As was normal at the time Rita’s parents arranged her marriage to a young man of the locality named Paul Mancini. No doubt Rita was a dutiful and loving wife, though the accounts of her saintly forbearance and patience with a wild and cruel husband may have grown in the telling without much historical evidence. Two sons were born to Paul and Rita and for a while they enjoyed a reasonably happy, if hard, family life. But all was soon to change.
The Cascia area was frequently the scene of feuds and faction fights, vendettas between families that lasted years or even generations, political and civil unrest, particularly the constant rivalry between Guelphs and Ghibellines that then divided much of Italy. A Pope at a slightly later date is quoted as saying «Cascia is a place full of factions and vendetta» (Martin V). Paul Mancini was involved in some way in the unrest, possibly as a result of his job as a city watchman. One evening as he returned to his family in Roccaporena he was stabbed and killed. Rita was now a widow with two young sons in circumstances where vengeance and further bloodshed seemed inevitable. She worried particularly for her sons and both their physical and moral wellbeing. She prayed and worked for reconciliation between the sworn enemies. Tragedy struck again and a strange answer to her prayers. Her two sons died while still in their teens, possibly from one of the many plagues or epidemics so common at the time rather that through the violence that had been her greatest fear. Rita the widow now had no family; she was alone in the world with only her faith and her trust in God to keep her going.
Gradually a new hope came into Rita’s life. Whether or not she had wished to become a nun as a young girl, she now felt strongly called to the life of an Augustinian nun in the convent in Cascia. She would find peace, security and rest in that convent. But not yet. Nothing was ever easy for Rita. Some of the nuns in the small convent were related to the murderers of Rita’s husband while others were from her late husband’s side. They were uneasy at the thought of having the widow among them with the bitterness and division this could bring. Rita was not accepted and she well knew why. She turned to prayer again. Little by little she worked at bringing the estranged parties together. Once again she became a peacemaker. Eventually peace was agreed between the feuding sides in Cascia and Rita was finally accepted into the convent. Legend would have it that Rita was transported overnight into the locked convent by her patron saints John the Baptist, Augustine and Nicholas of Tolentino and that it was this miracle that convinced the community to accept her. No doubt Rita’s devotion to these saints who were particularly honoured in the Augustinian churches in Cascia had much to do with it but their intercession in response to Rita’s prayers in bringing about reconciliation and peace may well have been the real miracle.
For the final thirty years of her life Rita would be an Augustinian nun in the Cascia convent, living a life of prayer and penance, work and charity. People with all kinds of problems would come to the Sisters for advice, help and consolation. Rita was always willing and also well prepared by her own experience of life to respond to these needs.
Rita shared the popular devotion of the time to the sufferings of Our Lord. She listened to sermons of the great preachers of the day when they came to Cascia and she spent long hours in personal prayer and meditation. One day she felt a thorn from Christ’s crown of thorns wound her own forehead which was to leave her with a painful stigma for the last fifteen years of her life. She had been praying before a favourite image, a representation of Christ rising from the grave but still bearing the wounds of his passion, the «Jesus of Holy Saturday». Rita bore her open wound in the same loving spirit of patient suffering on the way to risen life. For the last four years of her life frailty and illness confined Rita to her room. There is a tradition that the wound on her forehead healed temporarily to enable her to accompany her sisters on a pilgrimage to Rome. If so, this may have been for the canonization in 1446 of local Augustinian and her favourite saint Nicholas of Tolentino. Rita died in her seventieth year on 22nd May 1447.
An incident happened during her final days that together with the stigma of the thorn would become a defining element in the story and cult of Rita of Cascia. A relative from Roccaporena came to the convent to take her leave of the dying Rita. When leaving, as visitors to the sick are wont to do, she asked Rita if there was anything she would like. Rita made the strange request for a rose from the garden at her old home. Not much to ask, except that it happened to be a very cold January in the mountains round Roccaporena. «The raving of death», thought the visitor. On returning to the village, however, she was to find a lone rose in bloom in the garden. It was soon in Rita’s room in the convent in Cascia, with that enduring message about simple faith and the granting of «impossible» requests that would come down through the centuries associated with Rita’s name. Fittingly, the Saint of the Thorn became the Saint of the Rose.
The people of Cascia were in no doubt that Rita was a saint from the beginning. Ten years after her death her incorrupt body was placed in a richly decorated walnut coffin which can still be seen in the convent in Cascia and which bears two images that may well be portraits of Rita as she was in life. In the 18th century the body was transferred to a new gilded coffin after it had been damaged in an earthquake in the area. The remains, still bearing the mark of the wound in the forehead, now rest in a glass coffin in St Rita’s Basilica in Cascia.
At the beginning no official Church recognition was given to Rita, but her cult grew and spread among the ordinary faithful without any official opposition being voiced. Her body was not buried but was preserved in the convent chapel and her memory commemorated annually on 22nd May, the day she had died.
First official recognition came in 1628 when Pope Urban VIII authorised the keeping of the feast in the local diocese of Spoleto where he himself had been bishop before being elected Pope. Rita was beatified in 1737 and finally canonized by Pope Leo XIII on 24th May, 1900. Since her canonization devotion to the «Saint of the Impossible» has spread dramatically to many parts. It was only in the year 2000 that St Rita’s feast day was included, by authority of Pope John Paul II, as an optional memorial in the universal calendar of the Church. In this same year the Jubilee of the Devotees of St Rita was celebrated with Pope John Paul when the remains of St Rita were airlifted by the Italian police from Cascia to St Peter’s Square to be welcomed by the Pope.
In 1946 a magnificent new basilica was erected in her honour in Cascia close to the convent. There is also an orphanage, with the young girls known as St Rita’s Bees, and a retreat centre serving a very large number of retreatants of all ages and classes. Cascia has become a centre of pilgrimage for several million pilgrims every year. It is said that in Italy only St Anthony can rival St Rita in popularity today. As with Anthony of Padua the devotion to Rita of Cascia, «Saint of the Impossible» and «Advocate of the Helpless» has gone right round the Catholic world. Rita is an example and inspiration to so many people because in her own life she shared the experiences of so many in several different ways of life – wife, mother, widow, Religious – and always has an encouraging and consoling message for everyone.