Poor Mary Magdalene

From Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:

"Well, you must excuse me there. You know to me all women are divided into two classes…at least no…truer to say: there are women and there are…I've never seen exquisite fallen beings, and I never shall see them, but such creatures as that painted Frenchwoman at the counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind, and all fallen women are the same." "But the Magdalen?" "Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He had known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words are the only ones remembered. However, I'm not saying so much what I think, as what I feel. I have a loathing for fallen women. You're afraid of spiders, and I of these vermin. Most likely you've not made a study of spiders and don't know their character; and so it is with me."

Note:

The pope who wrongly identified Mary Magdalene as a prostitute was Pope Gregory I (also known as Gregory the Great) in the year 591 A.D. 

In an Easter homily, he conflated Mary Magdalene with two other unnamed biblical women: the "sinful woman" who anointed Jesus’s feet in Luke 7, and Mary of Bethany. 

This conflation turned Mary Magdalene's public reputation from an influential disciple and apostle into a penitent prostitute—a misconception that persisted for over 1,400 years. While the mistake became deeply embedded in Western Christian art and culture, the Eastern Orthodox Church never accepted this association.