Three saints lead St. Rita into the locked convent of Cascia

CASCIA, Umbria, 1407 AD — Saint Rita of Cascia asked the Augustinian nuns of Saint Mary Magdalene at Cascia this year to take her in as one of them, and they refused her. She went home to Roccaporena, came back, and was refused again, and then a third time. She came to them a widow whose two sons were dead as well.

St. Rita wanted a place inside the enclosure for the rest of her life; the nuns could keep her out, and they did. The abbess, the superior of the house, put the request to all the nuns, and they voted on it. Their stated reason was custom: the house was meant for virgins, and it did not take widows. Most of the nuns said no widow had been admitted since the house was founded, and that admitting one now would damage its good name, even though they knew her life to be blameless and her holiness real.

St. Rita had wanted this life since she was a girl. She told her parents she meant to become a nun. Her parents were old, and they wept as they begged St. Rita to stay with them. They arranged a marriage for her instead. Around 1406 AD her husband, Paolo, was ambushed and killed near Roccaporena in a vendetta between the valley’s families. St. Rita forgave the killers and would never say who they were, and Paolo’s family, the Mancini, held it against her. When Paolo’s brothers set out to avenge him, she prayed that God would take her two sons before they shed blood, and both boys fell ill and died, one soon after the other.

As a widow, St. Rita dressed in coarse dark blue serge, with a rough cloak in the worst of the winter and sackcloth underneath. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, she prayed to Jesus many times in those months: “O my dear Lord and Master. Since I am free now, when will the time come, when you will admit me into the haven of religion?”

One day this year she went into Cascia, and into the nuns’ church while Mass was being said. She heard Christ’s words from St. John’s Gospel, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The words stayed in her mind and filled her with love for Jesus. She went to the nuns, threw herself at their feet, and asked in plain words to serve God inside their walls, in the habit they wore. The nuns voted her down.

She took the refusal quietly and put it down to her own unworthiness. She walked the two and a half miles back to Roccaporena and kept to her prayers more faithfully than before. Then she came back to Cascia and asked again, and was refused a second time. The more often the nuns refused her, the more she prayed. She asked her three patron saints, St. John the Baptist, St. Augustine and St. Nicholas of Tolentino, to plead with God for her.

At the third asking she begged the nuns to take her even as a servant, because she did not think she was worthy to live among the brides of Christ. They refused her again. Tradition keeps the words the abbess said to her: “My dear woman, it is impossible for you to become a member of our community.” The abbess told her to stop asking. St. Rita went home to Roccaporena and accepted that the time God had set for her had not yet come.

Around this time Paolo’s family made peace in public with the families of the men who had killed him. The Order of Saint Augustine credits St. Rita with the reconciliation. It calls the peace “the great ‘miraculous deed’ that gained her acceptance into the convent.”

According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, she was praying late one night at home when she heard hard knocking at her door and a voice calling, “Rita, Rita.” She ran to the window and saw no one. She went back to her prayers and heard the voice again. Then, in ecstasy, she heard it say clearly: “Come, beloved Rita, for now it is time that you enter the monastery from which you have so often been turned away.” St. Rita went to the window a third time and saw St. John the Baptist standing at the door. She followed him out.

St. John the Baptist led her to the Schioppo, the sheer crag above the village, and his path went up it. St. Rita stopped at its foot. The rock was so steep that no one would dare to climb it even by day. Then St. Augustine and St. Nicholas of Tolentino appeared beside St. John the Baptist, and with the three of them she climbed it. She followed the three saints to Cascia and found herself inside the monastery, with every door and window still shut.

The nuns found her there when they rose for the morning office, and each suspected another of having left a door unlocked. St. Rita told them plainly what had happened. The nuns would not send away a woman the saints had brought in, and they admitted her as one of the community.