Saint Rita (1381 – May 22 1457) was born at Roccaporena near Cascia in the Diocese of Spoleto (Spoleto), Italy. The name is perhaps a shortening of Margherita.
In the parish church of Laarne, near Ghent, there is a statue of Saint Rita in which several bees feature. This seems to arise from the story that, on the day after her baptism, a swarm of white bees was seen around the baby as she was asleep in her crib. They went in and out of her mouth. Her family seems to have been mystified rather than alarmed. Later, and in retrospect, the bees were seen as representing her subsequent beatification by Pope Urban VIII.
Her parents arranged her marriage, despite the fact that Rita repeatedly begged them to allow her to enter a convent. Rita's husband was a man of quick temper. (This might be assumed to be why she is represented as having a wound on her head but is not so.) The husband made enemies in the region and one night, he was set upon and killed. (Some accounts say that he was ambushed, others that he provoked a quarrel and was killed.)
While Rita continued to care for her sons, it became clear as they grew up that they were intent upon exacting revenge for the death of their father. Rita sought to persuade them otherwise, telling them that such a killing would be murder. She also prayed that they would not carry out their plans. Both sons died of natural causes within the year.
With her husband and sons gone, she was able to become a nun and entered the monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene at Cascia at age 36 and stayed there until her death in 1457. While she was there, a thorn detached itself from Christ's crown of thorns and set itself in her forehead - hence the representation of a head wound. She was beatified by Urban VIII in 1627, to whose private secretary Fausto Cardinal Poli, born less than ten miles from her birthplace, much of the impetus behind her cult is due; she was canonized on May 24, 1900 by Leo XIII. Her feast day is May 22.
A large sanctuary of Saint Rita was built in the early 20th century in Cascia: it and the house in which she was born are among the most active pilgrimage sites of Umbria. Saint Rita, along with Saint Jude is a patron saint of "Lost Causes".
