The Patroness of the Impossible
By Carolyn Ferguson
When I have a daughter, I’ll tell her the story of the Patroness of the Impossible. I’ll whisper to her how the white bees circled St. Rita as a child, and how though her heart yearned for something else at so young an age, her parents forced her into a marriage with a violent man. I’ll tell her about the Romeo and Juliet feudal era that she lived in, the murder and the revenge.
But again and again, St. Rita never gave up. Even when those around her, even when her circumstances and when the world all seemed so hell bent on telling her she was wrong, St. Rita persisted.
Now her shrine is painted in a feminine pink and red, like a Valentine’s Day postcard, tucked in a gritty corner of South Philly where cars park in the middle of the street. I’ll tell her how once a year, thousands of pilgrims flock to this shrine to raise roses in her honor. I’ll tell my daughter how her mama used to visit her shrine during some of the hardest years of her life, worn and weary and sitting alone, and how St. Rita always seemed to intervene. How she saved my life.
And as my girl’s eyes widen when I end with the miraculous story of the rose, I’ll lean in and whisper, “You too are called to be a saint. Just like daddy. Just like me. We can be like St. Rita if we keep trying and never give up, even when things seem…impossible.”
S. Rita was born in Roccaporena, Italy in the 14th century and her life was pretty much hell on earth; yet, despite this, she never gave up, which is why today she is the patroness for the impossible, for loneliness, Church abuse, and difficult marriages. I like to equate her to St. Jude's female equivalent, and I call the two of them my dynamic duo. They are powerhouses for miracles, and as I watched the amount of pilgrims flooding the shrine on one of her feast days, their numbers only gave testament to her intercession.
When St. Rita was baptized, she was surrounded by a swarm of white bees but was not harmed, causing her family to recognize something miraculous in her at a young age. A few short years later, she begged her parents to allow her to enter a convent but instead, was married off at age twelve to an abusive man. Her husband Paolo naturally had many enemies and eventually his life was ended by the hands of them, leaving this young widow to tame her two sons' passionate thirst for revenge.
Her witness for forgiveness spoke louder though. With her public compassion towards her husband's murderers and fervent prayers to God, her sons were saved from falling into mortal sin. It was around this time that St. Rita pursued her vocation to the convent, though again and again she was denied. Her determination deepened and eventually, through the intercession of some of her dear saints, she was permitted entrance at the age of thirty-six.
Her earthly trials were not enough and she began to invoke the Lord to share in His own burdens. That's when she received the wound we so often see depicted on her forehead, as if a thorn from Christ's crown pierced her with a mark that would never heal and inflicted daily burdens until her death. As if that weren't enough, St. Rita also became bedridden from tuberculosis.
Because she could no longer go outside, she requested a rose be picked from her garden in her old home. Though it was January, there was miraculously a single rose in bloom.
St. Rita's body remains incorrupt, and her life is marked with frequent occasions of never giving up even when the trials sent her way seemed too heavy to bear. Her feast day is May 22nd.
