At her sister-in-law's coffin, St. Frances of Rome cries 'When? When?'

ROME, 1431 AD — Vannozza Ponziani, sister-in-law of Saint Frances of Rome and her companion in the Ponziani house since St. Frances married into the family, died in Rome this year after a short illness. St. Frances, who had nursed her to the end, knelt beside the coffin at the funeral in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli.

St. Frances, forty-seven, is the wife of Lorenzo Ponziani, of a rich family in Trastevere. Vannozza came from the noble Santa Croce family and was the wife of Lorenzo’s elder brother, Paluzzo Ponziani. When St. Frances arrived in the house as a bride of twelve, the two brothers, their wives and Lorenzo’s parents all lived together as one family. St. Frances had wanted to be a nun and was married on her father’s orders. While everyone else celebrated the wedding, she cried. She told Vannozza why, and from then on Vannozza was her companion in everything she did in her husband’s house.

Vannozza called St. Frances by a pet name, Ceccolella, because she was still so young. Soon after the wedding St. Frances fell gravely ill and spent most of a year in bed. One night in July 1398 AD, Saint Alexius appeared to her on his feast day and asked whether she wanted to be healed. St. Frances answered him: “I want only what pleases the Lord.” She got up from her bed healed. She went straight to Vannozza, who had been with her through the illness, to take her to church to give thanks. Vannozza, barely awake, asked: “Who is that? Is it you, Ceccolella? What madness is this? Do you need something? Where did you get the strength to get out of bed?” St. Frances answered her: “It’s your Ceccolella. I don’t need anything.”

Not long after, Lorenzo’s mother, Cecilia, died, and the family put St. Frances in charge of the house. Vannozza, as the elder brother’s wife, had the first claim to run it, but she begged to be St. Frances’s companion instead.

In the years that followed, the two women heard Mass together at Santa Cecilia, the church nearest the house. They went out at first light, with no servants, to pray in the churches of Rome. When famine came, St. Frances gave the family’s grain to the hungry until her father-in-law took the keys of the stores from her. Then she and Vannozza went begging through the city for the poor. St. Frances drank only water, and for a time, as a penance, she drank it from half a human skull, until Vannozza, who loathed the thing, threw it away.

When King Ladislaus of Naples held Rome, his governor turned on the families most loyal to the Pope. He had Paluzzo arrested. Lorenzo was later exiled and the family’s property seized. St. Frances and Vannozza lived in one corner of the damaged house and turned the least damaged room, a large hall on the ground floor, into a hospital for the sick poor.

In the last years of the occupation, St. Frances fell dangerously ill. Almost everyone, her relatives included, kept away for fear of infection. Vannozza stayed at her bedside.

In 1425 AD, at the church of Santa Maria Nova, St. Frances and nine other women dedicated their lives to God and to the service of people in need, while staying in their own homes. Vannozza was one of them. The Life of St. Frances says the two women had lived together in such peace “that they seemed to share one soul and one heart.”

This year, according to the Life, St. Frances was praying one night when she saw a cross of the kind carried before funerals standing in front of the house. Then she saw one of the main beams of the building thrown into the street. Her confessor, Don Giovanni Mattiotti, told her Vannozza would soon die. A few days later Vannozza fell ill and took to her bed.

Vannozza received the last sacraments. Several men of religious orders sat round the bed reading the Passion and the Church’s prayers for the dying. When St. Frances saw the devil come close to the bed, she asked Don Giovanni to sprinkle holy water to drive him off. Vannozza died in great peace. The Life records that at that moment St. Frances was shown a cloud around the body, and Vannozza’s soul leaving it as a brilliant light and rising into heaven.

St. Frances prepared and dressed the body and walked with it to Santa Maria in Aracoeli, where it was laid in the chapel of Santa Croce. For three days before the burial, crowds of Romans tried to touch the body, if only with their rosaries, and to take scraps of the grave-clothes as relics. They told one another aloud what they had seen Vannozza do for the poor and the sick.

At the funeral, St. Frances knelt on one side of the coffin. As she prayed there, in front of the whole crowd, she was taken into ecstasy. Her eyes stayed fixed on heaven, and the people near her heard her say again and again, “Quando, quando” (When? When?). She stayed that way through the whole funeral service. When it was over she still did not move. At last Don Giovanni ordered her to get up and go back to the sick she was nursing at home. She rose at once and went.