St. Frances of Rome

St. Frances of Rome was born in 1384 to a noble Roman family in the Trastevere quarter. Though she longed as a girl to enter a convent, she obeyed her parents and at about thirteen married Lorenzo Ponziani, a wealthy young nobleman. What might have been a reluctant match became a marriage of deep mutual devotion that lasted forty years; Frances later said that she and Lorenzo never quarreled. She fulfilled her duties as wife, mother of three children, and mistress of a great household while quietly ordering her life around prayer and the service of the poor, remarking that a married woman must sometimes leave God at the altar to find him in her housekeeping. Together with her sister-in-law Vannozza, Frances visited the poor and sick of Rome, nursed plague victims, and turned part of the Ponziani palace into a refuge and infirmary. Her charity was tested by terrible years: plague carried off two of her children, and during the wars that ravaged Rome in the early fifteenth century her husband was wounded and driven into exile, her son taken hostage, and the family property plundered. Frances bore these losses with steady trust in God and continued to feed and heal her neighbors from whatever remained. Frances was also a mystic. Accounts of her life relate extended ecstasies and visions, and most famously the tradition that for many years she enjoyed the almost continual sight of her guardian angel, whose light guided and corrected her—a tradition that later inspired Pope Pius XI to name her patroness of motorists in 1925, since she is said to have traveled safely by the angel's lantern-light. In 1425 she founded a community of noblewomen dedicated to prayer and service of the poor, attached to the Olivetan Benedictines: the Oblates of Mary, later known as the Oblates of Tor de' Specchi, who took no vows but offered themselves to God while living in the world. After Lorenzo's death in 1436, Frances entered the community she had founded and was made its superior, spending her last years in prayer and in the direction of her oblates. She died in Rome on March 9, 1440. Canonized by Pope Paul V in 1608, she rests in the church of Santa Francesca Romana beside the Roman Forum, where Romans still bring their automobiles to be blessed on her feast, March 9. She is venerated as a patroness of motorists and of widows, and as a model of holiness lived in both marriage and consecrated life.