St. Zita

Zita of Lucca belongs to the category of saints whose biography is, on the surface, the simplest possible: she was a domestic servant who served one household for her entire adult life, served it faithfully, served it well, and died in it after sixty years. In this apparent simplicity lies one of the most instructive examples in the calendar.

She was born around 1218 at Monsagrati, a village near Lucca in Tuscany, to a poor family. At the age of twelve she entered the household of a wool merchant named Fatinelli in Lucca and remained there until her death in 1272 — a period of sixty years in the same house, in the same service, in the same city. Her early years in the household were not easy. She was generous to the poor from what she had, which was not hers to give away; she spent time in prayer when she should have been working, from her employers' point of view; the other servants resented both the piety and what looked like favoritism toward her. The friction was the ordinary friction of a genuinely devout person living in proximity with people who were neither devout nor otherwise, and it passes without drama.

The miracles that accumulated around her during her long service — the bread multiplied, the dinner miraculously prepared while she was at Mass, the angels who assisted when her duties exceeded her capacity — are the popular tradition's way of expressing that something was happening in that household beyond normal domestic service. She became in time the most trusted member of the Fatinelli family, the person to whom the most sensitive responsibilities were given, the figure around whom the poor of Lucca gathered knowing they would not be turned away.

She was canonized in 1696 and is the patron of domestic workers and servants. Her life is one of the clearest demonstrations that sanctity does not require an unusual life, only an unusual quality of attention and love directed at whatever life one has been given.