May 22: Feast of Saint Rita

Céline Arétin, head of cultural, women's and ecology-related topics, May 22, 2025

Who was Saint Rita?

Saint Rita of Cascia, born Margherita Lotti in 1381 in the hamlet of Roccaporena (Umbria), grew up in a family where her parents, Antonio Lotti and Amata Ferri, acted as mediators in local vendettas. Educated by the notary Ferreto, she was already reciting the psalter when, at the age of twelve, she was betrothed to Captain Paolo Mancini. Margherita gave birth to two sons, Giangiacomo Antonio and Paolo Maria. On February 21, 1406, Paolo Mancini fell to the blows of rivals as he returned from the fair at Poggiodomo. Fearing that her sons would embark on a vendetta, Rita prayed intensely that God would preserve them from mortal sin; a bout of typhoid fever carried them off during the winter of 1407, an event she interpreted as the preservation of their souls. A widow without heirs, she appealed to the abbess of the Augustinian nuns of Cascia, but the rule excluded women involved in bloodshed. Tradition holds that one night in October 1417, Saint John the Baptist, Saint Augustine and Saint Nicholas of Tolentino helped her pass through the locked doors. In the cloister, Rita adopted a strict ascetic regime: fasting on bread and water three days a week, sleeping on a bed of vine shoots and meditating on the chapters of the Passion. On Good Friday 1442, as she meditated before a polychrome wooden crucifix, a thorn came loose from the carved crown and lodged itself in her forehead, leaving a festering wound that never healed. In 1450, during the Jubilee proclaimed by Nicholas V, she made the pilgrimage to Rome; the wound closed just before she entered Saint Peter's Basilica, then reopened as soon as she returned to the convent. Rita passed away on May 22, 1457, after murmuring the Miserere.

Official recognition of Saint Rita

In September 1457, Bishop Domenico Graziani of Spoleto opened a diocesan inquiry in which six caregivers attested to sudden healings, but the cult remained local until the establishment of the Congregation of Rites by Sixtus V. In 1626, Urban VIII entrusted the cause to Cardinal Fausto Poli, who added 18 miracles verified by the physicians Picinelli and Ciampoli. In 1877, Pius IX charged the prefect Prospero Caterini with a further inquiry. After the confirmation of two modern miracles and the relative incorruptibility of the body, Leo XIII proclaimed the canonisation on May 24, 1900. On October 11, 1946, Pius XII declared Rita patron saint "of desperate causes and of couples in difficulty," a title inserted into the Roman Martyrology of 1969.