Saint Rita of Cascia

What draws ordinary people to Saint Rita, generation after generation, is not just the hope that she will untangle some knotted problem. People come to her because they see a real person of flesh and blood who tasted the bitterest things in human life, who stood among the ashes of ruin, and still found a way to keep love and forgiveness from being buried along with those losses.

Umbria at that time was lovely to look at, but it was torn apart by factional wars and age-old family feuds, the same bloody conflicts between rival factions that had engulfed all of Italy through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when a whole family line could be wiped out simply for standing on the wrong side of a local power struggle. A small insult could lead to killings and revenge handed down from father to son. “Blood for blood” was seen as a sacred duty of family honor, so much so that refusing to take revenge could be thought more shameful than death itself.

Rita grew up in that stifling atmosphere. Her parents’ example taught the girl a lesson that went against the current: there must be people who dare to stand between two drawn blades, speaking words that calm the fury, so that one death does not drag countless more deaths after it.

When she grew up, Rita obeyed her parents and married Paolo Mancini, and they had two sons. The old accounts differ about her husband’s temperament, but this much is clear: they lived in a society full of violence, and in the end Paolo himself fell victim to its spiral of hatred.

Married life meant the hard daily work of a mountain wife and mother: washing, cooking, caring for the children. Most of a woman’s life is not made of great events, but of patiently sharing joys and hardships and keeping a home.

Her husband lay dead in a pool of blood. Her two growing sons were surrounded by their father’s relatives, who kept urging them to take up the sword and avenge him, to wash clean the family’s honor. Rita was caught between two terrors: on one side the grief of losing her husband, on the other the fear of seeing her two sons set out on the road to murder.

No one should twist that grief into the picture of a heartless God snatching away the lives of children. In Saint Rita we meet a mother who bore yet another heartbreaking loss: in a short time, both husband and sons were gone forever. The house still stood on the mountainside, but the beloved voices and laughter had fallen silent. Rita carried all that crushing emptiness into silent prayer.

Early in the fifteenth century, Rita was received into the convent of Santa Maria Maddalena. She lived there as a nun for forty years, long enough for holiness to soak into every simple, repeated rhythm of the day: praying, sweeping, weaving, living with sisters whose temperaments differed from hers, learning to bear her own limits and to love people she had not chosen.

Rita had a deep love for the Passion of Jesus. Before the Crucified, her old grief for her husband and sons was not brushed aside but taken up into the vast love that saves.

This story speaks the language of devotion. What it holds on to is Rita’s deep union with the Savior who suffered out of love. She did not seek suffering to be praised by others; that wound belonged to a life that had long since been wholly given.

People who are ill need treatment, comfort and support. Contemplating Saint Rita does not mean seeking out suffering or refusing medicine. In her, believers see that even in wounds of body or soul that cannot be healed, a person is still loved by God without limit and can still give love to the world.

This is the rose of hope that devotion has lovingly kept. The old garden recalls the family home of long ago and the loved ones who had died. When she entered the convent, Rita never cut herself off from her life as a wife and mother, or denied it. She carried all that love with her until her last breath.

She does not promise that a tragic past can be undone. Her husband and two sons never came back to walk again in the old house. But her life shows that people can truly learn to love again after the most desolate ruin.