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| St Rita of Casia: Patron of abused wives and widows |
I grew up hearing stories
about Jesus and his saints. They were
usually fantastic exaggerations like Saint Francis talking to birds or Saint
George saving an innocent girl from a monstrous dragon. So when I read about Saint Rita of Casia in
Marquez’s autobiography, Living to Tell the
Tale, I burst into laughter. Marquez
says that his mother used to narrate the story to the children.
Rita of Casia had an
alcoholic husband. He returned home one
night maddened by alcohol. Rita’s hen
had just left her droppings on the dining table. Rita didn’t get the time to clean the
immaculate tablecloth as the husband staggered in. She managed to place an inverted plate over
the hen’s droppings before asking her drunk husband, “What would you like to
eat?”
The man growled, “Shit.”
Rita just lifted the
plate and said with her saintly sweetness, “Here you are.”
The husband was amazed by
the miracle. He was convinced by his
wife’s holiness and became a devout follower of Christ.
Wikipedia tells me that
the husband was killed in a family feud.
But Marquez’s mother was not teaching history to her children. She was teaching religion. So the twisting of history is justified, I
guess.
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