St. Rita asks God to take her two sons before they kill

ROCCAPORENA, Umbria, 1406 AD — Saint Rita of Cascia has asked God to take her two sons out of this life before they can shed blood. They are Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria Mancini. Since their father was stabbed to death on the road outside this village, the two of them have thought about nothing but the men who did it. St. Rita argued with them for as long as arguing looked as though it might work. When it stopped working, she asked for their deaths instead.

In this valley the families answer a killing with a killing, and Paolo Mancini was killed to settle a score of that kind. His brothers had decided that the killing would be paid for, and Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria meant to be the ones who paid it. St. Rita knows who did it. She has forgiven the men, and she will not name them, to her sons or to anyone else. That silence has already turned her husband’s family, the Mancini, against her. She could withhold the names. She could not change what her sons meant to do.

St. Rita had been married at her parents’ wish and against her own to Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino. Two sons were born to them, close together in age. When the children came the family moved out of the village to the Mulinaccio, a property of Paolo’s a short way down the valley, where the house was larger and there was a grain mill he could run himself. Both boys grew up quarrelsome and quick to anger.

Paolo had enemies of long standing. He was quick and skilled with a dagger, and in years of quarrels he had usually beaten them. None of them would fight him alone. So they waited. This year they came at him together, on the road a short distance outside Roccaporena, near the mill, and left him bleeding from a dozen wounds.

St. Rita reached him in time to catch his death rattle and no more. What broke her was not that she had been left a widow with two boys and a mill: it was that he had died out on the road with no priest, and had gone to be judged without the last sacraments. That day she prayed for him in the words of a psalm, putting his own name, Ferdinando, where the psalm says “thy servant”. Tradition gives her the words, in Sicardo’s Life of her: “O God, enter not into judgment with thy servant Ferdinando, for in thy sight no one will be justified.”

Her husband’s body was carried up to the house, and St. Rita wept over it. Then, before her sons could see it, she hid the bloodstained shirt.

The hidden shirt made no difference. So St. Rita talked to her sons, and went on talking: she put in front of them the judgment and hell, the examples of the saints, and above all Christ dying and asking his Father to pardon the men who were killing him. Sometimes they gave way, and it lasted a moment, and then they were back where they had been.

So she prayed, and went on praying: that God would change the hearts of Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria, or else take the two of them out of this life before they killed anyone. In the first days after her husband died she had prayed for the men who killed him; she prayed for her sons now with the same ardour. Her own Order records what her prayers did: “Her words were unable to change their hearts, but her prayers to God prevented them from exacting revenge.”

She did not have to wait long. Both boys fell ill, one shortly after the other, and within about a year of their father’s killing both were dead, reconciled to God. St. Rita did not weep for them as she had wept for their father. She thanked God for having taken them out of reach of the worse death, the death of the soul.