Philly's 'Saint of the Impossible'

“It's a very special privilege to be back in my old hometown in what was my moth-er's special church.”

So said the late Cardinal John O’Connor in 1998 to several bus-loads of people he led on a pilgrimage to the National Shrine of St. Rita of Cascia in Philadelphia. He knew firsthand the intercessory power of St. Rita, called the “saint of the impossible,” whose feast the Church celebrates May 22. (She can also give you some child-rearing techniques — see page 16.)

As a young boy growing up in Philadelphia, the cardinal would often go with his mother to the shrine. Although she went completely blind from unexplainable causes when her son was a baby, that didn’t stop Dorothy O’Connor from faithfully attending novenas at the shrine for many years to thank and petition St. Rita.

She joined the thousands who flocked to the Renaissance-style church. One night, the cardinal explained, his mother said she woke to a vision of St. Rita. Maybe it was the picture of the saint on her wall, he added. “At any rate,” he said, “she could see.” The cardinal's mother credited St. Rita for her restored vision and united with countless other pilgrims who reported receiving a miraculous answer to prayer here.

In 1907, seven years after St. Rita was canonized, the Augustinians founded the church to serve as an ethnic parish for Italian immigrants living in the city. Services were held in the lower church until the upper one was completed in 1915. In the early years, as many as 1,000 babies were baptized yearly.

Wife, Mother, Widow, Nun

As the neighborhood changed, the parish register grew much smaller, but the pilgrims and visitors continue to come. Their constant numbers and the centennial celebration of St. Rita's canonization in the Jubilee Year 2000 motivated a major renovation of the upper church.

From the outside, even the impressive 14th-century-style facade doesn’t give people any inkling just how large and grand the upper church is on the inside. Its cathedral-like proportions and beauty surprises many first-time visitors.

The painted ceilings are 80 feet high. One of the two major murals honors the Holy Trinity in a familiar pose. This reminder of the Trinity repeats over and over symbolically as interlocking triangles within a circle in the floor mosaic.

The other stunning painting that soars in the apse high above the altar pictures St. Rita accompanied by angels and saints as she enters heaven. Beneath it, the magnificent main altar, guarded by gigantic angels to either side, has a tall reredos topped by a gray-white image of St. Rita. Towering above everything is a spectacular baldachin with sculpted angels, personified virtues and a cross.

St. Rita, who died on May 22, 1457, was a wife, mother, widow — and Augustinian nun. The church-shrine tells her story marvelously in art, beginning with the stained-glass windows lining one side of the nave. They’re by the world-master F.X. Zettler in Munich.

One, for example, pictures St. Rita's patron saints — John the Baptist, Augustine and Nicholas of Tolentine — accompanying her to the Augustinian convent in Cascia where she had been turned down three times. Her patrons showed her how to open the door.

Born in Umbria, Rita married at 16 and had two sons. Then, 16 years later, her husband was killed by political rivals. Within a year her sons died.

As a passport to the convent, Rita reconciled the families of her slain husband and their political rivals. When she convinced them to sign a formal document with a promise to live in peace, Rita was welcomed into the convent. Later, as a saint, she would also be titled “peacemaker” and “reconciler and promoter of family harmony.”

Rita received the stigmata in the form of a thorn from Our Lord's crown that pierced her forehead. She bore it for 15 years. Before she died, she asked for a rose from her family home. To her it would be a sign that her prayers for her deceased family had been heard. It was January, but her cousin found one rose growing through the snow.

The windows depicting this and the other important chapters in St. Rita's life story gently guide the eye to the elaborate St. Rita altar to the rear. Its marble columns and arch frame a bright bas-relief of St. Rita contemplating Jesus crucified. Above, an angel holding a crown of flowers watches intently from the azure sky. The tabernacle displays a relic of St. Rita for veneration.

More awaits pilgrims and visitors in the former lower church, newly constructed into another shrine honoring St. Rita. The novena draws thousands during its nine days plus the celebration of the solemn feast on May 22.

The hub of this lower shrine is a remarkable bronze statue of Rita in ecstasy the moment after she receives the stigmata. She holds the thorn that pierced her forehead, and her gaze draws us to turn to see what she sees. On the far wall, the object of her intense look is an image of Jesus of Holy Saturday. He is still crowned with thorns but is beginning to rise from the tomb. This depiction was popular in Rita's time; on it she focused her own devotion. The bronzes are the work of Anthony Visco, a parishioner.

On the reliquary wall, the gift from the Augustinian Sisters in Cascia offers cause for reflection: the pillow from St. Rita's coffin. Her hands rested on it from 1935-47. There's also a relic with a piece of the saint's flesh from her incorrupt body.

Every square inch of this place reminds us that, with God, nothing is impossible.

Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.