St. Frances of Rome

Who they were

Frances wanted the convent and her family required a marriage. She obeyed at thirteen, and made of the marriage itself, forty years long and by all accounts genuinely loving, the raw material of sanctity in the worst Rome of the age.

Schism, civil war, plague, and famine rolled through her decades, and Frances turned the Ponziani palace into a relief station: selling her jewels for grain, nursing plague victims, burying two of her own children in those epidemics, and founding a community of Roman noblewomen, the Oblates, who served the poor without vows or enclosure while living their family obligations. Her recorded counsel is the thing to keep: a married woman must, when called upon, leave her devotions to God at the altar and find him in her housework. Widowed at fifty two, she joined her own community as its least member. The tradition that her guardian angel was continually visible to her made her, by a designation of 1925, the patron of motorists: the one who sees the road.

Why people turn to St. Frances of Rome

Everyone whose real vocation interrupted their planned one, which is most caregivers. Wives and mothers stretched across duties. And drivers, by the modern patronage, which is worth a smile and a prayer before the commute.

How to ask their intercession

Mid obligation, since her counsel makes the interruption itself the prayer. And a line to her before the drive is an old and cheerful habit.