March 9, 2026
Monday of the Third Week of Lent
Or Optional Memorial of Saint Frances of Rome, religious
Gospel: Luke 4:24-30
The Unaccepted Prophet

Today the Church celebrates the Optional Memorial of St. Frances of Rome, Virgin. Born in 1384 into a wealthy aristocratic family in Rome, she was baptized in the Chiesa di Sant’Agnese in Agone (Church of St. Agnes in Agone) on the famous Piazza Navona. At age 11, she desired to become a nun, but at around 12, her parents forced her to marry Lorenzo Ponziani, commander of the Papal troops of Rome and a member of an extremely wealthy family. Though the marriage was arranged, it was blessed by God, and they lived happily together for forty years.
During the Western Schism of the Catholic Church, when the Pope in Rome opposed various antipopes, Lorenzo served the former. It is said that their son Battista was to be handed over as a hostage to the commander of the Neapolitan troops. Obeying her spiritual director’s command, Frances took her son to the Campidoglio. Along the way, she stopped at the Church of the Aracoeli there and entrusted her son’s life to the Blessed Mother. Upon arriving at the designated site, the soldiers tried to place her son on a horse to transport him to captivity. However, despite heavy whipping, the horse refused to move. Seeing the hand of God in this, the soldiers returned the boy to his mother.
On August 15, 1425 (Feast of the Assumption of Mary), she founded the Olivetan Oblates of Mary, a confraternity of pious women under the authority of the Olivetan monks of the Abbey of Santa Maria Nova in Rome. Neither cloistered nor bound by formal vows, they could follow her model of combining a life of prayer with meeting societal needs. In March 1433, she established a monastery at Tor de’ Specchi, near the Campidoglio, for those members of the confraternity who felt called to communal life. This monastery remains the only house of the institute. On July 4 that year, they received approval from Pope Eugene IV as a religious congregation of oblates with private vows. Later known simply as the Oblates of St. Frances of Rome, the community grew in devotion.
Frances herself remained in her home, nursing her husband through the final seven years of his life—he had been severely wounded in battle. After his death in 1436, she entered the monastery and became its superior. She died in 1440 and was buried in Santa Maria Nova.
On May 9, 1608, Pope Paul V canonized her as a saint. In 1925, Pope Pius XI declared her patroness of motorists, as tradition holds that an angel once lit her path with a lamp while she traveled, protecting her from danger. Among Benedictines, she is also venerated as patroness of oblates, and she is patroness of widows.
Today’s Gospel from St. Luke portrays an unaccepted Jesus. We often categorize people based on our own biases, treating Jesus as the crowd in the Nazareth synagogue did. Thus, Jesus tells them, “No prophet is accepted in his own hometown” (Luke 4:24). The incident began when Jesus quoted Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah’s mission: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Isaiah 61:1-2a; Luke 4:18-19). After reading this, Jesus declared, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). But the Nazarenes, knowing Jesus since childhood, rejected his words as blasphemy. They drove him out of the synagogue, led him to a cliff, and intended to throw him down (Luke 4:28-29). Such conflict mirrors what happens within each of us.
We often think we are pure after being washed clean of original sin in the mercy flowing from Christ’s pierced side on the Cross, and thus feel no need to listen to God’s Word proclaimed through His Church. When such thoughts arise, we, like the Nazareth crowd, reject all Jesus offers.
Today, let us imitate St. Frances of Rome, Virgin: courageously renounce our selfish desires, embrace God’s Word, and faithfully proclaim it to the world.

May your unfailing compassion, O Lord,
cleanse and protect your Church,
and, since without you she cannot stand secure,
may she be always governed by your grace.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever

©Totus Tuus 2026
Cum Approbatione Ecclesiastica