The saints

Saint Catherine of Siena

Mystic and Doctor of the Church · Feast day April 29 · 1347 to 1380 · Siena, Italy · Also known as Caterina di Siena, Catherine Benincasa

Saint Catherine of Siena was a young laywoman with no schooling and no office who, by the sheer force of her holiness and love, counseled popes, made peace between warring cities, nursed the plague-stricken, and left the church a masterpiece of mystical writing. One of the first two women ever named a Doctor of the Church, she is a patron of Italy and of Europe.

One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.Psalm 27:4 (KJV)

A child of plague and prayer

Catherine was born in Siena in 1347, the twenty-third of some twenty-five children of a moderately prosperous cloth-dyer, and she came into the world on the eve of the catastrophe that would shape her whole century. The very next year the Black Death swept through Europe and killed perhaps a third of its people, and Catherine grew up amid recurring waves of plague, in a church weakened by corruption and a papacy that had abandoned Rome to live in comfort in France. From her earliest years she was extraordinarily given to prayer, and by her own account she experienced a vision of Christ while still a small child that fixed the whole direction of her life.

At about the age of seven she made a private vow to give herself wholly to God and to take no husband but Christ, and she held to it against every pressure. When her family, in the ordinary way of the time, began to press her toward a good marriage, Catherine resisted with a will of iron, cutting off her hair to spoil her appearance and enduring their anger and their attempts to break her by loading her with the hardest household drudgery. She bore it all in silence and turned the crowded, noisy house into her monastery, building, as she later described it, a secret cell within her own soul into which she could withdraw to be with God no matter what was happening around her.

The cell and the coming forth

Her family at last gave way, and Catherine joined the Mantellate, the Dominican lay women of Siena, who wore the habit of the order but lived in their own homes in the world rather than in a cloister. For about three years she kept an almost total silence and solitude in a small room in her father's house, leaving it only for church, and there she gave herself to prayer, fasting, and penance so severe that it alarmed those around her, passing through both great consolations and desolate dryness, and being formed, in the hiddenness, into the woman she would become. She spoke later of a mystical espousal to Christ that sealed this period, a sense of belonging to him beyond all doubt.

Then, by her account, God told her to leave her solitude and to find him now in her neighbors, and Catherine came out of her cell transformed. She gave herself to the poor and the sick of Siena with a tenderness that astonished the city, and when the plague returned she nursed the dying whom everyone else had fled, sitting with the abandoned through their last hours and burying the dead with her own hands. A circle of followers began to gather around her, priests and laypeople, many of them older and far more learned than she, drawn to this young woman as to a mother and calling her by that name, for they found in her a wisdom and a love that plainly came from beyond her years and her lack of schooling.

A laywoman who counseled popes

Catherine could barely read, and she never learned to write with ease, dictating her letters to a group of devoted secretaries who could scarcely keep pace with her. Yet those letters reached the greatest figures of the age and were heeded by them. Nearly four hundred of them survive, addressed to popes and kings, cardinals and mercenary captains, nuns, prisoners, and prostitutes, all in the same fearless, tender, burning voice, calling every one of her correspondents, from the loftiest to the lowest, to give themselves without reserve to Christ crucified, whom she loved to call gentle first Truth, and whose blood was the constant theme of her devotion.

Her boldest cause was the papacy itself. For some seventy years the popes had abandoned Rome and lived at Avignon in France, under the shadow of the French crown and to the grave harm of the whole church, and Catherine became convinced that the pope must return to Rome. She wrote to Pope Gregory the Eleventh with astonishing directness, addressing him tenderly as her babbo, her papa, and in the same breath commanding him in the name of Christ to be a courageous man and not a coward, to reform the corrupt clergy, and to come home to Rome. She traveled to Avignon in person to press the cause face to face, and in 1377, in no small part through her tireless urging, the pope at last brought the papacy back to Rome, ending the long exile she had labored to close.

Peacemaker in a violent age

Catherine spent herself trying to heal the wounds of a broken church and a savage age. She threw herself into the work of making peace between the warring city-states of Italy and between rebellious cities and the papacy, riding into the middle of feuds and factions to reconcile enemies who had sworn each other's destruction, and she was sometimes trusted as an envoy by both sides at once, a role almost unheard of for a woman of her time. She worked ceaselessly for the reform of a worldly and grasping clergy, never by tearing the church down or turning against it, but by calling its ministers, from the pope to the humblest priest, back to holiness and to the poverty and purity of Christ.

She did all this in an age that gave women no public voice, and she did it not by seizing any office or power but by love, by prayer, and by plain speech that no one could ignore or answer. Her authority was entirely moral and spiritual, and it moved the most powerful men in Christendom precisely because they could see that it was real, that this young woman wanted nothing for herself, feared no one, and spoke only for God and for the good of the church. She was investigated by the authorities of her own order, who wondered at such a woman, and she satisfied them, and went on.

The Dialogue and the fire of love

Out of Catherine's life of prayer came her great book, known as The Dialogue, a long conversation between the soul and God which she dictated, tradition says, while caught up in ecstasy, her secretaries writing down the words that poured from her. In it God is the deep sea and the soul the fish that swims in him, and Christ is the bridge thrown across the terrible chasm between fallen humanity and God, the one way by which the soul can cross over to its home. Its central image is a heart set on fire with love, the love of God answered inseparably by the love of neighbor, for Catherine taught that we can never repay God's love to God directly, and so he has set our neighbor squarely in our path, that whatever we cannot do for God we might do instead for the person beside us, and so love him in them.

Catherine burned herself out young in the service of that love. Worn down by years of extreme fasting, ceaseless labor, and grief over the divisions of the church, and above all by the bitter split known as the Great Schism, which had torn Christendom between rival claimants to the papacy, she gave the last of her strength in Rome to prayer and work for the church's unity. She suffered a stroke and died there in 1380 at only thirty-three, the age of Christ at his crucifixion, having offered her very life, as she understood it, for the church she loved. In 1970 she was declared a Doctor of the Church, one of the first two women in all of history so honored, recognized as a teacher of the whole church though she had barely been taught to read.

Why Catherine still matters

Catherine proves that holiness, and not office or learning or gender, is the true source of authority in the church, and that a young woman with nothing but the burning love of God can move popes, reconcile enemies, and pour out her life for others. She is the patron of Italy and of Europe, and a standing rebuke to anyone who imagines that the humble, the unschooled, and the overlooked have no great part to play in the kingdom of God. Her whole life answers the one desire of the psalmist, to dwell in the house of the Lord and to behold his beauty, and out of that single desire, held from childhood, flowed a love that set a broken world alight and has not gone out.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

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