Saint Rita of Cascia

Saint Rita of Cascia was a wife and mother, and after the death of her husband and sons she became a nun in the monastery of Augustinian nuns in Cascia, in Umbria. The faithful ask her intercession in difficult and hopeless cases. The Church commemorates her on May 22. Rita left no writings, and many details of her life are known from tradition and from Lives written long after her death.

She was born at Roccaporena near Cascia. Her name was Margherita Lotti, and Rita is a diminutive of that name. The year of her birth is not certain: scholars give 1371 or 1381. Her parents, Antonio Lotti and Amata Ferri, were respected as peacemakers in disputes between feuding families. She learned the faith from the Augustinians in Cascia. She longed to give herself to God in religious life, but against her own wishes she married.

Her husband was Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino. The Roman Martyrology recalls that she patiently bore his violence and reconciled him to God. They had two sons. In a time of bloody strife between factions, Rita’s husband was murdered. Rita forgave the murderers, and according to tradition she hid her husband’s bloodstained shirt so that her sons would not seek revenge. She prayed that no more blood would be shed. Soon afterward both sons died of illness.

As a widow she asked to be admitted to the monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene in Cascia, where the nuns lived according to the Rule of Saint Augustine. At first she was refused. She was received only when the families involved in her husband’s murder were reconciled. In the monastery she spent about forty years in prayer and penance, and together with her sisters she cared for the sick and the poor. Tradition relates that the superior, wishing to test her humility, told her to water a piece of dry wood, from which a vine later grew.

Rita meditated especially on the Passion of Christ. For the last fifteen years of her life she bore on her forehead a wound that tradition links to a thorn from the crown of the Crucified. According to tradition, in the winter before her death she asked a relative to bring her a rose and two figs from the garden at Roccaporena, and the relative did indeed find them there. That is why the rose became her sign. She died in Cascia during the night of May 21 to 22. The year of her death, like the year of her birth, is not certain: 1447 or 1457 is given. Her body was never buried and rests in the basilica in Cascia.

Pope Urban VIII, formerly bishop of Spoleto, in 1627 permitted the Augustinians and the diocese of Spoleto to celebrate Mass and the Office in her honor, which amounted to beatification. Leo XIII declared her a saint on May 24, 1900. On the centenary of her canonization, May 20, 2000, her body was brought to St. Peter’s Square, and John Paul II presented her to families as a sign of hope. Since 2002 her memorial has been in the General Roman Calendar.