Saint Catherine of Siena

Words like those could have cost anyone else their head. But that woman was no queen, no princess, and did not own a single inch of land to take refuge in if the court at Avignon grew angry. She was the daughter of a cloth dyer in Siena, a town in Tuscany, and had grown up in the Fontebranda quarter, home to an ancient fountain that flowed all year round and that the whole neighborhood of dyers depended on. She could not write. All her life, the letters bearing her name were written down by others as she dictated.

And yet only a few months after that meeting, a Pope left his safe palace, boarded a ship at Marseille, spent two long months at sea, and returned to a ruined Rome full of political danger. We know her as Catherine of Siena, whom the Church would later make a Doctor and a patroness of all Europe. But before all those titles, she was only a child in a cramped house that smelled of dye, one of twenty-five brothers and sisters.

Caterina Benincasa was born on March 25, 1347, on the very feast of the Annunciation — a coincidence people never stopped mentioning later, as if a sign had been given before she even opened her eyes. She and her twin sister Giovanna were the last two of the twenty-five children of Giacomo and Lapa Benincasa. The number sounds hard to believe today, but in a fourteenth-century craftsman’s family, where one child in every few did not survive the first years of life, having many children was the only way to make sure the family had heirs and someone to carry on the trade. Giovanna, Catherine’s twin, died in her first months.

We often imagine that the saints were unusual right from the cradle. With Catherine, the surviving records, mostly from her confessor Raymond of Capua, who later wrote her life, show a cheerful, lively child, pampered by the whole family for her sweet nature, often laughing and loving to play with her brothers and sisters. Nothing gloomy, nothing forced. That very ordinary foundation makes what happened when she was six all the harder to explain.

It was not a childish whim. It was a declaration, and her parents understood its meaning at once. They answered not with understanding but with a long, simmering anger. They dismissed the maid who helped in the house and gave all the heaviest work — washing, cooking and cleaning for a family of nearly thirty mouths — to Catherine, as if hard labor could break their stubborn daughter’s will. They allowed her no private corner to pray, not even the little attic room she used to slip away to.

This is a part her biographies often pass over quickly, but it is one of the details that most clearly shows who Catherine was. With nowhere left to retreat to, she did not resist, did not run away from home, and did not pretend to give in. She thought of another way: to build a room no one could see, right inside herself. She told herself that her father was the image of Jesus, her mother was Our Lady, the brothers and sisters around her were the Apostles — and each time she bent to scrub pots or carry water, she saw it as serving the Holy Family itself. A child of twelve or thirteen, in the middle of unjust punishment, found a way to turn humiliation into a form of wordless prayer. Few adults could do as much.

At sixteen, Catherine asked to join the group of women in black mantles of the Dominican Third Order, popularly called the Mantellate — literally “the mantled ones”. It had originally been a group for older widows, who lived on their own and did works of charity in the city without taking lifelong vows like nuns in a convent. An unmarried young girl asking to join was unheard of. At first the women of the group flatly refused. But Lapa, her mother — once the fiercest opponent — now stepped in herself to persuade the Mantellate to change their minds, on the grounds that her daughter was sickly and frail and needed a devout life to heal her soul. In the end, the women agreed to interview her. Catherine came to that meeting with her face still marked by the smallpox she had just recovered from. Perhaps it was precisely her lost good looks that convinced the women that this girl was sincere, and not trying to use the habit to escape an unwanted marriage.

It was no comfortable retreat. The room had no window worth the name, only enough light coming through a narrow slit. She slept on a wooden plank, with no mattress, no warm blanket in Siena’s bitterly cold winters. Her daily food was reduced to dry bread dipped in water and a few raw vegetables. As an adult, her body could hardly digest ordinary food at all, and modern researchers still debate whether this was a sign of a serious eating disorder or simply the result of extreme penance kept up since adolescence.

It was during those years that she went through what she herself described as terrible battles with temptation. Not abstract temptations, but — as she told her confessor — violent sensual hallucinations and voices sowing despair, so that many nights she did not dare close her eyes. When that inner storm finally passed and Catherine felt peace return, she burst into tears and cried out into the silence: “Lord, where were You when my heart had to endure such horrible filth?” And the answer she received, as she told it, was not a rebuke for having doubted, but a surprisingly gentle reply:

“Catherine, I was right in the middle of your heart. It was I who gave you the strength never to consent to those temptations.”

This answer is worth pausing over: God did not promise to take the temptation away, but showed that He had been there all along, even in the moment when she felt most abandoned.

In 1374, the Black Death — the bubonic plague that had swept across Europe from the middle of the century, taking nearly a third of the continent’s population — broke out again in Siena. The city had had as many as fifty thousand people before the plague; after the first outbreak in 1348, fewer than half remained. By the time it returned in 1374, the terrible memory was still so fresh that people panicked, abandoned the sick and shut their doors, not daring to go out. Catherine and the little group of disciples who followed her — later called the “Bella Brigata”, the beautiful company — went straight into the isolation quarters, where the sick, covered in sores and stinking, had been abandoned by their own families for fear of infection. She washed their wounds with her own hands and buried the bodies no one dared touch, even when the smell of death had spread through the whole quarter.

Beyond nursing the sick, Catherine threw herself into far more dangerous work: reconciling the age-old feuds between the noble families of Tuscany — bloody Montague-and-Capulet-style conflicts, where one wrong word could make her a target for both sides. She went in person, sat among men whose hands were still stained with the blood of the other side’s relatives, and with an authority that came not from the sword but from her own uncompromising frankness, she made them sit down and talk.

But perhaps no story about Catherine is told and retold as often as the afternoon she accompanied Niccolò di Toldo, a young nobleman from Perugia whom Siena had sentenced to beheading for plotting rebellion. Niccolò was in a towering rage. He believed the sentence was unjust, and in his fury he cursed God Himself, refused all the sacraments, even refused to confess before dying, which at the time meant losing one’s soul forever.

She called the Pope “Dolce Cristo in terra” — sweet Christ on earth — a form of address expressing absolute reverence for the chair of Peter. Yet right after that greeting, she could write questions that would make any courtier break into a sweat. What made those letters so urgent was the crisis of the “Avignon exile” — for nearly seventy years, from 1309, the Popes had left Rome to live at Avignon, in the south of France, under the ever heavier influence of the French court. Rome, meanwhile, fell into chaos: noble families fought for power, Saint Peter’s Basilica fell into disrepair, and sheep even grazed in the courtyard in front of it.

Catherine’s last months in Rome were one long stretch of exhaustion and pain. She felt the schism like a wound tearing her own body, and in the deep faith of one who had been “betrothed” to Christ, she believed she could offer her very life, the very sufferings gnawing at her body, as a sacrifice for the Church’s unity.

It was during that time, surrounded by pain, that she dictated to her secretaries her great work: “The Dialogue of Divine Providence” — an imagined conversation between her soul and God the Father. In it is an image that became one of the most beautiful theological images ever written by someone with no formal schooling in theology: Christ as a golden bridge spanning the abyss between heaven and earth, with three steps — the nailed feet, the pierced side, and the lips that give the kiss of peace — to lead people across the raging river of sin below and into eternal life.

In 1375, a little earlier, in the city of Pisa, she had received the stigmata, the Five Wounds of Jesus: wounds that could not be seen with the naked eye, but which she described as intense pain in the palms of her hands, her feet and her side, recurring for the rest of her life.

In her last weeks in Rome, Catherine could hardly take anything but the Eucharist. Every morning she dragged herself, step by trembling step, to Old Saint Peter’s — a building that then still kept its shape from the time of Constantine, before it was torn down and rebuilt into the magnificent Saint Peter’s Basilica known today — to kneel for hours before Giotto’s mosaic “Navicella”, the image of the ship of the Church tossing amid the storm, with the Apostles in panic while Jesus walks on the water. She said she felt the whole weight of that ship — of the whole divided Church — pressing down on her thin shoulders, now only skin and bone.

Six centuries later, on October 4, 1970, Paul VI made an unprecedented decision: he proclaimed Catherine of Siena a Doctor of the Church — in the same year as Teresa of Ávila — the first time in history that two women were given the title previously reserved for scholars, bishops and formally trained masters of theology. A young woman who had never gone to school now stood in the same rank as Thomas Aquinas, Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux — the greatest minds of Christian theology.

In 1999, Pope Saint John Paul II proclaimed her one of the principal co-patrons of all Europe — together with Benedict, Cyril and Methodius, Bridget of Sweden and Edith Stein. The Church celebrates her on April 29 each year, the day of her death.