Our Lady of Guadalupe

Date: September, 4

St. Rosalia, daughter of Sinibald, Lord of Roses and Quisquina, was a descendant of the great Charlemagne. She was born at Palermo in Sicily.

In her youth, her heart turned from earthly vanities to God. She left her home and took up her abode in a cave, on the walls of which she wrote these words:

“I, Rosalia, daughter of Sinibald, Lord of Roses and Quisquina, have taken the resolution to live in this cave for the love of my Lord, Jesus Christ.” She remained there entirely hidden from the world.

She practiced great mortifications and lived in constant communion with God. Afterward she transferred her abode to Mount Pellegrino, about three miles from Palermo, in order to triumph entirely over the instincts of flesh and blood, in sight of her paternal home.

She is said to have appeared after death and to have revealed that she spent several years in a little excavation near the grotto. She died alone, in 1160, ending her strange and wonderful life unknown to the world. Her body was discovered several centuries later, in 1625, during the pontificate of Pope Urban VIII. Her feast day is September 4th.

St. Rosalia is the patron of not only Palermo, but of a handful of towns in Central and South America, and, of course, many parishes and dioceses around the world. She’s invoked against the plague,  pandemics, and bad weather.

She’s also the de facto patron saint of evolutionary studies and biodiversity, a situation that came about when the “father of modern ecology,” George Evelyn Hutchinson, after studying waterbugs in a spring near St. Rosalia’s cave, wrote his 4-volume “Treatise on Liminology” which included an article called “Homage to Santa Rosalia: or Why are There So Many Kinds of Animals?’’ and proposed St. Rosalia as patron for his science. Ever since, she has, at the very least, become a sort of shibboleth among ecologists.

As an aside, St. Rosalia is mentioned (as “Rosalie”) in the first canto of Walter Scott’s poem “Marmion,”in Canto 1, Stanza 23 —  the poem with the famous line, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!” (Canto 6, Stanza 17).

PRAYER

O God, who called Saint Rosalia to a life of prayer and solitude,
grant that through her intercession we may seek You above all things and find protection in times of trial.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.