Saint Rita of Cascia

Saint Rita was the only child of Antonio Lotti and Amata Ferri, born when her parents had nearly reached old age. They were so given to reconciling feuding neighbours that they were commonly called Peacemakers of Jesus Christ. She was baptised Margherita, and St. Rita is the familiar form she has always been known by.

About her eleventh year she made an oratory of a small room in her father's house and lived in it a full year. She hung its walls with pictures of the Passion and gave the poor children nearby the food her fasting spared. When she asked leave to enter the Augustinian convent at Cascia, her parents wept and begged their only child not to leave them, and she gave way.

About 1397 AD St. Rita married Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino, a young man of the Ghibelline faction in the Cascia valley. Connolly records that she consented only after prayer. Two sons were born to them, Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria.

The shrine at Cascia holds that the family then moved to the Mulinaccio, a property of Paolo's with a larger house and a grain mill. The clans of the valley were at feud throughout those years.

Paolo Mancini was ambushed and stabbed to death a short distance outside Roccaporena. St. Rita hid his bloodstained shirt so that her sons should not see it and take up revenge. She forgave the killers and never revealed their names, at the cost of the resentment of his family, the Mancini.

The Order of Saint Augustine records that her words could not change her sons' hearts. She asked God to take them from this life before they stained their hands with blood. Both fell ill and died one shortly after the other, within about a year of their father.

St. Rita asked for the habit at the monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene at Cascia and was refused three times. Connolly gives the ground of refusal: a house intended for virgins did not receive a widow. The shrine at Cascia holds that a sister of Paolo's was in the house and would not accept her silence about the killers.

The Mancini made public peace with their enemies about 1407 AD, and the door opened. According to longstanding Catholic tradition, first written down by Cavallucci, her three patrons led her by night up the crag above Roccaporena and into the closed monastery. She received the Augustinian habit and kept the anniversary of that day as a feast for the rest of her life.

Cavallucci records that St. Rita took the discipline three times a day, for the dead, for benefactors and for all sinners. She divided her cell into stations of the Passion and prayed from midnight until dawn.

A woman of Cascia asked her prayers for a sick daughter and found the girl well on returning home. People came from distant parts to visit her at the monastery. When Cascia divided in 1426 AD over the Bernardine tablet and the quarrel turned to crimes, the shrine holds that she worked to restore peace.

St. Rita heard the Franciscan Saint James of the Marches preach at Cascia on the crown of thorns. Before the crucifix in the old oratory she begged to feel one of those thorns, and a thorn wounded her forehead. The wound festered and stank, and she withdrew from her sisters so as not to trouble them.

The superior refused her leave for the Jubilee of 1450 AD until the wound should heal, and after her prayer it closed. She walked to Rome at about sixty-nine, and threw away on the road the money given her for the journey. The wound opened again as soon as she was back inside the monastery.

In her seventy-second year St. Rita took to a hard bed with an illness that lasted four years. In January a kinswoman asked what she wanted, and she asked for a rose from the garden at Roccaporena. The valley was under snow, and the woman found a deep red rose blooming on the bush.

She asked afterwards for two figs from the same garden, and the woman found them and carried them to Cascia. She asked pardon of her sisters and received the last sacraments. She died in her cell in the night between May 21 and 22, 1457 AD, in her seventy-sixth year.

The people of Cascia prevented the burial, and the body stayed in the church three days while cures were reported. Three days after her death Battista d'Angelo of Col Giacone recovered his sight. The shrine at Cascia calls that cure the most extraordinary of the miracles recorded in 1457 AD.

She was venerated at once as a protector from the plague, and in Spain came to be called the Saint of the Impossible. Pope Urban VIII granted her Office and Mass in 1627 AD, and she was beatified at Rome on July 16, 1628 AD. Pope Leo XIII canonized her in Saint Peter's on Ascension Day, May 24, 1900 AD.