Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Virgin & Doctor of the Church
April 29 · d. 1380
also known as Caterina Benincasa, Catherine of Siena, La Beata Caterina
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) was a Sienese laywoman of the Dominican Third Order whose mystical contemplation flowed outward into bold theological writing and political reform. She nursed plague victims in Siena's hospitals, dictated The Dialogue, and composed 383 surviving letters of spiritual direction. She went to Avignon to press Pope Gregory XI to bring the papal court back to Rome, and has been credited ever since with his return, though modern scholarship doubts she caused it. After his death she spent her last two years labouring for Urban VI in the opening of the Western Schism. She was canonized in 1461 and, in 1970, declared the second female Doctor of the Church.
She was a dyer's daughter, one of some twenty-five children, and she did not leave home to become what she became. She was a twin; her sister lived only a few days, and their mother, unable to nurse both, had given one of them out to a wet-nurse. Raymond of Capua, who was her confessor and wrote her life, says she had a vision at six and took a vow of perpetual chastity at seven, and that when her family pressed her towards marriage she "took her scissors and joyfully cut off her beautiful tresses." These are a confessor's memories of a childhood he did not see, and they are shaped for the purpose he wrote them for; but the refusal itself is not in doubt, and it held.
There was no convent. Catherine took the habit of the Dominican tertiaries at about sixteen, which meant a black mantle over a white tunic and a life lived in her father's house, and she was never a nun in the enclosed sense at all. For three years she kept to one room and came out only for church.
What ended the seclusion was not a vision but an errand. She came out, and went to the sick. Plague came to Siena in her lifetime, and Raymond, who was there for the later part of it, writes in his own voice that it "raged, but never so fearfully as in Sienna." She worked its hospitals and prisons. People began to come to her, and then to write to her, and then to do what she said.
That last part is the strange one, and it is the thing most worth explaining. She could not, on any ordinary account of the fourteenth century, have had the standing she had: a laywoman in her twenties, of the artisan class, with no office, no university, no orders, and no business addressing the men she addressed. Part of the answer is that the Dominicans decided to manage her rather than silence her. In 1374 the friars appointed Raymond as sole authority over her within the order, which is an administrative act and not a friendship, and it had the effect of putting an educated, well-connected priest at the elbow of a woman who was already writing to cardinals.
And she wrote. Something near four hundred letters survive, dictated to secretaries, to cardinals and queens and mercenary captains and two popes, and the striking thing about them is the tone. She told Gregory XI, who was keeping the papal court at Avignon, that his trouble was fear of men rather than fear of God, and that if he would not use his authority he had better give it up: "it would be better for you to resign what you have assumed." She addressed him, in the same letters, as Babbo, daddy. To a Sienese confraternity she wrote the line that is now the most quoted thing about her and is almost always quoted wrongly: "If you are what you ought to be, you will set fire to all Italy, and not only yonder." It is plural, it is addressed to a group of laymen, and it is about lobbying the city for a pope.
In 1376 she went to Avignon herself. The visit was not a triumphal progress; a trio of cardinals, judging that Gregory was taking her too seriously, interrogated her in the hope of discrediting her. Gregory left for Rome that autumn and entered the city in January. For six centuries the story has been that she moved him, and it should be said plainly that modern scholarship does not think so: the decision appears to have been taken before she arrived. What is not in doubt is that she believed it was her business to try.
Between the autumn of 1377 and the autumn of 1378 she dictated the book, the Dialogo, a long exchange between a soul and God, composed, her secretaries said, while she was in ecstasy. Its governing image is Christ as a bridge thrown across the gap between earth and heaven.
She got what she had asked for, and it went wrong. Gregory died within fifteen months. The cardinals elected Urban VI and then repudiated him, and the Western Schism opened with two popes and Europe choosing sides. Catherine backed Urban, and Urban proved to be a man whose temper alienated nearly everyone who had supported him. She spent the last two years of her life writing letters to hold together a cause led by someone she had to beg to govern himself: "Mitigate a little, for the love of Christ crucified, those sudden impulses which nature forces on you."
She had eaten almost nothing for years by then. It had begun as ascetic practice and had become something she could not reverse. An earlier confessor had once ordered her to eat and she had obeyed and nearly died of it; she called the condition an illness, feared it might be a deception of the devil, and told her own correspondents to be moderate. From the beginning of 1380 she could take neither food nor water, and in February she lost the use of her legs. She died at Rome on the twenty-ninth of April, thirty-three years old, after what one account calls a prolonged and mysterious agony of three months, with the Schism unresolved. It ran on for another thirty-seven years.
Catherine is the patron saint of asking for the wrong thing and getting it. She spent years telling a pope to come home to Rome, and he came, and what followed was the worst institutional catastrophe the Western Church had suffered: two popes, then three, and a division that outlived her by thirty-seven years. She did not live to see it healed. She died at thirty-three with the thing she had worked for in ruins, having spent her last strength defending a man she also had to beg to control his temper. It is worth sitting with that before reaching for the lesson, because the usual lesson (be bold, speak truth to power) is exactly what she did, and it is not obvious that it worked. What she seems to have believed is that the obedience was hers and the outcome was not. She wrote to a friend asking God for grace "ever to love and to proclaim the truth, and that for that truth I may die," which is a prayer about her own conduct and says nothing at all about results. Most of us want the reverse: we will risk the difficult sentence if we can first be told it will work. Is there something you already know you ought to say, whose only real obstacle is that you cannot be promised it will change anything?
Catherine's life is documented in unusual detail for a fourteenth-century figure. She herself dictated The Dialogue and composed nearly four hundred letters in her own voice; Raymond of Capua, her confessor and spiritual director for the last six years of her life, wrote the principal hagiography Legenda Major within fifteen years of her death. The first-hand record is dense, the principal hagiography is contemporary, and where Raymond's account leans toward the marvelous it can frequently be cross-checked against the letters themselves. Catherine is one of the medieval saints about whom we know the most, and about whom we know most reliably.
Catherine Benincasa was born at Siena in 1347, the daughter of a dyer and one of some twenty-five children. The traditional birth date is March 25, but Raymond gives none, and the coincidence with the Annunciation is the kind of tidiness a hagiographer supplies. From childhood she reported mystical experiences and visions. Around the age of seven, she experienced a vision of Christ and resolved to dedicate herself to a contemplative life. Against her family's wishes for marriage, at sixteen she joined the Dominican Third Order (the Mantellate, the lay tertiaries), committing to celibacy, prayer, and service. She lived as a tertiary in her father's house, not in a convent, observing severe ascetical practices: extreme fasting and extended vigils.
Beginning in 1370 she engaged in active mission work, serving plague victims in Siena's hospitals and prisons and gaining a reputation for spiritual counsel and miraculous healings. During this period she dictated 383 surviving letters to popes, cardinals, nobles, religious leaders, and spiritual seekers, addressing both personal direction and the major ecclesiastical issues of her age. The letters are remarkable for their spiritual intensity, political insight, and unflinching criticism of church corruption. Between 1377 and 1378 she composed her major theological work, The Dialogue (Il Libro della Divina Dottrina), a mystical exchange between the Soul and God on sin, redemption, discretion, virtue, and the Christian life. One of its enduring images is Christ as the bridge between earth and heaven through his wounds: "By Mercy You have washed us in the Blood, and by Mercy You wish to converse with Your creatures. Oh, Loving Madman! was it not enough for You to become Incarnate, that You must also die?… Oh, Divine Mercy! My heart suffocates in thinking of you, for on every side to which I turn my thought, I find nothing but mercy" (chapter 30, in Algar Thorold's translation).
In 1376, at twenty-nine, Catherine turned much of her attention toward political activism, particularly toward restoring the papacy to Rome from its exile in Avignon. The roots of that exile lay seventy-one years earlier, when King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII clashed over control of the French clergy and church revenue. Boniface issued in 1302, asserting that submission to the pope was necessary for salvation; Philip's soldiers assaulted him at Anagni in 1303, and Boniface died a few weeks later. In the climate of political violence that followed, his successor Clement V was enthroned in Lyon and eventually settled the papal court in Avignon.
Catherine is celebrated in tradition for her mystical marriage to Christ, an experience she recounted during her life. She also received the stigmata, at Pisa in Lent 1375, and by her own prayer the marks did not show. The invisibility was not a quiet detail. Bearing Christ's wounds had been treated as the particular prerogative of Francis, and Catherine's claim was contested on exactly that ground, with a Franciscan pope, Sixtus IV, backing the Franciscan side against images showing her with the marks. Her own order pressed the opposite case, arguing that the hidden wounds were the greater gift because she had asked for them to be hidden. Rome did not formally recognise them until 1630, two hundred and fifty years after her death. She adopted severe ascetical practices, reportedly subsisting on the Eucharist and water for extended periods.
Raymond of Capua wrote about her in Legenda Major with particular emphasis on her mystical intimacy with Christ and on Christ himself as the bridge between earth and heaven, the central image of her Dialogue. The Western tradition has seen in her a model of contemplative action: a deep prayer life flowing outward into mercy ministry to plague victims and into prolific letter-writing across the political and ecclesiastical world.
Patronage and iconography. Pius XII proclaimed Catherine co-patron of Italy in 1939, joining her with Francis of Assisi; John Paul II named her one of the patron saints of Europe in 1999. She is invoked by nurses, the sick, and the dying, and against illness, a patronage rooted in her plague-ward ministry. In Western art she is most often shown in the white tunic and black mantle of the Dominican Third Order, sometimes crowned with thorns and carrying a lily for purity, a book for the Dialogue, and a heart (Christ's or her own) exchanged for hers in mystical betrothal. Where her stigmata are shown they are typically rendered as faint marks rather than open wounds.
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Il Libro della Divina Dottrina (The Dialogue)(Italian (Tuscan dialect), c. 1377–1378)
Recommended: tr. Suzanne Noffke (Paulist Press, Classics of Western Spirituality)
Noffke's translation is the modern standard, and her introduction is a guide in itself to Catherine's mystical theology.
Public domain: CCEL — The Dialogue (older translation)
The Letters of Catherine of Siena (383 surviving)(Italian (Tuscan dialect), c. 1370–1380)
Noffke's four-volume translation is the modern standard but intermittent in print; the Project Gutenberg edition is a good free starting point.
Public domain: Project Gutenberg — Vida D. Scudder's selection (1905)
Legenda Major (Life of Saint Catherine of Siena)(Latin, c. 1395)
Recommended: Modern English translation
Raymond of Capua was Catherine's confessor and spiritual director for her last six years; his life of her is the foundational hagiography and the source of nearly every later story about her.
Public domain: Older English translation (PDF, saintsbooks.net)
Further reading. The standard English translations are all by Suzanne Noffke, O.P.: The Dialogue (Paulist Press, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1980), The Prayers of Catherine of Siena (Paulist, 1983), and The Letters of Catherine of Siena, four volumes (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000-2008), which is the first complete English letters and supersedes every earlier selection. The principal medieval life is Raymond of Capua's Legenda maior, translated by Conleth Kearns, O.P. (Michael Glazier / Dominican Publications, 1980), and now available in Silvia Nocentini's critical Latin edition (SISMEL, 2013). For her politics, F. Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Cornell, 2006); for her literacy and language, Jane Tylus, Reclaiming Catherine of Siena (Chicago, 2009).
Online resources. Vida Scudder's Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters (1905) is free at Project Gutenberg, and is the source of the English quoted here from her letters; note that it is a selection of sixty-four letters, not the whole correspondence. Algar Thorold's Dialogue at CCEL, the source of the passage quoted here from the Dialogue, is likewise the 1907 abridgement, not the complete text. The Italian letters in Tommaseo's edition of 1860 are at the Internet Archive.
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Into this drama Catherine traveled to Avignon, where Pope Gregory XI was then reigning. She urged him to return to Rome, and her arguments were less political than theological and moral. She urged Gregory to keep a vow he had reportedly made to return the papacy; she argued for Rome as the designated place for Peter's chair; she insisted that the pope must lead clerical reform from Rome itself; and she warned that cowardice in the face of political pressure was a sin. She told him directly that he was failing through fear of men rather than fear of God, calling on him to become a "manly man, free from any fear or fleshly love toward yourself, or toward any creature related to you in the flesh." If he would not exercise his authority, she said, he should resign: "you should use your virtue and power: and if you are not willing to use it, it would be better for you to resign what you have assumed; more honor to God and health to your soul would it be." Pope Benedict XVI later described her as a woman who "impels us to walk courageously toward holiness to be ever more fully disciples of the Lord."
Her spiritual authority, boldness, and moral conviction (unusual for anyone, and in her era especially for a woman without formal theological training) impressed the pope. Gregory XI departed Avignon in late 1376 and arrived in Rome in January 1377. Catherine's intervention was celebrated then and afterwards as the decisive cause, and that claim originated in the writings produced to secure her canonisation. Modern scholarship does not sustain it. Andre Vauchez puts it flatly: it is now well established that it was not her intervention that prompted Gregory to leave, and the pope appears to have resolved on it not long after his election. Blake Beattie places her influence "somewhere along the broad spectrum between the largely symbolic and the determinative," prominent and influential, but neither driving events nor determining them. After Gregory's death in March 1378, rival claimants arose and the Western Schism began. Catherine supported Urban VI, the Roman pope, against the Avignon antipopes; she spent her final years writing letters and negotiating on behalf of the unified papacy. She died at Rome on April 29, 1380, aged thirty-three, after what the Catholic Encyclopedia calls "a prolonged and mysterious agony of three months." No source reached here draws a causal line from her fasting to her death, and this page does not draw one either. She was canonized by Pius II in 1461, and Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church on October 4, 1970. She was the second woman to be given the title, not the first: Teresa of Avila had been proclaimed a week earlier, on September 27.
A note on what she is quoted as saying. Catherine is among the most misquoted saints in the calendar, and the three lines most often attributed to her do not survive checking against her own corpus. "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire" is not hers. What she wrote, in a letter to Stefano Maconi, one of her Sienese disciples, urging him and his brothers of the Company of the Virgin Mary to lobby for Urban VI, was "If you are what you ought to be, you will set fire to all Italy, and not only yonder." The verbs are plural, the subject is a political errand, and the fire is Italy. The modern version appears to descend from a paraphrase in a homily of John Paul II in 2000, which cited the letter with a "cf.", and reached a very wide audience when it was preached at a royal wedding in Westminster Abbey in 2011, on Catherine's own feast day. "All the way to heaven is heaven" is not found in the Dialogue or the letters in any language; its earliest traceable appearance is Dorothy Day in 1948. "Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear" has no source at all, and cuts against her actual teaching, since she also taught that truth keeps silence when it is the time to be silent. What she did write, and what this page would rather quote, is a prayer that God would give her grace "ever to love and to proclaim the truth, and that for that truth I may die."
British (Received Pronunciation): Avignon /ˌævɪnˈjɒn/
Readings for a Reformer
Jeremiah 1:4–10Psalm 461 Corinthians 3:10–23Matthew 5:13–20
O God, by your grace your servant Catherine of Siena, kindled by the flame of your love, became a burning and shining light in your Church, turning pride into humility and error into truth: Grant that we may be set aflame with the same spirit of love and discipline, and walk before you as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.