, you had this great book, Lives of Roman Christian Women, produced by Penguin Classics, and in it is a somewhat lengthy letter from St. Jerome about St. Marcella.

So I had the great privilege of learning about her, and she's really amazing.

Yeah, so St. Jerome had a number of, like, women correspondents, even got driven out of Rome

because of rumors about how many women correspondents he had. So Jerome, you know, crotchy Jerome.

So a number of Jerome's letters are also written to Marcella. And then in this lengthy letter,

he writes about Marcella to a kind of pupil or fellow monastic named Principia about her,

praising her, praising her life after she died. And it's really moving. I mean, you could tell St. Jerome

really loved St. Marcella. So just a little background on her.

She was born in 325, which was the Council of Nicaa, and then died soon after the Sack of Rome in 410.

She was widowed after just seven months of marriage and never remarried and was committed to a very different type of life,

which we will talk about.

Those are the basic details.

Yeah.

So the fact that she was widowed after seven months, this is a common thing that happens in a lot of these lives of early Christian women is that they're widowed at a young age.

...