Saint Rita of Cascia, Religious

Saint Rita was born Margherita Lotti, affectionately called Rita, in the little Umbrian hamlet of Roccaporena, most probably in 1371. Her parents, modest farmers known as peacemakers of Jesus Christ, gave her a solid schooling and religious formation in nearby Cascia under the care of the Augustinian friars. In that setting she grew in devotion to Saint Augustine, Saint John the Baptist, and Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, whom she chose as her special patrons.

Around 1385 she married Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino. The age was torn by political feuds, and her husband was drawn into them. By prayer, gentleness, and the peacemaking spirit she had learned at home, Rita gradually drew him toward a more Christian life. Their marriage became fruitful; two sons, Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria, were born. Yet the spiral of hatred that marked the factions of the time claimed Paolo's life: he was murdered. Rita forgave his killers in her heart and hid the blood-stained shirt so that her sons would not be inflamed to vengeance. The Mancino kin, however, pressed for retaliation. Rita prayed unceasingly that no further blood be shed. A sickness then carried off both sons; her only consolation was the hope that their souls were saved and no longer endangered by the climate of revenge.

Left alone, she intensified her prayer for her dead husband and sons and for the Mancino family, that they might forgive and find peace. At about the age of thirty-six she sought entrance among the Augustinian nuns of the Monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene in Cascia. She was refused, for the community feared that admitting the widow of a murdered man might endanger their safety. Rita's prayers and the intercession of her three patron saints brought about reconciliation between the hostile families. After many obstacles she was at last received. Tradition relates that during her novitiate the abbess, to test her humility, ordered her to water a dry stick; her obedience was rewarded by God with a vine that still flourishes.

In the monastery Rita lived as a humble religious, zealous in prayer and in the tasks assigned her, given to frequent fasting and penance. Together with her sisters she went out to visit the elderly, care for the sick, and assist the poor. Ever more absorbed in contemplation of Christ, she asked to share in His Passion. In 1432, while deep in prayer, she received on her forehead the wound of a thorn from the crown of the Crucified; it remained until her death, some fifteen years later.

In the winter before she died, bedridden and ill, she asked a cousin visiting from Roccaporena to bring her two figs and a rose from the garden of her parents' house. It was January; the cousin thought her delirious, yet returned astonished to find the rose and the figs and carried them to Cascia. For Rita they were a sign that God had received her husband and sons into heaven. She died in the night between 21 and 22 May 1447. Because of the great cult that sprang up at once, her body was never buried; today it is kept in a glass urn. Rita knew how to bloom amid the thorns life reserved for her, giving the good fragrance of Christ and melting the icy winter of many hearts. For that reason, and in memory of the prodigy of Roccaporena, the rose is her special symbol. She was beatified by Urban VIII and solemnly canonized by Leo XIII on 24 May 1900.

May Saint Rita of Cascia obtain for us the grace of patient forgiveness and the courage to entrust every impossible cause to God.

LETTER FROM JOHN PAUL II TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF SPOLETO FOR THE SIXTH CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF SAINT RITA OF CASCIA

To my venerable brother Ottorino Pietro Alberti, Archbishop of Spoleto and Bishop of Norcia.

With your recent letter concerning the celebrations currently underway for the Sixth Centenary of the birth of Saint Rita of Cascia, you wished to renew the kind invitation, already expressed in March of last year, for me to participate personally—either through a special visit or another initiative—in the unanimous chorus of praise rising throughout the Christian world in honor of her whom my predecessor Leo XIII, of venerable memory, called "the precious pearl of Umbria."

This request, which I know is shared not only by the faithful of the dioceses entrusted to you but also by the countless host of the Saint's devotees, coincides with my own deep desire not to let the present "Rita Year" pass without remembering and exalting her mystical and greatly cherished figure. Therefore, uniting myself spiritually with the pilgrims who, even from distant lands, arrive in great crowds at Cascia, I am pleased to lay a flower of piety and veneration upon her Tomb, in remembrance of the outstanding examples of her high virtues.

I am also grateful to divine Providence for certain singular connections that unite the present Centenary with other highly evocative anniversaries for anyone who knows how to read the events of human history in the proper perspective. I do not forget, in fact, the visit I made to Norcia to celebrate, fifteen centuries after his birth, the great patriarch of Western monasticism, Saint Benedict. Nor can I omit the recent opening of the Centenary of Saint Francis of Assisi.

These are two figures alongside whom the humble Woman of Roccaporena takes her place as a younger sister, almost composing an "ideal triptych" of radiant holiness, which testifies to and at the same time urges us to deepen, in the sense of coherence, the uninterrupted stream of grace that furrow the fertile earth of Christian Umbria.

Nor can I overlook another happy coincidence, discernible in the fact that Rita came into the world one year after the death of Catherine of Siena, almost marking a continuity not devoid of marvelous spiritual significance.

It is known to all how the earthly journey of the Saint of Cascia is divided into different states of life, chronologically successive and—what matters most—arranged in an ascending order that marks the various phases of development of her life of union with God. Why is Rita a saint? Not so much for the fame of the wonders that popular devotion attributes to the efficacy of her intercession with Almighty God, but rather for the astonishing "normality" of her daily existence, lived by her first as a wife and mother, then as a widow, and finally as an Augustinian nun.

She was an unknown young girl of your land who, in the warmth of her family environment, had learned the habit of tender piety toward the Creator in the contemplation—which is already a lesson—of the evocative scenery of the Apennine range. What was the reason for her holiness then? And where was the heroism of her virtues? Hers was a tranquil and shadowed life, without the prominence of external events, when, against her personal preferences, she embraced the married state. Thus she became a wife, immediately revealing herself as a true angel of the hearth and carrying out a decisive action in transforming her husband's behavior. And she was also a mother, gladdened by the birth of two sons, for whom, after the treacherous murder of her husband, she trembled and suffered so much, fearing that even the shadow of a desire for vengeance against their father's murderers might arise in their souls. For her part, she had generously forgiven them, even bringing about the reconciliation of the families.

Already a widow, she was soon after left without her children, so that, being free from every earthly tie, she decided to give herself entirely to God. But in this regard too she suffered trials and contradictions, until she was able to realize the ideal that had beckoned to her since her early youth, consecrating herself to the Lord in the monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene. The humble existence that she spent here for about forty years was likewise unknown to the eyes of the world and open only to intimacy with God. Those were years of assiduous contemplation, years of penances and prayers, which culminated in that painful wound imprinted upon her forehead. Precisely this sign of the thorn, beyond the physical suffering it caused her, was like the seal of her interior sorrows, but above all it was the proof of her direct participation in the Passion of Christ, centered—so to speak—on one of the most dramatic moments, such as that of the crowning with thorns in Pilate's praetorium (cf. Mt 27,29; Mk 15,17; Jn 19,2.5).

It is here, therefore, that one must recognize the peak of her mystical ascent, here the depth of a suffering that was such as to determine an external somatic trace. And here again we discover a significant point of contact between the two children of Umbria, Rita and Francis. In reality, what the stigmata were for the Poverello, the thorn was for Rita: that is, a sign, both that and this, of direct association with the redemptive Passion of Christ the Lord, crowned with piercing thorns after the bloody flagellation and, subsequently, pierced by the nails and struck by the lance on Calvary. Such an association was established in both saints on the common basis of that love which possesses an intrinsic unifying force, and precisely because of that painful thorn the Saint of the roses became a living symbol of loving co-participation in the sufferings of the Savior. For the rose of love is fresh and fragrant when it is associated with the thorn of pain! Thus it was in Christ, the supreme model; thus it was in Francis; thus it was in Rita. Indeed, she too suffered and loved: she loved God and she loved men; she suffered for the love of God and she suffered because of men.

Therefore, the gradual succession of the various stages in her earthly journey reveals in her a parallel growth in love up to that stigma which, while giving the adequate measure of her elevation, explains at the same time why her sweet figure exerts such great attraction among the faithful, who celebrate her name and extol her admirable power before the throne of God.

A spiritual daughter of Saint Augustine, she put his teachings into practice, even without having read them in books. He who had so recommended to consecrated women to "follow the Lamb wherever He goes" and to "contemplate with the eyes of the interior the wounds of the Crucified, the scars of the Risen One, the blood of the Dying One..., weighing everything on the scales of charity" (cf. St. Augustine, De Sancta Virginitate, 52.54.55: PL 40,428), was obeyed "ad litteram" by Rita who, especially during her forty years in the cloister, demonstrated the continuity and firmness of the contact established with the divine victim of Golgotha.

The lesson of the Saint—it is worth specifying—focuses on these typical elements of spirituality: the offering of forgiveness and the acceptance of suffering, not indeed as a form of passive resignation or as the fruit of feminine weakness, but through the strength of that love toward Christ, which precisely in the aforementioned episode of the crowning suffered, along with other humiliations, an atrocious parody of His kingship.

Nourished by this scene, which not without reason the tradition of the Church has placed at the center of the "sorrowful mysteries" of the holy Rosary, Rita's mysticism connects back to the same ideal, lived out personally and not simply enunciated, of the apostle Paul: "Ego... stigmata Domini Iesu in corpore meo porto" (Gal 6,17); "Adimpleo ea, quae desunt passionum Christi, in carne mea pro corpore eius, quod est Ecclesia" (Col 1,24). This further element must also be noted, namely the ecclesial destination of the merits of the saint: segregated from the world and intimately associated with the suffering Christ, she caused the fruit of this "co-suffering" of hers to flow back into the community of her brethren.

Truly Rita is at once the "strong woman" and the "wise virgin" of whom Sacred Scripture speaks to us (Pr 31:10ff; (Mt 25:1)ff), who in all states of life indicates, not merely in words, what the authentic path to holiness is as a faithful following of Christ even to the cross. For this reason, to all her devotees scattered throughout every part of the world, I have wished to present once again her sweet and sorrowful figure with the wish that, drawing inspiration from it, we may respond—each in the state of life proper to him—to the Christian vocation in its demands of clarity, witness, and courage: "Sic luceat lux vestra coram hominibus..." (Mt 5:16).

For this same purpose, I entrust to her this present Letter which, in the light of the Rita Centenary, you will bring to the knowledge of the faithful with the encouragement and comfort of the apostolic blessing.

From the Vatican, 10 February in the year 1982, the fourth of my pontificate.

JOHN PAUL II