She hid the shirt so her sons wouldn't want revenge

ROCCAPORENA, Umbria, 1406 AD — St. Rita of Cascia hid a shirt before her two sons could see it. The shirt was their father’s, and it was covered in blood. Paolo Mancini had been stabbed to death that day on the road just outside the village. St. Rita got to him while he was still alive. She heard his last breath, and that was all.

What hurt St. Rita most was not that she had been left a widow with two boys. It was that her husband had died out on the road with no priest. He went to be judged by God without the last sacraments.

Before all this, St. Rita had been married to Paolo Mancini at her parents’ wish and against her own. Two sons were born to them, close together in age. They were called Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria. Both boys had grown up picking fights and quick to lose their tempers.

In that valley, when a man was murdered, his family killed someone from the other family back. Paolo Mancini was killed as payback in a feud like that. From the day their father died, his two sons thought about nothing but the men who had done it. Their father’s brothers had already decided that the killing would be paid for. The two boys meant to be the ones who paid it.

St. Rita knew who had killed her husband. She had forgiven those men. She would not say their names to anyone, not even to her sons. That silence turned her husband’s family, the Mancini, against her.

The hidden shirt made no difference. So St. Rita talked to her sons, and went on talking. She told them about God’s judgment, and about hell. She told them what the saints had done. Most of all she told them about Christ dying. He asked his Father to pardon the men who were killing him. Sometimes the boys gave way, and it lasted a moment, and then they were back where they had been.

When talking stopped working

Talking had stopped working, so St. Rita prayed instead, and went on praying. She asked God for one of two things. The first was that he change the hearts of Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria. The second was that he 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 own two sons now just as hard.

Her own Order wrote down 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. Within about a year of their father’s killing both were dead. Both had made their peace with God. St. Rita did not weep for them the way she had wept for their father. She thanked God for keeping them out of reach of a worse death — the death of the soul.