I have always felt that May is the loveliest of months. Here in the northern hemisphere, during this time of the year, Spring is in full bloom and everything looks so colourful and cheerful. May is the month during which the piety of the faithful is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, mother of God and our mother as well. It is also the month when we celebrate Mother’s Day.
On May 22 the Church celebrates the feast day of Rita of Cascia who, along with Saint Jude, is the patron saint of impossible cases.
As you might know, I was born in Trieste, a seaport town in north-eastern Italy, and I was baptised in a parish church which was dedicated to Saint Rita. The church was located in a large basement hall of a block of flats – not your usual quaint little church. Those were the post-war years when money was hard to come by. Not many people could afford building new houses, let alone churches! In any case to me, a small child, that hall looked like a heavenly place, and I especially cherish the memory of the parish priest, Fr. Luigi Reiner.
I vividly remember the feast held in May in honour of the patron saint of our parish, Saint Rita. Various Masses were celebrated on that day and, at the end of each one, an enormous quantity of roses were blessed. These roses were donated by parishioners who picked them from their gardens. They were of almost every colour and variety, and they were all very beautiful. What fragrance they gave off!
At the end of each Mass, people hurried to the back of the church to take home one of the blessed roses; they would keep them for days in a vase and then, when the petals had all fallen off, they would collect and dry the petals in the sun and place them in a transparent bag and keep them throughout the year. At the moment of blessing, Fr. Luigi would recall the prodigious event in the life of the Saint that had originated that rite.
In January 1457 Saint Rita, lying ill in her monastic cell in Cascia, asked a cousin to bring her a rose. Tradition affirms that God granted this desire: Rita’s relative was able to pick a rose for her, found blooming amidst the winter snow.
“We invoke the Lord who generously grants spiritual and material graces to those who call upon him so that he may deign to bless these roses which are for us a homage to the memory of Saint Rita,” Fr. Reiner used to say, adding, “it is a sign of her participation in the redeeming Passion of Jesus. In fact, in exchange for the thorn in her forehead that she bore for fifteen years, Saint Rita was miraculously given a rose in winter.”
And yes, dear readers, you must know that one day, while meditating in the chapel of her convent, Rita whispered to the Lord, “Please let me suffer like you, Divine Saviour.” And immediately afterwards a thorn from a figure of the crucifixion of Jesus fell from the crown of thorns and left a deep wound in Rita’s forehead, a wound that never healed and that was to cause her great suffering for the rest of her life.
My mother was very devoted to Saint Rita, and she told me that the Saint had helped her on many occasions in truly wonderful ways. She was so grateful to her that she had vowed to always keep some fresh flowers in front of a small image of the Saint. My mother used to keep this image in the kitchen so that Rita could be “closer to her”. From April to the end of November there was no problem finding fresh flowers because we had a garden with various rose bushes. It was more difficult from the late autumn on: the garden bore no new flowers so my mother was forced to buy them from the local flower shop. Roses were too expensive, and so she bought two carnations… always two carnations. Sometimes she sent me to the flower shop, and I have to confess that I always felt embarrassed asking for two carnations when the other clients were buying beautiful bouquets, ornamental plants or bunches of roses and lilies. Still, I am sure that Saint Rita was as happy as my mother when she saw those two carnations in front of that small image.
Let’s ask Saint Rita to intercede for our troubles, needs and fears, but first of all let’s ask her to teach us how to accept suffering as well as to forgive from our hearts, and to make us settle our minds and hearts in God, “for the Lord is good and his love endures forever” (Psalm 100:5).
Updated on October 06 2016