Q153024

Rita of Cascia, born Margherita Lotti in 1381 at Roccaporena in the Umbrian hills of central Italy, was the only child of Antonio Lotti and Amata Ferri, a couple remembered in local tradition as peacemakers amid the factional violence of the late medieval Papal States. From childhood she wished to enter religious life, but her parents arranged her marriage while she was still very young to Paolo Mancini, a man of the district whose temper and involvement in local feuds contrasted with her piety. The marriage produced two sons. Hagiographical tradition describes years of patience on Rita's part in the face of her husband's harshness, and a gradual softening of his character before his violent death.

Paolo Mancini was murdered in the course of a blood feud, leaving Rita a widow. Her sons, according to the traditional accounts, were determined to avenge their father. Rita is said to have prayed that they might die rather than commit murder and lose their souls; both sons died of illness not long afterward. Widowed and childless, she sought admission to the Augustinian convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in nearby Cascia. The community refused her several times, both because she was a widow and because her family connections to the feud threatened the convent's peace. Tradition holds that she first obtained a public reconciliation between the rival families and was then admitted, in some versions after a miraculous entry into the locked cloister. She took the Augustinian habit and lived in the convent for some four decades.

As a nun she was known for severe penance, meditation on the Passion, and care of the sick. In later life she received a wound on the forehead that was understood as a partial stigmata, as if from a thorn of Christ's crown; the wound remained until her death and, according to the sources, isolated her from ordinary community life. A well-known episode in the last winter of her life recounts that she asked a visitor for a rose and figs from the garden of her family home at Roccaporena; despite the season, the flowers and fruit were found and brought to her. She died in the convent at Cascia on 22 May 1457. Her body was preserved and became the focus of a local cult; it is still venerated as incorrupt in the basilica that bears her name.

Devotion to Rita spread from Umbria through Italy and, after the early modern period, throughout the Catholic world. She was beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1627 and canonized by Pope Leo XIII on 24 May 1900. Because of the circumstances of her marriage, widowhood, and the favors attributed to her intercession, she became known as the saint of impossible and desperate causes, and as a patron of those suffering in difficult marriages, of widows, of the abused, and of the sick. Her feast is kept on 22 May. The basilica and shrine at Cascia remain a major pilgrimage site, and her life has been retold in art, popular piety, and later hagiography as an example of patience, forgiveness, and perseverance.