Marcella of Rome

Description

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.” 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. 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.”

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.”