(A.D. 410.)
[Roman Martyrology. Authority: the Letters of S. Jerome.]
Marcella, a young widow, whose name alone is enough to recall the best
days of the Roman republic, and whose rare beauty, enhanced by the long
and illustrious line of her ancestors, drew around her numerous suitors,
rejected the suit of Cerealtis, the consul, and resolved to imitate the
lives of the ascetics of the East. Afterwards, when S. Jerome came to
Rome to renew the instructions and narratives of those holy men by
adding to them the living commentary of his own life, Marcella, with her
mother Albinia, and her sister Asella, placed herself at the head of
that select number of illustrious matrons who took him as their guide
and oracle. She astonished the holy doctor by her knowledge of the
Divine Scriptures; she fatigued him by her thirst always to know more of
them than he could teach her; she made him afraid to find in her a judge
rather than a disciple. In her palace on Mount Aventine, she collected,
under the presidency of Jerome, the most pious among the noble ladies,
for mutual strength and enlightenment. After having thus first given to
Rome the true model of a Christian widow, she passed the last thirty
years of her life in her suburban villa transformed into a monastery.
The Goths under Alaric plundered Rome in 410. S. Marcella was scourged
by them to deliver up her treasures, which however she had long before
distributed among the poor. All the while she was in anguish of soul for
her dear spiritual child Principia, and falling at the feet of the cruel
soldiers, she tearfully implored them to spare her insult. They
conducted them both to the Church of S. Paul, to which Alaric had
granted the right of sanctuary, and suffered the beautiful young nun
Principia to remain unmolested. S. Marcella did not survive this long,
but died peacefully in the arms of Principia, about the end of August,
410, but her name occurs in the Roman Martyrology on Jan. 31st.
[Illustration: S. MARCELLA.
After an Engraving of the Seventeenth Century.
Jan. 31.]