St. Rita of Cascia

Rita of Cascia is one of the saints ordinary people have loved most easily because so much of her life was spent enduring what they themselves fear: a hard marriage, violent loss, family sorrow, and long illness. From youth she desired religious life, but in obedience to her parents she married instead. The world she entered was not gentle. Her husband was harsh and entangled in the feuds of the time, and her home stood close to the kind of vendetta life that could ruin whole families. Rita did not romanticize any of that. She met it with prayer, self-command, and a patience strong enough to soften her husband before his death. His murder only made the trial darker, especially when danger and revenge threatened her sons as well.

Only after passing through those losses was she able to enter the Augustinian convent at Cascia, the place she had first wanted in youth. There the outward drama gave way to another kind of greatness: obedience, hidden charity, severe penance, and deep meditation on the Passion of Christ. The famous wound associated with the crown of thorns belongs to that last period of her life, when suffering had become almost the language in which she offered herself to God. She died as she had lived for years, quietly, painfully, and faithfully. Her life remains compelling because it is not the life of a protected soul. It is the life of a woman who stayed faithful to Christ in precisely the places where bitterness, grief, and loneliness might have ruined her.