St. Frances of Rome reads at night by her guardian angel's light

ROME, October 2, 2026 AD — The Church keeps the memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels today. The Catechism states what the Church holds about them in a sentence of Saint Basil’s: “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.” Saint Frances of Rome, a Roman wife and mother of the early fifteenth century, told the priests who heard her confession that she could see her angel. They ordered her to describe him. As she told it, an angel stood beside her for more than twenty-four years, until the day she died. No one else could see him, and St. Frances lived by what the angel allowed and what he forbade.

At eleven St. Frances wanted to enter a convent. Her parents married her instead, in 1396 AD, to Lorenzo Ponziano, a rich young nobleman, and she went to live in his family’s palace in Trastevere. She was married to Lorenzo for forty years and ran his house.

Her confessor, Don Antonio Savello, had taught St. Frances as a child, and she did exactly what he told her. He ordered her to say what the angel looked like. St. Frances answered him: “His stature is that of a child of about nine years old; his aspect full of sweetness and majesty; his eyes generally turned towards heaven: words cannot describe the divine purity of that gaze. His brow is always serene; his glances kindle in the soul the flame of ardent devotion. When I look upon him, I understand the glory of the angelic nature, and the degraded condition of our own.”

Then St. Frances told Don Antonio what the angel wore: “He wears a long shining robe, and over it a tunic, either as white as the lilies of the field, or of the colour of a red rose, or of the hue of the sky when it is most deeply blue. When he walks by my side, his feet are never soiled by the mud of the streets or the dust of the road.”

In her first years in the Ponziano house, long before St. Frances saw the angel, she felt him. Whenever she did something wrong, a hand she could not see struck her before she had had time to blame herself, and the people near her heard the blow. Once she let a silly conversation go on because she was afraid of what the people with her would think, and the blow she got for it left a mark for several days. At sixteen she went to confession and said nothing to Don Antonio about the unseen hand. At once she was knocked flat on the floor, and she knew the same hand had done it. She then told Don Antonio about the hand, and from that day she told him what happened to her as well as what she had done wrong.

Then the King of Naples took Rome and let his soldiers loot it. Famine followed, and after the famine plague. The plague reached the Ponziano palace, and St. Frances’s son Evangelista, who was nine, caught it. As he died, Evangelista said to his mother: “Here are the angels come to take me away. Give me your blessing, my mother. Do not be afraid. I shall never forget you.”

About a year later St. Frances was praying one morning in her oratory when the little room filled with light. Evangelista stood in front of her, and beside him stood a companion of the same size and height, more beautiful still. She opened her arms to her son and they closed on nothing. Evangelista told her who his companion was: “This my companion is higher than I am in rank, as he is more bright and fair in aspect. The Divine Majesty has assigned him to you as a guardian during the remainder of your earthly pilgrimage. Night and day by your side, he will assist you in every way.”

Evangelista disappeared and the angel stayed. St. Frances fell to the floor and thanked God, then turned to the angel and asked him to be her guide, to show her the way she was to go and to fight beside her against the devil. When she left the oratory he followed her.

The light around the angel was so bright that St. Frances could seldom look straight at him, and at night, in complete darkness, she could read and write by it. She could see him plainly only at certain times: when she prayed, when she talked with her confessor, and when the devil attacked her. When the angel spoke St. Frances saw his lips move, and his voice seemed to reach her from a distance.

The angel disappeared from her sight whenever she did the smallest thing wrong, and he came back only after she had examined her conscience, found the fault and confessed it. When she was troubled only by a doubt or a scruple, he gave her a kind look and the worry ended.

St. Frances called her guardian the archangel. She asked Don Antonio’s permission for more penances, and when he hesitated she told him: “Be not afraid, father; the archangel will not allow me to proceed too far in that course. He always checks me when I am tempted to transgress the bounds of prudence.”

One day St. Frances was on her knees in her room reciting the Office of the Blessed Virgin, and her sister-in-law Vannozza was with her. St. Frances had begun an antiphon, the verse recited before and after a psalm, when Lorenzo sent for her. She got up, did the small thing he wanted and went back to her book. Lorenzo called her away four times in all, each time for something trivial, and each time she went. When she picked up the book after the fourth call, the antiphon she had started four times and never finished was written in letters of gold. Vannozza saw it. The angel whispered to St. Frances: “Thus the Lord rewards the virtue of obedience.”

After Don Antonio died, St. Frances chose a new confessor, Don Giovanni Mattiotti. Don Giovanni was a timid man, and at first he was not sure of her. He ordered St. Frances to tell him what she saw in the smallest detail. For two or three years, until he trusted her completely, Don Giovanni wrote down every day what she told him.

In 1425 AD St. Frances founded the Oblates, a community of Roman women attached to the Benedictine monks of Mount Olivet. After her husband Lorenzo died she went to the Oblates’ house at Tor de’ Specchi and asked to live among them as the lowest of their servants. The women wanted her as their superior. She refused, Don Giovanni commanded her to accept, and on March 25 she was elected.

That day the angel who had been at her side for twenty-four years left her with a smile, and another angel, brighter still, took his place. The new angel carried a palm branch, and day and night he wove a cloth from threads that seemed to grow out of the branch. Saint Benedict appeared to St. Frances the same day and told her that the palm was the victory she was to win over human weakness, and the angel’s unceasing weaving was the work she was to do for the community now in her care.

On March 3, 1440 AD, St. Frances went back to the Ponziano palace to see her eldest son, who had a fever. That night she came down with a violent fever there. All through her illness the angel stayed beside her, weaving the last threads of the cloth as if in a hurry to finish it, and the light around him grew brighter.

On March 9, 1440 AD, the seventh day of the illness and the day St. Frances had said she would die, Don Giovanni asked her one last time what she saw. St. Frances whispered her last words: “The heavens open! The angels descend! The archangel has finished his task. He stands before me. He beckons to me to follow him.”