Saint of the Issue: St. Frances of Rome

Within the walls of the Eternal City in the Year of Our Lord 1384, Frances of Rome was born to a wealthy family of old-blooded Roman aristocrats and was a very serious and pious child. She had a serious countenance and was a quiet girl, often expressing her desire to become a nun, and spending much time in prayer and recollection.

At the age of 12, however, her father demanded that she give up her desires for religious life, and instead marry Lorenzo Ponziani, a very wealthy nobleman and the commander of the armies of Papal Rome.

Initially resenting the idea of marriage, Frances would pray to God asking for Him to intervene until one day, opening her heart to her confessor, he asked her, “are you crying because you want to do God’s will, or because you want God to do your will?”

Upon hearing this, St. Frances immediately entered into the marriage, but as a consequence was dropped into the decadence of high aristocratic life in Rome at the young age of thirteen. Dances, parties, and banquets, as well as the expectations of her socialite mother-in-law, quickly overwhelmed her, and she fell gravely ill. For months she lay at death’s door, being slow to eat and unable to move or speak.

When she seemed closest to death, she was given a vision of St. Alexis. Hundreds of years earlier, St. Alexis fled from his own family in Rome in order to live as a beggar and to avoid marriage, returning years later and living unrecognized as a mere servant in their household. St. Alexis asked her a simple and shocking question: did Frances desire any longer to live? Did Frances want to recover?

The young girl responded in a whisper, “God’s will is mine.”

Her recovery was immediate. She resolved to endure the sufferings demanded of her as the wife of a nobleman, even though she should more easily have accepted scourgings and fasting. Frances felt entirely alone, separated from everybody but God. Her mother-in-law, not understanding her difficulties in living out her vocation, constantly pressured Frances into being more like Vannozza, Frances’s sister-in-law. Vannozza, her mother-in-law would say, enjoyed these parties, dinners, dances, and other functions, and carried through these things with the greatest joy and diligence. Frances, though she would now participate, was nevertheless very clearly sorrowful and melancholic.

One day, Frances was weeping while kneeling in the chapel. Vannozza, finding her there, asked why she wept. Frances told her it was because she had desired to become a nun, live a life of quiet contemplation and adoration of God, that the struggles of married life were exceedingly difficult to bear with, and that she was alone.

To the great surprise of Frances, Vannozza responded that she was in a similar state—she too had desired to become a nun and struggled to perform the duties expected of her. Vannozza said that all of her actions were a penance, and that she simply tried to do them all as best she could and in as pleasing a way as she could in order to do right by God and her husband.

Frances and Vannozza became quick friends, and from then would be nearly inseparable. Living “in the world but not of it,” Frances would have several children with her husband and be happily married for 40 years, even through some of the most trying circumstances one could imagine.

Through plague, religious upheaval, poverty, the loss of children, and war, St. Frances protected her family and community as best she could, all without losing her serene countenance or failing to trust in God. Having, by the grace of God, a lively spiritual life, she was also blessed with extraordinary external graces, including the ability to heal the sick and to see the presence of her guardian angel.

Her husband, dying in her care, spoke his last words: “I feel as though my whole life has been one beautiful dream of the purest happiness. God has given me so much in your love.” Upon his death, St. Frances moved into the house of an order of Oblates she had founded, and was made its superior. 

At 52 years old, Frances had everything she desired as a little girl of eleven. She would join her husband four years later. Her last words were, “the angel has finished his task—he beckons me to follow him.”

St. Frances of Rome, pray for us.