Saint Rita: Saint of the Impossible

Bought for a friend who's very pleased with it.

Like the rosary, the Fifteen Thursdays devotion to Saint Rita included in this volume provides an opportunity for learning the exemplary life of one of the Church's most remarkable saints and fosters a cumulative and enlightening meditation on the revealed truth of the Catholic faith.Each set of Thursday prayers and reflections concentrates on a chapter of Rita's life based on the current state of historical scholarship about her relationship with her aged parents, the complex politics involved in her admission to the Augustinian convent and her novitiate, and her fifteen years of bearing the wound from Christ's crown of thorns.Particularly instructive here is the restraint with which this text acknowledges the role of tradition in such episodes as the miracles which recur throughout Rita's infancy and her last days, as well as in the convincing portrait of her lengthy arranged marriage to the supposedly "ferocious" Paolo Mancini (so-called thanks to a centuries-old misreading of an inscription on Rita's sarcophagus). Rita appears here as a nurturing presence to her beleaguered soldier husband and vengeful sons, an unflappable and resourceful peacemaker whose bereavement was truly heartfelt and whose prayers for her departed loved ones were genuine.Finally, the devotion's concluding remarks about the growth of Rita's cult call attention to the incorrupt state of her body and emphasize the decisive role in her eventual canonization of popular testimony, a phenomenon that endures throughout the world to this day.With each completion of the Fifteen Thursdays, the devotee of Rita of Cascia achieves a spiritual edification offered by few other figures in the communion of saints. Buy this book, drop to your knees every Thursday, and make known her favor!