St. Rita with Bees Praying at a Crucifix Mini Candle Favors

Born Margherita Lotti (1381-1457), baby St. Rita, like the infant St. Ambrose, was swarmed upon by bees as she lay asleep in her cradle the day after her baptism. The bees were white and flew in and out of her mouth without hurting her. Her dumbfounded parents like St. Ambrose’s took it as a sign of heavenly favor—albeit not as a presage of oratorical greatness (after all she was a girl in an age when public speaking roles for women were severely limited) but of industry and holiness. To some extent, her parents were wrong. St Rita must have been a persuasive speaker: she eventually converted her allegedly violent, abusive husband before his murder in a vendetta to a more Christian lifestyle; she mediated a peace between the extended families of her husband and his assassin ending the cycle of vengeance; and—although a little miracle helped--she talked her way into the Augustinian Monastery of St. Mary Magdalene despite an outright rejection at first and then, later, despite the persistent misgivings of the Superior and other nuns. But, her parents were also right: their little Rita grew up to be both industrious and holy in spite of--or, perhaps, because of—the many hardships she endured. (In addition to losing her husband, St. Rita’s twin sons died of dysentery—a blessing in disguise since they could not commit the mortal sin of murder avenging their father’s death.) Wife, mother, widow, nun--St. Rita lived a life so fraught with difficulties that she is principally regarded patronage-wise as the female counterpart of St. Jude: a patron of impossible and lost causes. + While bees are not an official patronage of St. Rita but merely a sometimes attribute, bees and bee-friendly gardens may be committed to her care: At Cascia, in the monastery where St. Rita spent the last 40 years of her life, mason bees have created a hive in a courtyard wall. Every year for centuries now the bees have emerged from the wall during Holy Week and buzz around until her feast day on May 22. In the 17th century, Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644) demonstrated the constancy of ‘Rita’s bees’ by tagging a bee brought from Cascia for his examination with a silk thread. Set free, the bee was later found back home in the Cascia hive. (St. Rita was beatified by the selfsame Pope Urban in 1627.) + In this painting, St. Rita kneels before a crucifix on a wooden altar. She is clad in the all-black habit of an Augustinian nun. The habit, however, is an anachronism. In St. Rita’s day, the nuns of her convent wore a brown or beige habit and white veil with a black stripe running inches above the hem. The repetition of this image and its slight variants on innumerable devotional prints has enshrined this portrayal in popular memory as her definitive image. While at prayer, St. Rita is receiving a partial stigmata: a single wound to the forehead from a thorn from the Crucified Christ’s Crown of Thorns. Among her other attributes are roses and a discipline, that is, for a small scourge or whip used for penance and self-mortification. Bees hover in the space between the kneeling Saint and the altar. Perhaps unaware of their iconographical significance, bees are the feature most often omitted by artists in variations on this scene and in many modern portrayals. + A side note: Statuettes of St. Rita with a spattering of bees clinging to her habit, modeled after a statue in the Sint-RitaKirk at Kontich, Antwerp, are very popular in Belgium. + Image Credit (M 066): Antique image from a devotional print of St. Rita of Cascia, after a painting by an undetermined artist, from WikiMedia Commons, Public Domain. The image file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.