Zita of
Lucca was a thirteenth-century house servant. Patient and responsible, she was
given to meditation and heard Mass daily. But she was known and loved most of
all for her generosity. Whatever Zita had, she gave away to the poor.
One cold
morning, compelled by her master to wear his cloak on her journey to church,
she met a beggar and wrapped the cloak around him without a moment’s
hesitation. Returning home without it, she was roundly scolded. Later that day,
a mysterious stranger appeared at the door, the master’s cloak in hand. Another
time, called away from the kitchen while baking bread to attend to a sick
woman, her fellow servants were amazed to discover a company of angels tending
the ovens.
The lives of
the saints abound with stories like these. Saint Brigid gave her father’s
prized sword to a leper, and, after being exiled to a work in a dairy in
response, she slipped dozens of hampers of butter out the side door. Elizabeth
of Hungary was chased from her castle for pawning her jewels to build a
hospital during a plague, while Robert Bellarmine scandalized Renaissance Rome
by ripping the tapestries from his walls to have them cut up for clothing for
the poor. The walls, he assured his fellow clerics, wouldn’t catch cold. Even
Martin Luther, for all his hostility to works of supererogation, had to insist
that his wife Katie keep the key to the family strongbox. Otherwise, he would
be sure to give it all away.
