‘The Fisherman’s Bride’

BEACON PHOTO | MICHAEL WOJCIK

‘THE FISHERMAN’S BRIDE’  Catherine Magia of Our Lady of Holy Angels Parish, Little Falls, visited her home faith community on April 22 to talk about her book of historical fiction, “The Fisherman’s Bride: the Untold Story of the Wife of Simon Peter.”

LITTLE FALLS  What do theologians and historians really know about the wife of St. Peter — if anything?

In his Gospel, Matthew tells the story of Jesus performing a miracle to heal Peter’s mother-in -law, giving evidence that the future first pope had a wife. In one in his letters, St. Paul calls Peter’s wife as a disciple of Jesus. Later, Clement of Alexandra wrote that Peter had comforted his wife, before she died as a martyr. The Church also honored their disabled daughter, Petronilla, as a saint. Still, these scraps of information could not even fill a short biographical pamphlet on the saint’s spouse.

So Catherine Magia of Our Lady of Holy Angels Parish here recently tried to paint a fuller portrait of the nameless, faceless wife of Peter, a fisherman who left his family to follow Christ, by writing a 240-page work of historical fiction, “The Fisherman’s Bride: the Untold Story of the Wife of Simon Peter.” She draws on historical and theological research, her travels to the Holy Land, prayer, her imagination and sparkling prose to draw this mysterious woman out from the shadows of history and into the light of faith. Magia writes from the wife’s perspective, giving a voice, letting readers into her life as a woman in Ancient Israel and probing the shadows — the gaps in her biography — that might point to her actual influence in the whole of Salvation History.

“Peter’s wife is one of the first martyrs in the Church and one of the first female martyrs, who even died before her husband,” said Magia, who spoke on Sunday, April 22 at Holy Angels about “The Fisherman’s Bride,” which she self-published in November 2016 and had vetted by the Catholic Writers Guild. “This is a story of love and is more about Peter and Jesus. Peter’s wife is a silent witness. In a Christ-like way, she serves others selflessly. She teaches us that history may not remember our names but what’s most important is that we do what we do with great love, because Jesus calls us to go out into the world to make people feel loved,” she said.

To make the life and times of Peter’s wife feel real, Magia spent seven years conducting research in the areas of ancient history and culture, the Gospels and other theological writings, including accounts found outside the traditional canon of Sacred Scripture. She draws on the political situation in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus, which was under the occupation of the Romans, who “pillaged and murdered” the Jewish people.

Through her research, Magia also learned more about the status of women, who were considered by societal custom to be the property of their fathers and their husbands. In addition, Magia’s poetic paragraphs capture the multi-sensory experience of the Holy Land — the smell of the sea, the feeling of the sand between the wife’s toes and the warmth of the sun on her face: a product of her many trips to the Holy Land, including Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey.

With the deft skill of a novelist, Magia also creates characters, situations and dialogue not found in history or Scripture. In the prologue, readers hear from Peter’s wife, who says, “I did not merit a footnote; indeed, I did not even have a name in these accounts. I reside in the silence, the space between the stories, a whispering in the wind. My name has become dust.”

“I was a woman in love with a man named Simon. I was married to the martyr, the proverbial rock, the first pope, when he was only a man. A part of Simon Peter belonged to me,” Magia writes as the wife. “There was also another: Jesus. When he called to me, he awakened something beyond the binds of mortality, beyond flesh and skin. It was the memory of light, an exquisite and perfect love embedded within the soul. He taught me to discover the raw material of divinity within the self. He taught that sin splinters the soul, and that we are broken, shards of our own darkness weighing us down,” she writes.

In the book’s first chapter, readers meet her mother, and her father, also a fisherman. Later, Simon Peter, the father’s less-than-well-off employee, and the daughter elope, inflaming her father, who disowns her, after she ran away from an arranged marriage with another man. This is one of many situations that Magia chalks up to conjecture.

“I imagine the emotions of many of the characters in the book so modern Catholics can relate. I also imagine the way Jesus could have acted around the wife, when she was a disciple — respecting her as an equal to men, which was not the custom of the time,” said Magia, who also writes from the perspective of the wife about such stories in Scripture as Jesus naming Peter as the leader of his Church and Peters’ denial of Jesus three times. Her accounts shed light on Peter — his charisma as a leader and his faults, such as trying to act like the “big man” among the disciples — and Jesus — his endless compassion and saving power as the Messiah.

Magia’s spiritual and literary journey in writing “The Fisherman’s Bride” started more than seven years ago when she endured three serious difficulties, all within a six-month period: a major surgery, a broken engagement and sudden unemployment. While on retreat, she read a passage in Scripture that mentioned Peter’s wife. Instantly, she was intrigued and inspired to learn more about the wife.

Today, Magia, a Brooklyn-born Vietnamese-American young woman, lives and works in Boston as an associate director of marketing research in the development of new medications for cancer for a major pharmaceutical corporation. She returns to northern New Jersey often to visit family and Holy Angels, where she first started worshipping as an eight-year-old. Magia has been writing a second book about the healing ministries of Jesus, set for publication on Oct. 3, and another book about Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection and the revolution by the Jews against the Romans afterwards — the final part of a trilogy.

“The Fisherman’s Bride” has won several awards, including the 2017 Winner of the New England Book Festival for spirituality and religious. The Midwest Book Review praised the book, calling it “a powerfully written, compelling account of the impact of Jesus on all layers of society, narrated from the eyes of an outsider to his central group of believers who uses the ordinary life experiences of an unnamed wife to chronicle an extraordinary journey of love, faith and miracles.”

After Magia’s talk on April 22, Marie Mead, a Holy Angels’ parishioner who has known the author for many years, praised “The Fisherman’s Bride” for its “sense of authenticity.”

“Catherine did deep and extensive research of the life and plight of women of that time which includes Peter’s wife,” Mead said.

[“The Fisherman’s Bride” is $14.99 for paperback and $3.99 for electronic copy, which is on sale for 99 cents until May 20. To order the book, visit booksellers such as Amazon.com at the direct link, http://myBook.to/FishermansBride, or www.catherinemagia.com]