In reading the wonderful and miraculous facts of the life of St. Rita and the very many prodigious works done by God through her intercession, the reader must have asked himself more than once how it is that so grand a soul, whose heroic virtues shine so brightly, and who was, like the greatest saints of the Church, favoured by God with most singular graces and sublime privileges, should be adorned with the aureole of a saint and raised to highest honours of the altars only after more than four centuries had passed since she had gone to immortal glory in heaven. The only reasonable answer to this question, the only explanation of a delay not by any means unique in the history of the canonization of the great heroes of the Church, is that the judgments of God are incomprehensible and His ways unsearchable, and the Divine wisdom which in His own time makes each cause produce its effect, and all things regulates in number, weight, and measure, so disposes it that the exaltation of His servants on earth then takes place when it is for the greater glorification of His Church and the greater spiritual advantage of Christians. This just reflection ought to console us in the sorrow we naturally feel at the long delay that has occurred in bringing to a happy termination the process of the canonization of our heroine. After the privilege of reciting the office and celebrating Mass in honour of the saint had been granted to the Augustinian Order and the Diocese of Spoleto in 1627, as soon as the solemn festivals we have described were brought to an end, devotion to St. Rita increased to such an extent, and the desire of the faithful became so fervent to have their great advocate enrolled by the Church's supreme authority in the catalogue of the Blessed and afterwards of the Saints, that in August, 1737, her cause was resumed in the state and terms in which it was found. On the 3rd of August in that year an ordinary session of the Congregation was held to debate the point whether the case excepted in the decrees of Pope Urban VIII. was fully established, and in the result the Congregation found the answer to be in the affirmative, and Pope Clement XII., on the 13th of the same month, confirmed the finding of the Congregation. On the 25th of July in the following year remissorial letters were therefore sent to the Ecclesiastical Courts of Spoleto, in whose jurisdiction Cascia then was, authorizing them to institute an Apostolic process of inquiry regarding the virtues and miracles of Blessed Rita, it being the unbroken practice of the Holy See not to grant the supreme honours of the altars unless it be shown that the theological and moral virtues were practised in a heroic degree. But the process then begun was interrupted by various events, and was not resumed until 1851. Without further interruption it was finally perfected in 1855, and its validity was approved in 1856 in Rome by Pius IX., of happy memory. Meanwhile the fame of the