september 4. Rose of viterbo, baby visionary and young hermitess

experiment:

identify an evil SORCERESS. attempt to convert her. 

Patron saint of exiles and people rejected by religious orders

Lived 1234 to 1252
Canonized 1457

Described as a "lowly and unimportant creature", Saint Rose was born of slim means. By one account, baby Rose never cried. By another,  she "let out a (figurative?) cry that would grow and grow until it awakened the people to a new consciousness." Even before she could speak, Saint Rose attempted to pronounce the names of Jesus and Mary, and as soon as she could walk, she took "tottering steps towards Christ in His tabernacle." As a little girl, she practiced great austerities, disciplining herself three times a day until she fainted from blood loss. Called to be a "young hermitess" and also a child preacher, little Rose took to the streets with a cross in her hand, decrying Christ's torture and describing the heinousness of sin. Later, she spoke out in support of the Papal State when her town revolted against it.  Rose's father--frightened by his daughter's fiery nature--beat her if she so much as left the house, to which she replied, "If Jesus could be beaten for me, I could be beaten for Him."

MIRACLES

• Moved by her loved ones' grieving, three-year-old Rose's prayed, pressed her hands to her dead Aunt's body, and spoke the corpse's name aloud. The corpse opened her eyes, rose from the dead, and embraced her niece.
• When Rose was 8 years old and very ill, the Virgin appeared to her and advised her to don a Franciscan habit as a tertiary (i.e., she'd continue to live at home rather than in a convent). She liked to contemplate how Christ had been wounded by the ingratitude of his own Children.
• When she was ten, a bloodied Crucified Christ appeared to Rose. Our Lord told Rose that his "deep love of men" had reduced him to this state, and that it was the sins of those men that had "so pierced and torn" him. "Sin, sin!" cried the saint, and she scourged herself to atone for the world's transgressions.
• Like Saint Elizabeth of Portugal before her, bread that she carried for the poor in her apron's folds became flowers when her irate father asked her to reveal the hidden loaves. 
• While she preached of the pope's goodness, the stone she stood on rose up in the air.
• Rose converted an evil sorceress by dragging a pile of wood into the town's square, stepping upon it, and setting the pyre ablaze. All the while she was preaching. There she stood without burning for three hours, until the sorceress cast herself at Rose's feet in penance. 
• She died at just 17 or 18 or 19, and her body remains "fragrant and beautiful, as if still in life." The only imperfection is its color, "which was darkened" in a chapel fire. Every year on September 4, it is paraded through the streets of Viterbo.

"VERY POSTMORTEM FINDS"
In 1921, 670 years after Rose's death, a monk extracted her still heart to create a new relic. 79 years later--in 2010--the relic was submitted (by whom, I don't know!) to undergo scientific examination by a team of Italian paleoanthropologists. The researchers x-rayed the "teen mummy's heart" and found a blockage there, revealing that Saint Rose died of an embolism rather than tuberculosis as previously thought. This research was made possible by the corpse's incorrupt state, which this article attributes to a unique process of interment reserved for prospective saints and a sealed glass casket.