St. Rosalia

Rosalia of Palermo is one of those saints whose historical biography is sparse but whose cult proved enormously significant at a precise and dramatic moment of crisis. She was, by local tradition, a Norman noblewoman of Sicily, said to be a relative of King Roger II, who withdrew from the court at Palermo around 1160 to live as a hermit — first near Bivona and then in a cave on Monte Pellegrino above the city. She died there alone, and her memory was kept alive for several centuries mainly in local devotion, without the institutional recognition that would carry it beyond Palermo.

Then, in 1624, plague struck the city. Palermo in the seventeenth century was one of the great Mediterranean ports, and plague when it came to such cities came thoroughly. During the years of the epidemic, a series of alleged visions directed searchers to the cave on Monte Pellegrino where Rosalia's bones were buried. The relics were found, examined, and translated through the city in solemn procession in 1625. The plague ceased. The connection between the relic translation and the end of the epidemic was taken by the city as manifest, and Rosalia became Palermo's principal patron; the great feast on September 4, the anniversary of the finding of the bones, became one of the most celebrated in all of Sicily.

This sequence can be recorded without undertaking to establish the causal relationship between the relics and the epidemic's end — that would exceed what the evidence permits — but it is not negligible. The Church's judgment, expressed in approving the cult and later in her beatification, was that the connection was credible enough to warrant the devotion. The more striking theological note in Rosalia's story is the reversal: the woman who sought complete obscurity, who retreated into a cave and disappeared from the world, became through her disappearance the protectress of one of the great cities of the Mediterranean. The hidden life had, at the moment the city most needed it, an overwhelming public consequence.