Saint Frances of Rome

St. Frances was born in Rome in 1384 AD, the daughter of the nobleman Paolo Bussa and Jacobella de' Roffredeschi. As a girl she asked to serve God in a monastery. Her father refused, because he had already promised her to Lorenzo Ponziani, a young nobleman of Trastevere.

She was married at twelve, moved to the Ponziani palace in Trastevere, and soon fell so ill that she could not move without help. One night in July 1398 AD St. Alexius, a saint of Rome, appeared to her in a vision and asked whether she wished to be healed. She answered that she wanted only what pleased the Lord, and at once got up from the bed healed.

After her mother-in-law died, the running of the large Ponziani house passed to St. Frances. She had run it for about a year when famine and disease struck Rome, and she fed the hungry from the family's grain. Her father-in-law feared that his own family would go hungry, so he took the keys of the stores from her and sold off the grain and wine.

She begged alms through the city with her sister-in-law and gave the poor the little grain still left in the granary. A few days later the granary was found full of good wheat, about forty measures. Her husband, Lorenzo, was awed by what had happened in his house, and from then on he let her decide for herself how she lived and how she spent her days.

King Ladislaus of Naples seized Rome in 1408 AD, and the Ponziani stood with the Pope against him. Lorenzo commanded a body of the Pope's soldiers; in the fighting he was wounded in several places, and for a time everyone believed he was dead. St. Frances washed and bound his wounds with her own hands.

The Count of Troia, who governed Rome for the king, then turned on the families loyal to the Pope, the Ponziani first among them. He arrested Lorenzo's brother and ordered that the couple's eldest son, Battista, be handed over as a hostage for Lorenzo; if the boy was not given up, the brother would be beheaded. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, she gave the boy up at the Capitol on her confessor's order, while people in the streets called her mad, and the Count sent him back as she prayed in the church of Aracoeli.

Plague struck Rome in 1411 AD and seized her second son, Evangelista, who was nine years old. He received the last sacraments, asked his mother for her blessing, folded his own hands and died. Her daughter, Agnese, died in 1413 AD, and of her three children only Battista was left.

When the king's army took Rome a second time, Lorenzo was banished with his brother, soldiers sacked the palace, and this time Battista was left a prisoner. St. Frances turned some ground-floor rooms of the wrecked palace into a small hospital for the sick. Three witnesses later swore that she stayed cheerful through these trials and thanked God for whatever happened.

Lorenzo and Battista came home after the king died in August 1414 AD, and about 1425 AD Lorenzo agreed that the couple would live chastely, provided she stayed in his house and kept running it. That year she proposed to the Roman matrons who met at the church of Santa Maria Nova that they offer themselves together to the Virgin Mother, and on August 15, the feast of the Assumption, she and nine companions did so. By this offering, called an oblation, the women gave themselves to God in service of the afflicted; it did not make them nuns, and the Oblates, as they were called, went on living in their own homes.

From 1430 AD her confessor, Don Giovanni Mattiotti, wrote down in detail what she told him of her visions and ecstasies. She told him that evil spirits came to her as lions, dogs and serpents and dragged her through the house. She also told her confessors of an angel who stayed at her side day and night in human form.

In 1433 AD the unmarried and widowed Oblates moved into a small house at Tor de' Specchi, at the foot of the Capitol, and that July Pope Eugenius IV recognised the community. St. Frances could not get Lorenzo's permission to live with them; whenever she came to the house or left it, she kissed the hand of the Oblate in charge and asked her blessing. Lorenzo died early in 1436 AD, after a long illness through which she nursed him.

She had lived with him forty years. Straight after his funeral she went to Tor de' Specchi and asked the Oblates to take her in out of charity. The Oblate in charge resigned and the sisters with one voice chose St. Frances as superior; she refused, and gave way only when her confessor, whom she had always obeyed, ordered her to accept.

Early in March 1440 AD St. Frances went to the Ponziani palace, where her son Battista lay sick with fever. A violent fever seized her there, and by evening her confessor, Don Giovanni Mattiotti, judged her too weak for the journey back to Tor de' Specchi and told her to stay the night. Battista was still living twelve years later.

Within days she told her confessor that Christ had appeared to her in the night and that she would die on the seventh day of her illness. She asked for the last sacraments and received them, and as the news spread through Rome, more clergy and lay people came to see her than could be held back. On the evening of Wednesday, March 9, 1440 AD, the seventh day of her illness, she spoke a last time to the Oblates, raised her eyes to heaven and died in the palace, still praying aloud.

Her body was carried in procession from Trastevere to Santa Maria Nova, the church where she had made her offering in 1425 AD, and for three days people came to venerate it. The people's outcry forced the Olivetan monks who served the church to put off her burial until March 12, when she was buried before the high altar. The Auditors of the Rota, the judges who later examined her case for canonisation, reported that the crowd had gathered with no one urging or arranging it.

Pope Paul V canonised her in St. Peter's Basilica on May 29, 1608 AD. Pope Pius XI proclaimed her patroness of motorists in 1925 AD, and a homily published by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives his reason: the angel she saw constantly at her side.