Influencers, Not Intercessors: Following Saint Zita of Tuscany

If today’s young people are glued to their phones and iPads, I came of age alongside the internet. My family got our first computer when I was in first grade in 1997, and we got the internet right around the dawn of the 21st century, back when AOL still came on CD-ROMs in the mail. YouTube didn’t emerge until I was in high school, but there was very little on it until I started college; we were still watching flash videos.

This particular digital timeline means that, unlike people older than me, I lived out my teen years talking to strangers on the internet, but unlike younger adults and teens, there weren’t yet internet personalities. I still had Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street and Carson Daly on MTV, while today’s kids and teens can scroll endlessly, developing a vocabulary of internet personalities— influencers, really—ranging from Miss Rachel to Charlie D’Amelio. We’re prone to describing this landscape with its ever-presence as being something new, but is it really?

A Long History of Influencing

In the broadest sense, influencers have always existed. Trends may have moved slowly, but we can track the spread of popular fashions, often beginning with royalty, back hundreds of years. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that even in the history of Christian saints, we can see the way particular manifestations of holiness emerge again and again in different contexts. One notable such presentation is the Miracle of the Roses, a sacred apparition associated with Zita of Tuscany.

Born in the early 13th century to a poor but religious family, Zita is known to be a patron of housekeepers, maids, and domestic servants because she was sent to work for a wealthy family when she was quite young. It was a difficult life, and Zita wasn’t treated well, but after years of abuse, she ultimately gained a place of honor in the house and was tasked with overseeing the family’s household affairs. She served the family well, but even in her obedience, Zita’s compassion for those even poorer and more marginalized than she was led her to smuggle food out of the house to feed those in need.

It would have been excellent if others were influenced by Zita’s work in this way, but service has never been especially trendy. Rather, Zita’s connection to a great legacy of miracles was revealed when a fellow maid informed the master of the house what Zita had been doing, who then confronted her about the stolen bread. Untying her apron full of things for a needy family, it appeared that Zita was only carrying bunches of flowers, which fell to the ground.

More Miracles of the Roses

Many saints are associated with flowers in one way or another, but there are several associated with a similar floral apparition to Zita’s, which is known as the Miracle of the Roses. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, born at nearly the same time as Zita, is associated with a nearly identical story, although Elizabeth was stealing from a wealthy husband, rather than from the household she served. Following Zita and Elizabeth, the story appears several other times in Christian hagiography, including Elizabeth of Hungary’s great-niece, Elizabeth of Portugal (late 13th/early 14th century); Didacus of Alcala—a lay associate of Spanish Franciscans in the 15th century; and, in a somewhat different form, in the story of Faustina Kowalka in the early 20th century.

It seems almost certain that, especially following its near-simultaneous emergence in Zita of Tuscany and Elizabeth of Hungary’s stories, the Miracle of Roses became a trope available to those writing the biographies of saints, at least as much as an actual event these figures experienced. Its earlier prominence influenced how these stories were told and retold.

A Legacy of Influence

I was taken by the Miracle of the Roses this winter while designing Lent Madness trading cards for my parish because both Zita and Elizabeth of Hungary were part of this year’s bracket. As I was introducing the program to our parishioners, however, I found myself being asked about the same thing repeatedly: do Episcopalians do that whole saint thing?

From the Catholic perspective, Episcopal reverence for saints can indeed seem confusing because they don’t function in the same way. Indeed, even calling them saints is something of a misnomer. As texts, we had Holy Women, Holy Men and The Great Cloud of Witnesses, and General Convention regularly authorizes new commemorations as published in Lesser Feasts and Fasts. None of this is what these parishioners were asking me to explain, though. Their question, at its core, was about purpose: Why do we look to saints (or holy people or witnesses or whatever we choose to call them) at all?

The answer to this question lies in the collects we pray during these various commemorations. Turning to the figure of the day, in this case, Zita of Tuscany, known as a Worker of Charity, the collect addresses God like any other and continues, “Grant that we, like your servant Zita, may be faithful in the exercise of our duties and that, whatever you give us to do, we may do it heartily to you for the honor and glory of your Name…”

When we turn to the lives of the saints, it is not as intercessors between us and God, but as models for how to live. We ask God to grant us the depth of faith to live lives more like these holy people who came before us. Instead of calling them saints, figures like Zita of Tuscany might be called the original influencers.