Rose of Viterbo

Rose of Viterbo was a thirteenth-century Italian laywoman, mystic, and member of the Third Order of Saint Francis. She was born in Viterbo, then a city of the Papal States frequently contested in the wars between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperor. Later tradition names her parents as Giovanni and Giovanna and describes them as poor. No contemporary record of her birth survives, and the year is known only approximately from later claims that she died in her teens. The medieval lives, composed after her death, portray her as a child of extraordinary devotion who practiced severe fasting and prayer and who was already credited with miracles of healing. Such stories cannot be verified independently, but they formed the core of her cult in Viterbo.

Traditional accounts state that in childhood she experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary, who instructed her to take the Franciscan tertiary habit and to preach penance. Viterbo at that period was under the influence of the Ghibelline supporters of Emperor Frederick II, who was in open conflict with Pope Innocent IV. Rose began to preach in public, calling the inhabitants to conversion and to loyalty to the papacy. Public preaching by a young unmarried laywoman was exceptional and politically dangerous. Her words won her a following among the Guelph party and the enmity of the imperial authorities. She and her family were eventually expelled from the city.

They found refuge in nearby places, including Soriano nel Cimino and Vitorchiano, where she is said to have continued her exhortations. Hagiographers attribute to her a prophecy of the approaching death of Frederick II, who died in December 1250. After the emperor's death the family returned to Viterbo. Rose then asked to be received into a monastery of Poor Clares in the city, often identified as Santa Maria delle Rose, but she was refused, according to the legend, because her poverty made a dowry impossible. She is reported to have predicted that the community would accept her after her death.

Rose died in Viterbo while still very young, on a day commemorated as 6 March, in the early 1250s. In 1258 Pope Alexander IV had her body translated, on 4 September, into the monastery that had turned her away, and he ordered an investigation of her life and of miracles attributed to her intercession. Her body was found incorrupt and became the center of a local cult, later taken up by the Franciscan Order. In 1457 Pope Callixtus III inscribed her in the catalogue of saints. Her remains are still exposed for veneration in the Monastery of Saint Rose in Viterbo. The principal feast is kept on 4 September, the date of the translation of her relics; 6 March, the traditional day of her death, is also observed. She is honored as patron of the city of Viterbo, of exiles, of those rejected by religious orders, and of Franciscan tertiaries.