Special Guest Blogger: Saint Mary Magdalene De’Pazzi

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be my name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in....oh, hello, you caught me in the middle of my evening prayer. I will finish it later because, to be honest, i don't know the rest of it but i know bread comes into it somewhere but i really should learn the rest of it, particularly as i am a fully canonized Saint now.
I set my sights on becoming a Saint early on but by the 16th Century the Church had more Saints then you could swing a cat at so i had to come up with something really extreme to show my devotion and humility to the cause and all the easy things had gone.
A life of abstinence was a given and some of the most extreme examples, such as St. Lucy who removed her eyes for a man who wanted to marry her saying something to the effect of 'You take these, then, and I'll keep my virginity. Now go away' so i had to really up the grossness, and i think i can safely say that i achieved that.
As a nun i became known for mortifying my body as a punishment for the sins of the flesh so i would whip myself, drip hot wax on my naked body, wore a barbed metal cilice and a home-made crown of thorns and jumping naked into thorn bushes but i felt that i still needed something more so told people that i could heal their leprosy and skin diseases and i did this by licking their open sores and suck any maggots out of their infected wounds with my mouth.
While it is true that my body was covered with putrefying sores and my gums became infected and all my teeth fell out before i took to my bed until i died four years later from any number of diseases i picked up, it proved my devotion to God although it took the Church 68 years to recognise me as a fully fledged Saint.
For a moment there it looked as though all those evening borrowing tweezers to pluck thorns out of my tender areas and picking maggots out of the few teeth that i had left had been all for nothing but i finally made it onto the wall of the Vatican and got handed the patronage of bodily ills and against sexual temptation and to be fair, if you are covered in weeping sores and are as gummy as a newborn and have maggoty breath, the sexual temptation bit really isn't that difficult.