Saint Rita of Cascia

Invocation

“Saint Rita, advocate of desperate causes, intercede for this request that surpasses my strength.”

Life and Devotion

Rita was born around 1381 in Roccaporena, a hilltop hamlet in the Umbrian mountains near Cascia, into a deeply Christian peasant family. From childhood she longed to take the veil, but her parents arranged her marriage to a man known for his violent temper. She spent many years as a quietly enduring wife, transforming conjugal suffering into a spiritual offering. Her husband was killed in an act of clan vengeance, one of the blood feuds ravaging medieval Umbria, and her two sons were in turn at risk of seeking revenge. Rita prayed that God would take them to himself rather than see them lose their souls to murder: they died of illness shortly after, which she accepted as a divine sign. Widowed and childless, she requested entry into the Augustinian convent at Cascia; refused three times, tradition holds that she was miraculously transported inside the monastery walls by Saints Augustine, John the Baptist, and Nicholas of Tolentino. She lived there until her death in 1457. Shortly before dying, she asked a relative to bring her a rose from her childhood garden in the depths of winter — the rose bloomed, and this sign was held to be a miracle. Beatified in 1628, she was canonized in 1900 by Leo XIII.

Rita's patronage over impossible causes arose from the cumulative weight of her own life: a battered wife who endured her marriage without breaking faith, a mother who offered her sons to God to spare them the sin of murder, a religious vocation considered impossible yet granted in the most wondrous fashion. The most striking sign of this patronage is the stigma she bore on her forehead: having prayed before a crucifix to share in Christ's suffering, a thorn from the Crown broke free and embedded itself in her flesh, leaving an open wound she carried for fifteen years. This wound, temporarily closed for her pilgrimage to Rome but reopened upon her return, stands in Catholic tradition as the tangible mark of a woman who entered into the very impossibility of the Passion.

To invoke Saint Rita, red roses — her most recognized symbol — are placed at the prayer space, preferably on May 22, her feast day. The nine-day novena is prayed in the evening, ideally including the Magnificat, the hymn of Mary that sings of divine mercy overturning human situations. Honey, another traditional offering, recalls a legend from her childhood: bees are said to have circled her mouth without stinging her, a sign of purity. In popular piety, she is entrusted specifically with causes no longer submitted to human hands — hopeless medical files, reconciliations deemed impossible, desperate longings for a child — in the recognition that any miracle, if it comes, can only come from above.