Life of St. Rita of Cascia, O.S.A. from the Italian. Richard Connolly

CHAPTER V

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THE WHITE BEES OF ST. RITA

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      When the godmother and her attendants returned from Cascia after the baptism, a feast was prepared for them and the relatives of the happy parents, to celebrate in a manner becoming their humble position the double birth of Rita in the order of nature and of grace. Meanwhile, the child had closed her eyes in a tranquil slumber. When the next day dawned, the fifth day of her existence, a swarm of bees, all of the fairest white colour, and such as were never before seen, made their appearance. They flew a-buzzing about the cradle of the child, and after alighting for a moment on her angelic face were seen to go in and come out of her slightly open mouth in a sort of regular order, as if to take from her lips the honey of Paradise. What feelings of wonder and awe must have been awakened in the heart of Amata and those who were present by so marvellous an occurrence!

      The Gospel tells us that fear came upon all the neighbours of Elizabeth and Zachary as they considered the miraculous events that marked the birth of the Baptist, and that they noised abroad all these things that foretold his future extraordinary sanctity. In like manner similar the wonderful signs that were given at Rita's birth, for Divine providence so disposed it in order that honour should be rendered to her by those whose attention had been attracted by these extraordinary happenings, and that those who came in contact with her should be induced to order their own lives more exactly by following the salutary example she was to give. This incident of the appearance of the white bees in the cradle of our saint is the one which the painters and poets who have illustrated her life have vied most with one another in depicting. To avoid having to return again to the subject of the bees, which have ever been mentioned in connection with the life of St. Rita, we will here describe what seems to be a confirmation and perpetuation of the wonderful occurrence we have just related. Going from Rocca Porena to Cascia, and entering the convent where our saint resided, there, in an old wall opposite the convent gate, at a point midway between the cell which Rita inhabited and the spot in which her body was laid to rest, we are met with a sight that cannot fail to move us to admiration. For there, even to the present day, the bees, commonly called St. Rita's bees, have their nest. They are called St. Rita's, for they have been there since her time, and have come there, we may believe, owing to her, and, as it were, to do her honour. There is only a small number of them—some twelve or fifteen—and everything connected with them is extraordinary and wonderful. In the first place, as we have hinted above, the species to which these bees belong has never, as far as we are aware, been determined. They live each one to itself in a hole which it has dug in the wall, and as often as these holes have been stopped up in the process of plastering the wall they have again excavated them. They spin a sort of white substance, with which they stop the entrance to their retreat, as if to hide themselves from view during their long retirement and fast of eleven months. They appear only on those days dedicated to the memory of our Lord's Passion, and, be it noted, these are mostly movable feasts; and they betake themselves to retirement about the time of the death of St. Rita, who was devoted, as we shall see, to meditation on the Passion of our Lord. For four centuries they have been found in the same place, without ever having changed their place of abode. These ascertained facts seem to declare clearly enough that it has been the will of the Most High to extol through them the merit and the glory of His beloved servant. There is no need to add the many anecdotes of these bees, which are related in some lives of our saint, and which the nuns of Cascia still tell; let one suffice. Jacobilli says that one of these bees was sent to Pope Urban VIII. in a crystal vessel, and that it soon flew back again to the place it occupied in the convent wall.

      Here it may be asked whether the bees we have described are the same that appeared when Rita was an infant in swaddling-clothes. It would be harder to give an answer to this question than to the riddle which Sampson proposed to his bridesmen. Sampson's faithless spouse was able to wrest his secret from him and then reveal it to her Philistine friends: that the sweetness that came forth out of the strong was the honeycomb that was made in the mouth of the lion that he had torn in pieces a short time before. But we can find no answer to our question. However, those biographers of St. Rita who, without hesitation, confused the bees that appeared at her birth with those in the convent may be excused, as they supposed both to be of the same white colour. But they have been mistaken, for those at present in the convent wall are not white—in fact, they do not differ in colour from ordinary bees, except that they are of a deep red on the back and they want the sting. But perhaps these writers were not so far from the truth, since there is but the accidental variety of colour that distinguishes the present bees from the white ones that appeared first at Rita's birth. And who can say but that those once meant by God to symbolize by their whiteness the splendour of Rita's baptismal innocence may not, through the power of God, have taken on their present appearance to signify the humiliation and sadness of the penances she took upon herself? To change the appearance of a species already existing or to create a new species is easy to God. Let the truth of the matter be where it may, it is clear that both are marvellous, and worthy to be recorded in the history of our saint. But it is time we returned to gaze on her, surrounded in her cradle by those lilies of her incipient sanctity, and crowned with the bright circle of bees that still buzzed around her. We might now inquire whether the bees that entered her innocent mouth made a honeycomb in it, as is believed to have happened to St. Ambrose in his infancy, as if to forecast the mellifluous eloquence which he poured forth in his manhood in defence of the Church. Although this anecdote as related of St. Rita is not sufficiently well proven, neither is it impossible; for when there is question of miraculous events the difficulties of time and place do not form an insurmountable obstacle, as they did not in the case of St. Ambrose. At all events, we have two authors that assert it, and perhaps their opinion is supported by the farther statement that is made—that Rita abstained from her mother's milk on the day on which the bees appeared, the fifth day after her birth. God may have wished to give her for corporal food mystical or symbolical honey of unearthly origin, as He had fed her soul with the food of baptismal grace. In this way would be more clearly signified that which was foreshadowed by the appearance of the bees, the insinuating sweetness in word and manner which was afterwards the cause of the conversion of many sinners, which ever brought consolation to the afflicted, and spiritual profit to all who had the good fortune to converse with her.