Turned away three times, St. Rita of Cascia receives the Augustinian habit

CASCIA, Umbria, 1407 AD — The Augustinian nuns of Saint Mary Magdalene at Cascia have taken in a woman they refused three times. Saint Rita of Cascia is twenty-six, born Margherita in the hamlet of Roccaporena, two and a half miles west of the town. She was clothed this year in the penitential habit of the house and admitted to the novitiate. She sold the property she had and gave the money to the poor.

She came to the door with nothing left at home. Her husband, Paolo Mancini, was a man of arms. He was stabbed to death about a year ago on the road just outside Roccaporena. The place is near the Mulinaccio, the holding where the family ran a mill. She reached him while he was dying and hid the bloody shirt so that their two sons would not see it. She forgave the men who killed him and has never given their names, and it cost her the goodwill of her husband’s own family, the Mancini. Both sons, Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria, meant to avenge their father, and her words could not move them. Both fell ill and died, one after the other, inside a year. Sicardo’s Life records that by then her husband, both her sons and both her parents were dead.

The statutes of the free commune of Cascia name private citizens whose work is to make peace between feuding families, or at least to stop the killing. Her parents, Antonio and Amata, held that office, and their neighbours called them the Peacemakers of Jesus Christ. Connolly’s Life counts some two hundred notable families in the town and more than forty villages under it. Cascia has governed itself since it rebelled against papal rule at the start of the schism that has left the Church with rival claimants to the papacy. Connolly describes those years of independence as one war after another with Norcia, Leonessa, Monreale, Aquila and Cerreto.

The monastery stands inside the town walls. It is an enclosed house of nuns who follow the Rule of Saint Augustine, and its oldest part was built in the late 1200s. It takes its name from the old title of its church. The nuns keep a strict observance.

She walked the two and a half miles to Cascia and knelt at the nuns’ feet, asking to serve God inside their walls and in the penitential clothes they wore. The abbess, whose name the record does not preserve, put the request to the nuns, and the nuns refused. The ground was custom: a house meant for virgins did not take in a widow. She came back and asked a second time, and a third, and was turned away each time. Tradition gives the abbess’s answer, in the Life by Sicardo: “My dear woman, it is impossible for you to become a member of our community.”

Two other reasons are on the record. Vatican City State holds that the nuns were afraid of being pulled into the family feuds of the valley. The monastery’s own account holds that a sister of Paolo’s was already a nun in the house, and that this sister and the rest of the Mancini would not accept St. Rita’s silence about the killers’ names.

What changed was a peace. The Mancini publicly reconciled with their enemies. Vatican City State dates that reconciliation to about this year and calls it the turning point that opened the monastery to her. The Order of Saint Augustine calls it the great “miraculous deed” that gained her acceptance, and venerates her as Peacemaker on that account.

According to longstanding Catholic tradition the door was opened another way. Cavallucci’s Life, the earliest, records that she was at prayer one night when her door was struck hard and a voice called her name. She went to the window and found nobody there. St. Rita then heard words in ecstasy. Cavallucci gives them: Veni, dilecta Rita, jam enim tempus est ut ingrediaris monasterium, unde toties fuisti repulsa (Come, beloved Rita, it is time now to enter the monastery from which you have so often been turned away). At the window a third time she saw Saint John the Baptist, and outside stood Saint Augustine and Saint Nicholas of Tolentino. The crag above Roccaporena is next to impossible to climb. The three of them took her over it and into the monastery, with every door and window shut. The nuns getting up for the morning office found her there.

The nuns then met in chapter. Cavallucci records that they received her at once, without a single dissenting voice, and put on her “the habit of Mother Saint Monica”. The monastery shows the ancient Choir as the room where she was dressed. Sicardo, citing the convent archives, records that she took the name Rita di Antonio.

The accounts differ on when she gave her goods away. Sicardo has her go back to Roccaporena before she took the habit, sell what she owned and hand the money to the poor. Connolly puts the same distribution just after her reception. They agree she kept nothing.

With the habit she received the Rule of Saint Augustine. On property it is brief: “Call nothing your own, but let everything be yours in common.” A year of novitiate comes before profession.

The year is not agreed. The monastery at Cascia and Vatican City State put her entry at about 1407 AD and count forty years inside. Connolly puts it at about 1413 AD, when she was nearly thirty-two, and counts forty-four. Sicardo counts forty-six.

Her dress as a widow was coarse dark blue serge over sackcloth. Cavallucci records that she kept the anniversary of the day she was let in as a feast for the rest of her life.