Saint Rita is invoked in desperate cases and is one of the most popular saints in Italy and around the world; she made a masterpiece of her life, beginning with a fundamental insight: to unite one’s own suffering with that of Jesus in order to draw extraordinary fruits from it. If we had to sum up the secret of her holiness in two points, we could say: acceptance of the cross and the ability to forgive, despite everything and everyone.
Precisely because, through her own life, she is able to teach us forgiveness, Rita has much to say to today’s world, which often believes that war and hatred prevail, forgetting that, on the contrary, love always has the last word.
Rita was a complete woman and lived as a wife, mother, widow, and finally a nun, experiencing pain up close and witnessing firsthand the consequences of hatred and war… She responded to everything by embracing Christ and his cross.
This can be seen clearly in what happened to her husband, Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino: he was killed by a rival gang, like the many that existed in Cascia at the time, a “town full of factions and vendettas”: Guelphs against Ghibellines, abuses by nobles and bourgeois against commoners, feuds and vendettas between families, popular uprisings, conflicts between cities and the countryside, brawls between factions, political crimes. Every act of violence grew like a spreading stain and in a chain reaction: hatred smoldered for generations and spread to neighbors and relatives. Even decades later, revenge could still come.
We can therefore imagine Rita as a wife and mother like many women today, so much like the women we see weeping over the injustice of war and the family tragedies that overwhelm them. The anguish over the death of the man she loved grew even worse at the thought of the blood feud that was about to erupt and that could involve her children.
How did Rita face this tragedy? An ancient biography says that she “prayed to God for the murderer, in obedience to God’s holy commandment and remembering the example of her Lord, who, while hanging on the cross, forgave his executioners; indeed, she prayed and urged her children as much as she could to forgive and to let go of the offense for the love of God.” Rita was tormented by the thought that her children might seek revenge, and so she suffered and prayed until she obtained from them a forgiveness like her own.
In her chapel at the shrine in Cascia, she is depicted holding her children close and firmly pointing them toward the Crucifix: by looking at it while pain gripped her heart, she had learned to forgive; by showing it to her children, she had awakened in them the same disposition of heart.
“She could have been an average or even a very poor Christian, embittered by suffering and driven to rebel. Instead, she became a Saint” (A. Trapé).
By following in her footsteps, we too can discover the pure power of forgiveness!
