High Middle Ages (13th century)
Feast: September 4
A teenager in medieval Viterbo who stood in the public square and told the Holy Roman Emperor's supporters they were wrong — and got exiled for it.
Rose was about fifteen when she started preaching in the streets of Viterbo. The city was under the control of Emperor Frederick II, who was locked in a power struggle with the pope, and Rose took the pope's side loudly and publicly. She was not a nun — she was a Franciscan tertiary, a laywoman, basically a teenager with convictions and no fear. The imperial authorities exiled her and her family from Viterbo in the dead of winter. She reportedly told her father not to worry: 'We will return soon, and it will be in greater honor.' Frederick II died shortly after, and the family came home. Rose tried to enter the Poor Clare convent in Viterbo, but the abbess refused her — possibly because Rose had no dowry, possibly because she was too much trouble. Rose died at about seventeen or eighteen, in 1251, never having entered religious life. Her body was moved to the very convent that had rejected her years later, on orders from Pope Alexander IV, who had witnessed one of her public sermons as a young cardinal. Every year on September 3, Viterbo carries a sixty-foot illuminated tower through the streets in her honor.