Saint Frances of Rome

Saint Frances of Rome (1384-1440) was a married Italian noblewoman whose life is a quiet rebuke to the assumption that holiness requires fleeing the world. Married at twelve to Lorenzo Ponziani, a wealthy Roman aristocrat, she remained his wife for forty years and bore him three children. Her household was wealthy and her duties extensive. She was also one of the great mystics and founders of the fifteenth century.

The defining feature of Frances's life was her capacity to hold married life and intense spiritual life together without compromising either. She fed her children. She managed her household. She nursed her sick servants. She handed out food and clothing during a famine. She gathered other Roman women around her in a loose community devoted to prayer and works of charity, eventually founding the Oblates of Mary (still in existence today). When her husband was exiled and her property seized in the political upheavals of fifteenth-century Rome, she remained faithful — to him, to her vows, to her vocation of practical charity.

Frances is reported to have had unusual mystical experiences, including the consistent vision of her guardian angel, who Catholic tradition holds was so visibly present to her that she could see him as easily as she saw her servants. After her husband's death in 1436, she finally entered the community she had founded as a full member, where she lived for four years before her death.

For Catholic married women in particular, Frances is a model and intercessor. Her witness is that the contemplative life and the active life of marriage and motherhood are not opposed; they can deepen one another. Many Catholic women in busy seasons of family life invoke her as a sign that the holiness God is forming in them is not waiting for some other, quieter time.