Feast day: September 4

St. Rose of Viterbo

Virgin · 1233–1251

Patron of Young people

A girl of Viterbo who as a child preached in the streets for the pope against a tyrant's rule, was exiled with her family for it, and died at eighteen.

Rose was born about 1233 to a poor family in Viterbo, in central Italy, and from her earliest childhood was marked by an extraordinary precocity in holiness. She is said to have given herself to prayer and penance while still a small child, and to have joined the Third Order of St. Francis — living as a laywoman consecrated to God in the world.

She lived in a time of fierce conflict between the papacy and the emperor Frederick II, whose forces then controlled Viterbo and whose partisans threatened the Church. Though only a young girl, Rose felt called to take a public stand: she went out into the streets and squares of her city to preach repentance and loyalty to the Church, an astonishing thing for a girl of her age and station.

Her boldness made her dangerous. The imperial party had her and her family banished from Viterbo; from exile she continued to preach and, tradition says, foretold the emperor's death. When the city returned to the papal side she came home, but her wish to enter the local convent of Poor Clares was refused for her poverty.

She died about 1251, only seventeen or eighteen years old, and her body is said to remain incorrupt to this day in the convent that had once turned her away, now renamed for her. Canonized in the centuries that followed, she is honoured as a patron of the young.

Barely into her teens, she stood on the street corners of her city preaching loyalty to the Church — and was banished for it before she was grown.

Image: artist unknown (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/13193a.htm