Cascia, Umbria, Fourteenth Century
The first famous scene in the life of Saint Rita is the scene of the bees. It exists in at least two versions, both old.
In the first version it takes place a few days after the baptism. The newborn Margherita lies in her wicker basket in the field while her parents work. A swarm of white bees arrives and settles on the child’s face.
They go in and out of her mouth, leave honey on her lips, and circle her without harming her. The baby does not cry. The whiteness matters, because it marks the event as a sign.
The second version adds a third person. A peasant from the neighborhood, on his way to Cascia, crosses the family’s path. He has badly wounded his hand at work and is looking for help. He sees the basket surrounded by bees and, fearing for the infant, runs to drive the insects away with his injured hand.
At the moment he moves his arm, the wound closes completely. He understands that he stands before something greater than himself, and he goes away healed and silent.
The tradition of Cascia holds that the bees never left Saint Rita. Today the Augustinian monastery points to small holes in a wall beside the cloister stairs where masonry bees live, and popular belief links them to the bees of her cradle.
The Press reports this belief as devotion reports it. Whether the bees of the wall continue the bees of the basket is left to the faith of the reader. As a sign they speak for themselves.
Why did this episode cling so firmly to the memory of Saint Rita? The answer lies in an ancient layer of Christian symbolism. Bees have always been special creatures in the Christian tradition. They are clean. They work in community. They make the honey that sweetens and the wax that lights the altar.
The Easter Exsultet, sung at the Vigil from ancient times, praises the bees by name for the wax they give to the paschal candle. Medieval preachers called the saints spiritual bees who make the honey of virtue.
When tradition places white bees at the cradle of Margherita Lotti, it says without spoken words that this child will make honey for the Church. She will work, she will offer sweetness, she will give light. The detail of the color adds a layer of purity and of heavenly origin. They are bees marked as a sign.
The modern reader, used to separating fact from symbol, may find it strange that the Church guards so carefully a scene so plainly symbolic as a proof of someone’s holiness. For the medieval Church the symbol was a form of fact.
When God wishes to say something about a life, he speaks in the language that people understand, and the language of white bees was, for an Umbrian peasant of the fourteenth century, perfectly clear. It said: here God is at work.
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