My Life With St Ria
3 years ago, all I knew about Saint Rita was her name and that she was depicted with a strange dot on her head. I didn’t know when or where she lived, what she was patroness of, that the dot was the mark of her stigmata, or anything about her. She came into my life on one very dramatic day, and I’ve prayed for her intercession every day since then. As noted in the About the Author in The Loser, the Robot, and the Antichrist, I have also promised to dedicate my 3rd book to her and donate any profits.
3 days before I met Rita, I was arrested. I went overnight from being a stay-home dad homeschooling my kids in a stable Catholic marriage, to being accused of a violent crime and not being allowed to see my kids while my wife let the latest in a series of adulterous lovers live with my family. When I was released from jail, I was still new to Indiana and didn’t know many people to call. I was able to get my friend’s wife to pick me up from the jail and take me to a hotel. She knew that I liked to pray and read spiritual books, and grabbed a handful of random holy cards, literature, and a rosary from her shelf, including a card of St Rita.
That night in the hotel I idly flipped through the books and cards to distract myself from my racing thoughts and fears. Eventually I read the short paragraph on the life of St Rita printed inside the holy card, and the connection felt miraculous.
The woman who gave me the card said she hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other. She had prayed a novena to St Rita years ago while looking for a job, and always had a devotion to her since then.
The first thing I noticed was Rita was the patroness of bad marriages. After covering up a lot of problems for years, I finally had to tell friends and family about the past and admit it had been a very bad situation since the beginning.
The Second thing I noticed was that Rita had wanted to be a nun when she was young and had only been allowed to live that vocation after the death of her husband. I had been interested in monastic life since I was 14 and learned about it through Buddhist texts. It was mainly the Christian monastic tradition that attracted me and lead to my conversion in college. When my wife and I were first engaged, years before I had a Christian view of the permanence of marriage, I told her I felt it would be a temporary union until I could pursue a more solitary life. Ultimately, I concluded that what I wanted was a life of contemplation, not a monastery, but looking at her late vocation just as I was finally on my own for the first time as an adult was very significant.
Third, she was a female saint. That was significant to me at the time because I was falsely accused of battery, of being a wife-beater, an enemy of women. It was consoling for me when many of the women in my circle of friends began telling me they didn’t believe the accusations and wanted to support me, and it was similarly significant that the saint who wished to support me from heaven was a woman who had been mistreated by her husband.
Fourth, she is the patroness of impossible causes. I was falsely accused of a serious crime. I couldn’t see my children. I didn’t know who among my friends I could trust. I didn’t have a place to live. I didn’t know if I would have to go back to jail. I had quit my job to be a stay-home dad and didn’t have a steady income. This woman whose life lined up with mine was also the woman in charge of helping with situations like mine.
About a week after I was released from jail, a friend told me he had gone to daily mass to pray for me. His pastor was gone, and the mass was said by an Augustinian priest from the shrine of St Rita in Chicago. He preached about the construction of her great shrine in Italy. I had not known there were Augustinian monks in Chicago maintaining a shrine to St Rita, but it seemed to be a confirmation that she really was interceding for me.
A few months after that I was at my own Byzantine parish. We also had a visiting priest. It turned out to be yet another Augustinian, one who was bi-ritual and helped out with the Byzantine parishes in the area. I went from knowing nothing about this saint to having her order coming to meet my without seeking them out. I made arrangements with him to be let into the shrine where I prayed in front of her relics and touched several holy cards to them to distribute to friends.
After that, believing that I really did have a powerful intercessor, the only saint who had forced her way into my life without my searching, I wrote a list of 10 petitions and promised to write a book dedicated to her when they were answered.
Some of them have been. My original criminal charges were dropped. I got my kids back. I found an old document I had written right after my conversion about how I would like to live something like a monastic lifestyle in the world, married or not, and now that I’m working from home praying the Office I’ve found I have exactly the kind of life I described.
Other petitions I’m still waiting on, and I’m not sharing them until I feel they’ve been answered.
But I have begun writing the 3rd book, which should be out sometime next year. Currently I am hoping to donate any profits to the new Chesterton Academy that should be opening in my region next year. If it’s successful, it would help toward one of my petitions.
I’ve had devotions to various saints over the years, but they’ve always been people I sought out because I was interested in their lives or their writings. Rita is the only saint who seemed to have forced her way into my life all on her own. Though my fervor has waxed and waned over the last 3 years, I continue to pray to her daily and feel quite confident she will see me through the rest of my requests.