Feast day: March 9
St. Frances of Rome
Roman noblewoman who balanced 40 years of marriage and motherhood with heroic service to Rome's poor and plague-stricken.
Frances was born to a noble Roman family in 1384 and, though she longed to become a nun, was married at twelve, as her father wished, to a young nobleman, Lorenzo Ponziani. The marriage, which lasted forty years, was happy, and Frances became a model of how holiness can be lived in the midst of family duties, wealth, and a violent age.
Rome in her lifetime was racked by plague, famine, war, and the chaos of the papal schism. Frances turned her palace into a refuge: she sold her jewels to feed the hungry, nursed the sick in the city's hospitals, and went through the streets gathering the poor, often joined by her sister-in-law Vannozza.
Amid wars that twice drove her family into exile and cost her two of her children, she bore every loss with serenity. A celebrated mystic, she was said to enjoy the constant visible companionship of her guardian angel — the source of her later patronage of motorists, as one safely guided along the road.
In 1425 she founded a community of pious women, the Oblates of Mary, who lived in the world without vows, devoted to prayer and charity. After her husband's death she joined them as their superior. She died in 1440 and was canonized in 1608.
She's the patron of drivers because she reportedly traveled with her guardian angel lighting the road ahead like a headlamp.
“A married woman must, when called upon, quit her devotions to God at the altar to find Him in her household affairs.”
— St. Frances of Rome
Image: Antoniazzo Romano (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/06205c.htm
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