Saint Rita of Cascia

Rita was born about 1381 at Roccaporena near Cascia in Umbria. As a young woman she was married to a man of violent temper; after many years he was murdered in a feud, and her two sons died soon after. She then asked to enter the Augustinian convent at Cascia, and was at first refused, perhaps because of the feud; she was admitted after helping to make peace between the families.

She spent some forty years there. Her Life tells that for the last fifteen she bore a wound on her forehead like that of a thorn, and that shortly before her death a rose bloomed in her garden in winter. She died in 1457, probably on 22 May. Canonized in 1900, she is known in Italy as the saint of impossible causes.