Marcella of Rome

Saint Marcella
Saint Marcella pleading with the Goths
Born	325 Rome, Italia, Roman Empire
Died	410 Rome, Italia, Western Roman Empire
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church Orthodox Church[1] Anglican Communion
Feast	January 31

Marcella (325–410) is a saint in the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. She was a Christian ascetic in the Byzantine Era.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church reports similarly, "She suffered bodily ill-treatment at the hands of the Goths when they captured Rome in 410 and died from its effects."^[2] She is commemorated on 31 January.

She came from a noble family who lived in a palace on the Aventine Hill. Growing up in Rome, she was influenced by her pious mother, Albina, an educated woman of wealth and benevolence. Marcella was but a child when the exiled bishop Athanasius of Alexandria visited Rome.^[3] According to Christine Schenk CSJ, she "gathered women to study Scripture and pray in her aristocratic home on the Aventine Hill fully 40 years before Jerome arrived in Rome. After Jerome returned to Jerusalem, Rome’s priests would consult Marcella for help in clarifying biblical texts. She also engaged in public debate over the Originist controversy."^[4][5]

After her husband's early death, Marcella decided to devote the rest of her life to charity, prayer, and mortification of the flesh. According to Butler, "Having lost her husband in the seventh month of her marriage, she rejected the suit of Cerealis the consul, uncle of Gallus Cæsar, and resolved to imitate the lives of the ascetics of the East. She abstained from wine and flesh, employed all her time in pious reading, prayer, and visiting the churches of the apostles and martyrs, and never spoke with any man alone."^[6]

Pammachius, a close friend and correspondent of Jerome's, was her cousin.^[7] He was also a cousin of Paula of Rome.^[8] Pammachius married Paula's second daughter, Paulina.^[9] Marcella's palatial home became a center of Christian activity. She and her mother Albina formed a group of religious women in their home, inspired by eastern monks. Paula's third daughter, Eustochium, was part of this group. The house is supposed to have stood close to the present site of Santa Sabina and became a refuge for weary pilgrims and for the poor. An associate of Marcella named Lea was also a wealthy widow and supported the house run by Marcella.^[10]

In 382, Pope Damasus I called Jerome to Rome, where he became the pope's confidential secretary. Damasus arranged lodging for him at Marcella’s hospitality house. Jerome gave readings and lectures to Marcella's community and friends.^[3] It was at the home of Marcella that Jerome first met Paula.

When Paula and her daughter Eustochium left Rome for the Holy Land, they asked Marcella to join them, but she chose to remain in Rome to tend to her growing community. She and her student Principia moved from the palace to a smaller house on the Aventine.^[11]

When the Goths invaded in 410, she was brutalized. Convinced that she had hidden treasure, which she had long before distributed among the poor, she was scourged and beaten with cudgels. Other soldiers arrived who had "some reverence for holy things". They escorted Marcella and Principia to the church of St. Paul,--one of those which had been named by Alaric as a sanctuary for all who chose to take advantage of it. Exhausted and injured, Marcella died of her wounds shortly thereafter.^[11]

In modern collections of Jerome's letters, we find many letters to Marcella (Letters 23, 25, 26, 29, 34, 127). Almost a third of all the extant letters from Jerome were addressed to women. Thomas Lawler, notes, “Marcella is by far the woman most frequently addressed, quite likely because of her leading position in that celebrated circle of religious-minded women that met at her house on the Aventine.”^[12] Most of what we know about Marcella is from the letters of Jerome, most famously his letter 127 to Principia.^[13] It was written on the occasion of Marcella's death, paying tribute to her life and consoling her beloved student. In it, he says the following about his relationship with Marcella:

As in those days my name was held in some renown as that of a student of the Scriptures, she never came to see me without asking me some questions about them, nor would she rest content at once, but on the contrary would dispute them; this, however, was not for the sake of argument, but to learn by questioning the answers to such objections might, as she saw, be raised. How much virtue and intellect, how much holiness and purity I found in her I am afraid to say, both lest I may exceed the bounds of men's belief and lest I may increase your sorrow by reminding you of the blessings you have lost. This only will I say, that whatever I had gathered together by long study, and by constant meditation made part of my nature, she tasted, she learned and made her own.^[14]

Perhaps because she did not live long after being scourged, she was included in the Roman Martyrology. Her feast day in the west is January 31. Jerome's To Principia is a biography of her life.

Marcella of Rome is honored with a Lesser Feast on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America^[15] on January 31.^[16]

The artwork The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago features a place setting for Marcella.^[17]

• Kraemer, Ross S., ed. Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics: A Sourcebook on Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World. 1988; rev. ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Wright, F. A., trans. Jerome: Select Letters. 1933; reprint ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.