The Magdalene case is the clearest instance of a woman's standing in Christianity being lost by administrative accident and slowly reclaimed. The gospels agree that she was at the crucifixion and at the tomb, and John has the risen Christ commission her to tell the others, which is why the medieval Latin phrase apostolorum apostola existed at all. But in 591 Gregory the Great preached a homily identifying her with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7 and with Mary of Bethany, and the West ran with it for fourteen hundred years: the penitent prostitute of the paintings, the patron of reformed women, the name given to the Magdalene laundries in Ireland where women were confined into the 1990s. The Eastern churches never made the conflation and always called her equal to the apostles. Rome separated the figures in the 1969 calendar reform and in 2016 raised her 22 July commemoration from memorial to feast, the same rank as the apostles, with the old title formally restored.