Who was St. Rita of Cascia?
Rita was born at Roccaporena, a hamlet a few kilometers from Cascia in the Umbrian hills. When, nobody is sure. The Sanctuary of St. Rita, which keeps her body and her records, gives two possibilities, 1371 and 1381; Vatican News says probably 1371, Franciscan Media 1381, and the old Catholic Encyclopedia 1386. Her parents, Antonio Lotti and Amata Ferri, were known in the valley as peacemakers, people called in to settle feuds. She wanted the convent. Instead, as a girl, she was married to Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino.
Here the sources part ways, and it matters. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls her husband "a man extremely cruel and ill-tempered"; Franciscan Media says she was "pressured at a young age into marrying a harsh and cruel man," and that the marriage lasted eighteen years. The sanctuary in Cascia reads the records differently: Paolo was "a resentful Ghibelline and nothing else," a hard man caught in the factional politics of the town, and it says he was not violent toward her. What every source agrees on is that she bore the marriage with patience, that she drew him toward a more Christian life, and that he was murdered, by tradition around 1406, near a place called the Mulinaccio. She forgave the killers and never gave their names. The couple had two sons, Giangiacomo and Paolo Maria. The Encyclopedia says she begged them not to avenge their father and that they died reconciled to God; the sanctuary says they died young, one soon after the other, probably of plague or another illness.
Widowed and childless, Rita asked to enter the Augustinian monastery of St. Mary Magdalene in Cascia and was refused. Vatican News says she was admitted only after the feuding families made peace; the sanctuary dates her entry to around 1407, when she was about thirty-six. She lived there for the rest of her life. In 1432, before a crucifix, she received a wound in her forehead, as from one thorn of the crown, which did not heal and stayed with her until death. Near the end, in a January snow, she asked a relative to bring her a rose and two figs from her old garden at Roccaporena. They were found. That is why she is painted with roses.
She died on the night of May 21 to 22. The sanctuary gives two possible years, 1447 or 1457, to match its two possible birth years; Franciscan Media gives 1457, Vatican News 1447, the Encyclopedia 1456. Her body was never buried; the people of Cascia began venerating her at once, and it rests today in a silver and crystal urn in the basilica there. Her beatification is dated three ways. Franciscan Media says she was beatified in 1626. The sanctuary says her process opened that year and counts Urban VIII's approval of her cult in 1627 and 1628 as the beatification. The Encyclopedia says he permitted her Mass and Office in 1637. Leo XIII canonized her on May 24, 1900, the first woman raised to the altars in the Holy Year of 1900.
Why Catholics pray to St. Rita for impossible cases, a hard marriage and forgiveness
The title "saint of the impossible" was not given by Rome. The Encyclopedia says she received it in Spain, as "La Santa de los impossibiles," because of the miracles reported through her prayers; the sanctuary traces it to her care for plague victims, from whom she never caught the disease. It is a traditional patronage, and so are the others: difficult marriages, infertility and parenthood, which Franciscan Media lists, and the hopeless case of any kind.
People go to Rita because her life is a list of things that should not have worked out. A forced marriage. A husband murdered. Two sons dead. A convent door shut in her face. She prayed through each of them and was not spared any of them, and that is the point. John Paul II, speaking to pilgrims on the centenary of her canonization in 2000, called her an "expert in suffering" who became "the advocate of the poor and the despairing," and named the heart of her holiness as "the offer of forgiveness and the acceptance of suffering." He also passed on Leo XIII's own judgment, that she "pleased Christ so much that he chose to imprint upon her the seal of his charity and his passion."
So a Catholic asks her for the marriage that looks finished, the diagnosis with no good options, the relative who will not speak to the family, and, hardest of all, for the grace to forgive someone who has done real harm. Rita forgave her husband's murderers without excusing the murder. That is the forgiveness she is asked for.
How to pray to St. Rita
Her day is May 22, an Optional Memorial on the General Roman Calendar, and a novena is commonly made in the nine days before it. But pray to her whenever the thing you are facing looks impossible.
Say the prayer below once, then name the case plainly. Take it to Mass. Take the resentment, if there is one, to Confession, which is where forgiveness usually begins for people who do not feel it yet.
One thing must be said clearly. If your marriage involves violence, or fear of violence, Rita's patience is not a model to copy. The sanctuary that keeps her records says her husband was not violent toward her; the older writers call him cruel; either way, her holiness lay in forgiveness, not in staying in danger. Prayer to her goes alongside a call to the police, a doctor, a domestic violence hotline or a counselor, never in place of one. Ask her to pray for you while you make the call.