Saint Rita of Cascia

About Saint Rita of Cascia

Rita was born around 1381 in Roccaporena, in Umbria. She had wanted to be a nun since childhood, but her parents married her off young to a violent man. She lived eighteen years in that marriage, raised two sons and, when her husband was murdered in a feud between families, publicly forgave his killers and stopped her sons from avenging their father.

Widowed and with no surviving children, she knocked three times at the door of the Augustinian monastery in Cascia and was turned away three times. On the fourth she was let in. She spent forty years there. For the last fifteen she carried an open wound on her forehead, which devotion attributes to a thorn from Christ's crown, and which forced her to live apart because of the smell. She died in 1457.

Wife, mother, widow and nun: Rita passed through every state of an ordinary life, and every sorrow in them. That is why she is the saint of impossible causes, invoked when a marriage stalls, when a child goes astray, when a hurt will not heal. A message from Saint Rita is often sent on 22 May, for wedding anniversaries, or to someone who needs the strength to forgive.

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