Novena to St. Rita of Cascia (Patron of Impossible Causes)

St. Rita of Cascia (1381-1457) is the Italian saint known as the Patroness of Impossible Causes (sharing the title with St. Jude Thaddeus). Born Margherita Lotti in the small Umbrian village of Roccaporena, she desired from childhood to enter religious life but was given in marriage at twelve to a violent and unfaithful husband named Paolo Mancini. Over eighteen years of marriage, through what hagiographies describe as patient love and prayer, she gradually transformed him — until he was murdered in a family vendetta when she was thirty. Her two adolescent sons swore revenge; Rita prayed that they would die before committing the sin of murder, and both did, of natural causes, within a year. Twice-widowed and twice-bereaved, she sought entrance to the Augustinian monastery at Cascia and was refused three times because she was not a virgin. In 1407, after she reconciled the warring families of her late husband and son, the monastery accepted her. She lived as an Augustinian nun for forty more years, becoming known for her sanctity, her care of the sick, and her bearing of a partial stigmata — a single thorn-wound on her forehead from a 1442 mystical experience meditating on the Crown of Thorns, which she carried for the remaining fifteen years of her life. She died on May 22, 1457, and was canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1900. The novena to St. Rita is appropriate for: any situation that seems beyond human remedy — a marriage in violence or infidelity, a child in grave moral danger, a long-standing family enmity, a 'lost cause' diagnosis, an addiction or wandering of faith that has resisted every intervention. She is also the particular intercessor for victims of domestic abuse (her own marriage) and for parents whose children's spiritual fate is in jeopardy.