Saint Frances of Rome

One morning she was sitting and praying the Divine Office, the common prayer of the Church. Before she had finished a single verse, someone called: her husband needed her. She closed the book, got up and went. When the task was done, she came back, opened the book and continued that verse. Again someone called: a member of the household needed her. Again she closed the book. This happened four times, the same verse, still unfinished. The fifth time, when she returned, tradition says that the words of the unfinished verse had turned to gold on the page.

Whether the story is true, no one can verify. But the saying attributed to her has stayed with generations of women: “A married woman must, when called upon, leave God at the altar to find Him in her household care.”

Frances lived in fifteenth-century Rome, amid war, plague, famine and a schism that split the Church apart. For forty years she was a wife, a mother, and a daughter-in-law in a noble family. She had wanted to enter religious life from the age of eleven, but she was only able to enter a religious house once she was widowed, four years before she died. And the Church honors her as a saint not in spite of her married life, but precisely because of the way she lived that family life.

Her father refused. By the noble custom of the time, daughters were for marrying, for forming alliances with powerful families. At twelve, Frances was married to Lorenzo Ponziani, a rich young nobleman of the Trastevere district, on the other side of the Tiber.

The young bride fell into a crisis. Not long after the wedding she fell seriously ill and was bedridden for many months; no doctor could cure her. Tradition says that during her illness she saw Saint Alexis appear and ask whether she wanted to be healed. She answered: “As God wills.” And she was healed.

From then on, Frances understood something that the twelve-year-old girl perhaps had not understood at her wedding: God was not calling her into a convent, but calling her to become holy right in this house, with this husband, in this family.

Lorenzo was a good husband. He loved his wife, respected her devotion, and in forty years of life together never hindered her works of charity. The biographies say the couple never quarreled.

From then on, the two sisters-in-law made a pact. If they could not enter religious life, they would live like religious right in their own home: rising early to pray, fulfilling their duties to their husbands, children and in-laws, and then spending the rest of their time visiting the poor and the sick of Rome. They set up a small chapel in an empty room upstairs, and went together to Mass and to visit the hospitals, dressed simply.

Their mother-in-law, a noblewoman who cared for appearances, was not at all pleased. She reproached her two daughters-in-law for shaming the family by mixing with the poor and dressing so plainly. But their father-in-law was fond of them and let them be.

When the mother-in-law died, the whole family wanted Vannozza, the elder daughter-in-law, to take charge of the Ponziani household. Vannozza declined and proposed Frances. So Frances, the younger of the two and just sixteen, became mistress of a great noble household with dozens of servants. She ran the house with care, and treated the servants as brothers and sisters, looking after their health and their practice of the faith.

Frances opened the Ponziani granary and gave grain to the hungry. When it was empty, her father-in-law, in anger, locked the granary and hid the key. Tradition says that Frances and Vannozza went into the granary, scraped up a few handfuls of grain left on the floor, and prayed; when the father-in-law opened the granary, he found it full of grain again. There is also a story that a wine cask that had run dry after she gave its wine to the poor was filled again with good wine. From then on, the stern father-in-law handed the keys over to his daughter-in-law for good.

When the plague came, Frances turned part of the house into an infirmary. She cared for the sick with her own hands, washing the sores that others shrank from. When the money ran out, she begged in the streets for the sick, gathered firewood in the countryside outside the city and carried it back on her back, leading a donkey loaded with wood through the streets of Rome. It is said that nobles who had known her looked at her as if she were mad.

Tradition says that exactly one year after Evangelista’s death, while Frances was praying, the boy appeared to his mother, radiant, accompanied by an angel. He told her that his sister Agnese would soon join him in heaven, and that God would comfort his mother by letting an archangel stay beside her from then on.

From then on, according to what Frances told her confessor, she saw that angel beside her for the rest of her life. The angel looked like a child of about nine, like her son, dressed in white, and gave off a soft light. She said that this light was enough for her to read by in the middle of the night, and lit her way as she went through the dark streets of Rome late at night to reach the sick.

Since then, every year on March 9, in front of the church of Saint Frances of Rome, which stands right in the ancient Forum of Rome where her remains are buried, people line up cars, motorbikes, buses, taxis, even ambulances, to have them blessed. The sight of gleaming modern vehicles parked among two-thousand-year-old Roman columns, waiting for a priest to sprinkle holy water, is one of those strange scenes that visitors who happen to be in Rome that day never forget.

A fifteenth-century woman who never saw a car is now invoked by drivers all over the world before every long journey.

Frances, with Vannozza and the remaining children, lived in one corner of the ruined house. She kept going out to care for the poor, even though she herself was now poor. Tradition says that when the enemy demanded that she hand over her son Battista as a hostage, she took him to the church of Aracoeli, set him at the foot of the image of Our Lady, and entrusted him to her. Later Battista was released.

In 1414, when the war died down for a time, Lorenzo returned, gray-haired, his strength spent, his spirit broken. Frances cared for her husband in his last years with the tenderness of their early married days. And he, according to the biographies, as he grew older treasured all the more the wife he called a saint.

In 1433 the community moved into a house in the Tor de' Specchi district, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. Frances still did not go to live with the sisters, because her husband was still alive, and she still held her duty as a wife above all.

In 1436 Lorenzo died. Frances, fifty-two years old, came and knocked at the door of the house at Tor de' Specchi, barefoot, a rope around her neck, like a lowly person begging to be taken in. The sisters welcomed her and immediately elected her their superior.

That community still exists today. Nearly six hundred years later, the Oblates still live in the very same house at Tor de' Specchi, and every year on March 9 they open its doors to visitors to see the rooms where Frances lived and prayed, with fifteenth-century frescoes telling the story of her life.

She died on March 9, 1440, in the very Ponziani house she had come to as a bride at twelve. Those present said her last words were: “The angel has finished his task. He beckons me to follow.”

All Rome mourned her. People called her by the title “Advocata Urbis”, Advocate of the City. She was buried in the church of Santa Maria Nova in the Forum, which the Romans later came to call simply the church of Saint Frances of Rome. In 1608, Pope Paul V canonized her.

The church was built on part of the foundations of the temple of the goddesses Venus and Roma, the largest temple of ancient Rome. As in so many places in this city, the Christian faith grew up right on the foundations of the old pagan world. Inside the church is kept a stone slab that tradition says bears the imprint of the knees of Saints Peter and Paul, when the two knelt to pray here. That legend, like many others in Rome, cannot be verified, but pilgrims still stop to look.

Beneath the main altar, in the crypt, lie the remains of Saint Frances. A woman who once carried a basket through these streets to give bread to the poor now rests at the heart of the most famous archaeological site in the world, where millions of visitors pass each year. Most of them do not know who she is. But every year on March 9, the cars line up again before the door, waiting to be blessed.

In 1378, six years before Frances was born, the papal election in Rome took place amid chaos. Some cardinals afterward declared that election invalid and elected another man, who set up his see at Avignon in France. From then on the Church had two popes, each with his own kings and princes, dioceses and religious orders supporting him. In 1409 a council at Pisa, wanting to end this situation, deposed both and elected a third; but the other two refused to resign, and so there were three men all claiming to be pope.

The Great Schism ended only in 1417, at the Council of Constance. Throughout those years, Rome was neglected, fought over by factions, and occupied by foreign armies. It was in a divided Church and a ruined city that one woman quietly kept the faith alive, not through theological debates, but through bowls of porridge, bundles of firewood, and nights spent awake caring for the sick.

Perhaps no woman saint is closer to Vietnamese mothers than Frances of Rome. She did not go on distant missions, did not suffer martyrdom, had no great visions that changed the Church. She was a daughter-in-law, a wife, a mother. She cared for a difficult mother-in-law, cared for a wounded husband, cared for sick children, buried two of them. She ran a large household and opened her home to the poor. She knew what it was to lose everything to war. And she prayed, a great deal, but was always ready to close the book when her family needed her.

Many women think that because they are busy with children, housework and the market, they have no time to become holy. Frances answers them with her own life: housework does not take us away from God. It is in housework that we meet God. The verse left unfinished four times because a husband or child called is not lost. It turns to gold.