Rita

Saint Rita of Cascia, born Margherita Lotti in the Umbrian village of Roccaporena in the late fourteenth century (traditionally 1381), is among the most widely invoked saints of the Catholic Church. She was the only child of Antonio Lotti and Amata Ferri, a pious couple remembered in later accounts as peacemakers amid the factional violence of the region, then part of the Papal States. The surviving narrative of her life depends largely on early-modern hagiography rather than contemporary archival records, but the tradition is consistent that she desired religious life from youth and that her parents instead arranged her marriage, while she was still very young, to Paolo Mancini, a man associated with the turbulent local feuds of the Cascia district.

Her marriage is described as lasting about eighteen years and as being marked by patience, prayer, and eventual influence over her husband, who is said to have undergone a conversion before he was murdered in a vendetta. Rita and Paolo had two sons. After the killing she publicly forgave those responsible and sought to keep her sons from taking blood revenge; both sons died not long afterward. Widowed and childless, she applied to the Augustinian convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Cascia. The community at first refused her, in part because of her connection by marriage to a family entangled in civic strife. Tradition holds that she obtained reconciliation between the rival parties and was then received as a nun, an episode later embroidered with miraculous details of her entry into the cloister.

As an Augustinian religious in fifteenth-century Cascia she lived a hidden life of prayer, penance, and charity. The best-known episode of her later years is a wound on the forehead, received, according to the accounts, while she meditated on the Passion and likened to a thorn from Christ’s crown; it is said to have remained with her for many years and was treated as a partial stigmata. She is also associated with a winter blooming of roses and figs, which became a central motif in her iconography and in popular devotion. She died in the convent on 22 May 1457. Her body was kept and venerated locally; it is still enshrined in the basilica at Cascia and has long been described as incorrupt or unusually well preserved.

A cult grew around her tomb from the later Middle Ages and expanded in the seventeenth century. She was beatified by Pope Urban VIII in the 1620s and canonized by Pope Leo XIII on 24 May 1900. Her feast is kept on 22 May. Because of the trials attributed to her marriage, widowhood, and intercession, she is invoked as patroness of impossible or desperate causes, of difficult marriages, of widows and parents, and of those afflicted by illness, wounds, loneliness, or infertility. She remains closely tied to Roccaporena and Cascia, whose shrines continue to draw pilgrims, and she is commonly represented in the Augustinian habit, with a wound upon her brow and with roses.