St. Rita of Cascia

Saint Rita of Cascia (1381-1457) is one of the most beloved saints of Italy, invoked around the world as the Saint of the Impossible. Born Margherita Lotti in 1381 in the small village of Roccaporena near Cascia in the Umbrian hills, she desired from girlhood to enter religious life, but in obedience to her parents she was married in her teens to Paolo Mancini, a man remembered in the accounts of her life as harsh and violent. For some eighteen years Rita bore his temper with patience and prayer, and tradition holds that her gentleness eventually softened him. Her married life ended in tragedy when Paolo was murdered in one of the vendettas that plagued the region. Rita publicly forgave his killers and pleaded with her two sons not to seek revenge; hagiographical accounts relate that she prayed that her sons might die rather than commit the mortal sin of murder, and both died of illness soon after, reconciled to God. Left alone, she worked to make peace between the feuding families, and this reconciliation opened the way for her to enter the Augustinian monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene in Cascia, which had at first refused her as a widow. Tradition tells that she was brought into the enclosed convent at night through the intercession of her patron saints. Rita lived some forty years as an Augustinian nun, devoted to prayer, penance, and meditation on the Passion of Christ. In 1442, while praying before an image of the crucified Lord, she received a wound on her forehead as though pierced by a thorn from Christ's crown, a mark of mystical union with his sufferings that she bore for the remaining fifteen years of her life. A cherished tradition recounts that in her final winter she asked for a rose from her old garden at Roccaporena, and a single rose was found blooming in the snow; roses are blessed on her feast to this day. Rita died on May 22, 1457, and devotion to her spread rapidly through Umbria and beyond. She was beatified in 1626 by Pope Urban VIII and canonized in 1900 by Pope Leo XIII. Her body is venerated in the Basilica of Saint Rita at Cascia, one of Italy's major pilgrimage destinations, and her birthplace at Roccaporena also welcomes pilgrims. Her feast is celebrated on May 22. Because her life embraced nearly every state, wife, mother, widow, and nun, and because of the seemingly hopeless situations she endured with faith, she is honored as patroness of impossible and desperate causes, of abused wives, and of those suffering in difficult marriages.