St. Rita of Cascia

Who they were

Rita was born in a village near Cascia in Umbria and wanted to enter religious life from a young age. Her parents arranged a marriage instead, to a man the sources describe as harsh and violent, and she spent roughly eighteen years in it. They had two sons.

Her husband was murdered, in the course of one of the family feuds that ran through the region. Her sons, by the account, intended to avenge him. Rita is recorded as praying that they would die rather than commit murder, which is a startling thing for a mother to pray and is usually softened in retellings. Both boys died of illness within the year.

Widowed and childless, she asked to enter the Augustinian monastery at Cascia and was refused, more than once, in part because the community included relatives of the men involved in her husband's killing. She was eventually admitted, by tradition after she brought about a reconciliation between the feuding families.

She lived another forty years as a nun. In her later years she is described as bearing a wound on her forehead, understood as a partial stigmata from the crown of thorns, which reportedly kept her somewhat apart from the community because of it. She was canonized in 1900.

Her shrine at Cascia draws a particular kind of pilgrim. The letters left there are overwhelmingly from women, and overwhelmingly about marriages, sons, and situations that have gone on too long to discuss with anyone nearby. That is a fair description of what her cult has always been: not a triumphal devotion, but one carried by people whose circumstances did not improve on schedule.

She is often shown holding roses, from an account of her asking for one from her family's garden in the middle of winter and being brought it. The roses at Cascia are blessed on her feast day and taken home by the thousands.

Why people turn to St. Rita of Cascia

Rita is invoked for impossible causes alongside St. Jude, and for difficult and abusive marriages, and the two patronages are the same patronage. Her life contained a violent husband, murdered, two sons dead, a vocation refused for years, and a wound that isolated her. None of those situations resolved the way anyone would have chosen. What the tradition attaches to her is not rescue but endurance, and specifically the endurance of a woman in a situation she could not leave. That is why she remains one of the most-asked saints among people in exactly that position.

How to ask their intercession

Say what the situation is, including the part you would not say out loud to anyone else. If what you are describing is a marriage in which you are being hurt, please also tell a person who can help. Asking a saint to pray with you and getting yourself somewhere safe are not alternatives, and nothing in this devotion asks anyone to stay in danger.