Saint Rita of Cascia

Widowed and then childless within a year

Rita of Cascia was born Margherita Ferri Lotti in 1381. Her parents arranged her marriage to Paolo Mancini, with whom she had two sons. Paolo was murdered while the boys were still young, and within a year both sons succumbed to a deadly illness — leaving Rita not only a widow, but childless as well, having lost her entire immediate family within a single year.

Entry into religious life, decades in the making

At thirty-six, Rita was finally accepted into the Augustinian convent in Cascia, having been baptized in the church of Saint Augustine there and long acquainted with its nuns at Saint Mary Magdalene Monastery. Over her forty years of monastic life, she devoted herself to prayer, penance, and fasting, while also regularly going out to serve the poor and sick of the town.

A wound that mirrored Christ's own crown

When Rita was around sixty years old, she was meditating before an image of Christ crucified when a small wound suddenly appeared on her forehead, as though a thorn from his crown of thorns had loosened itself and pierced her own flesh. Considered a partial stigma, she bore this mark for the remainder of her life, until her death from tuberculosis on May 22, 1457.

Patroness of impossible causes

Pope Leo XIII canonized Rita on May 24, 1900, bestowing on her at that ceremony the title "Patroness of Impossible Causes" — a title that traces directly back to a life defined by losses that seemed, at each turn, impossible to bear. Augustinians have kept her incorrupt body over the centuries, still venerated today at the shrine in Cascia.