Mary Magdalene Feast Day: July 22, Apostle to the Apostles

Mary of Magdala came to the tomb before daylight, carrying spices for a body she expected to anoint, and instead heard her own name spoken by a voice she thought silenced forever. Rabboni, she answered him, teacher. From that exchange in a garden outside Jerusalem, the whole of Christian memory of her unfolds: the woman who stood at the cross when the men had scattered, who kept vigil at the tomb, and who ran to tell the others what she had seen before any of them believed her.

When Is the Feast of Mary Magdalene Kept

The feast of Mary Magdalene falls on July 22 in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran calendars, and on the same calendar date in the Eastern Orthodox Church, where she is honored as Myrrhbearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles. Because many Orthodox churches still follow the Julian calendar for fixed feasts, that July 22 falls on August 4 by the civil Gregorian reckoning, one day kept under two clocks, the same woman remembered in both.

In Catholic parishes the feast is marked with Mass readings from the Gospel of John, the garden scene where Christ speaks her name and she turns. Orthodox churches sing hymns that call her first among the myrrh-bearing women, the ones who came at dawn with spices and left as heralds. In Orthodox iconography she is often shown holding a red egg, recalling a persistent legend that she carried one before the Roman emperor Tiberius, greeting him with the words Christ is risen, the origin, tradition holds, of the red eggs still exchanged at Pascha.

Why Is She Called the Apostle to the Apostles

Mary Magdalene is called Apostle to the Apostles because the risen Christ sent her, and no one else, to carry the news of his Resurrection to the eleven who would become the Church's first witnesses. The title is not a modern flourish. Hippolytus of Rome used a version of it in the third century, and Thomas Aquinas gave it its lasting Latin form, apostola apostolorum, the one who announced the gospel to those who would announce it to the world.

What earns her the title is not office but constancy. Mary Magdalene stood at the cross with the mother of Jesus and the beloved disciple while most of the Twelve had fled or gone into hiding. She followed the body to the tomb. She returned before sunrise to finish what grief had interrupted, and she was still standing there, weeping, when he called her by name. In 2016 Pope Francis raised her day from a memorial to a feast, the same liturgical rank held by the apostles' own days, a formal recognition of a title the Church had already been giving her for seventeen hundred years.

Is Mary Magdalene the Same as Mary of Bethany or the Sinful Woman of Luke 7

No. The Gospels present Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the unnamed sinful woman who anoints Jesus' feet in Luke 7 as three distinct figures, though they were merged into one composite figure for centuries in Western devotion. That conflation traces to a homily preached by Pope Gregory the Great in 591, and it shaped a thousand years of painting, poetry, and preaching before the Roman calendar's 1969 revision formally separated the readings and the Church distinguished the three again.

The detail that most invited confusion, that Mary Magdalene had been delivered of seven demons, is often misread as evidence of some hidden sin. Luke's Gospel describes an exorcism, not a moral history, the number seven signaling completeness of affliction and completeness of healing, not scandal. Nothing in the canonical Gospels names her a prostitute. The association is a legacy of Gregory's sermon and centuries of art built upon it, not a Gospel fact, and the woman it obscures was, in the Gospel record, a delivered woman who became the steadiest disciple at the cross.

How to Keep Her Feast, and What to Read

The feast of Mary Magdalene is best kept the way the Gospel keeps her: by returning to the scene at the tomb and letting it be read slowly, aloud if possible, and by carrying her constancy into the day rather than treating July 22 as a date to note and move past. Many parishes offer a novena in the days before, private prayers asking her intercession for penitents, for contemplatives, for those in the ministry of proclaiming what they have seen. She is invoked as patroness of penitents and contemplative religious, and, through older guild tradition tied to her ointment jar, of perfumers and hairdressers as well.

For a fuller sitting with her, The Apostle to the Apostles: The Life of Mary Magdalene tells her story across three volumes, beginning with the free Invitation volume for anyone starting cold. The Woman the Morning Found opens before the world knew her name; She Did Not Turn Away carries her through the cross, the tomb, and the garden; and The Name That Would Not Be Forgotten follows what she left the Church after. Readers wanting every life the house keeps, not only hers, will find the whole shelf through membership.