ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA

A brief sketch of her life taken directly from Endless Grace by Carol Lee Flinders

Catherine of Siena is one of the most extraordinary women in European history, a spiritual teacher of tremendous magnetism who was also a powerful advocate for peace and reconciliation.   Canonized soon after her death in 1380 and made a Doctor of the Church in 1970, along with Teresa of Avila, she is among the mystics the church has honored most lavishly. Catherine was a contemporary of Julian of Norwich, and, like her, a visionary.

Catherine was Siena's beloved beata popolana, the people's own saint, who would bring a Pope to heel.  In her intensity, she was said to be "like the wine of Siena - very red".   Catherine was declared Doctor of the Church for many reasons, prominent among which was certainly the Dialogue, which she wrote near the end of her life.

Catherine Benincasa (Well Housed) was born in 1347, the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children.   Her father was a wool dyer and prosperous enough to maintain a large home.  Of a pious nature and influenced by the great wave of 14th century Dominican women, Catherine spent much time at the nearby church and cloister of St. Dominic.  The tenor of life in Siena was as turbulent as it was throughout 14th century Europe.  War was a perennial backdrop.  From one generation to the next, feuds were passed on as tenderly as heirlooms.  As if in recurring, deadly chastisement, the plague would sweep across the region at regular intervals, settling old scores once and for all.

In the family's bereavement over the loss of Bonaventura, Catherine's favorite sister, they decided to procure a husband for Catherine regardless of her wishes.  She chopped off her long golden brown hair. Enraged, her parents dismissed a maidservant and put Catherine to work in her place.  Catherine was sixteen when she became a mantellata, and she lived in solitude for more than three years.  Her reception at the church was not altogether enthusiastic, for often when she received Holy Communion she would burst into tears and loud sobs that would disturb the other worshipers. She stayed on for endless prayers, and often she would lose all consciousness of her body and stand leaning against one of the stone pillars, immobile, her face white, seeing and hearing nothing.  Soon her sphere of influence widened.  As a mantellata, she was expected to nurse the ill and infim and she did so zealously, at two charitable hospitals in Siena.  Free to move about unremarked in her black and white habit, she went out each day and took the worst cases - the most irascible patients with the most repellent conditions - treating them as though they were of the Benincasa clan itself.  She admitted later to having been helped throughout this work by a special gift from God: the gift of being able to see the beauty of each soul, whatever the exterior.

Sometime before 1374, she gave every appearance of having died.  For four hours she stopped breathing.  For a long time before this she had been in an ecstatic state and at last she began to pray continuously to be taken 'from this body of death' and fully united with God.  Rapidly, Catherine became a court of last resort for the quarrelsome Sienese as well as the surrounding country people.

From 1375 until her death in 1380, Catherine was in Siena for only brief spells. Over and over she was called away; to Pisa, where she would preach a crusade and struggle in vain to keep the city from going over to the Florentine side; to Florence twice, with the understanding she was negotiating a peace with the papacy; to Rome, finally, in 1378 where she would remain throughout the last two years of her life.  Wherever she went, throngs of men and women crowded around her.  The Pope issued a special bull in 1376 requiring that three priests accompany her at all times to take the confessions of the multitude that would suddenly ask for the sacraments when they laid eyes on her.  By the first days of 1380,Rome was filled with rumors of plots to assassinate Pope Urban.  Catherine was living with her spiritual family in a house provided by the Pope about a mile from St. Peter's. They spent most of the day in prayer, taking on kitchen duties by turn and begging alms as needed.  On April 29, surrounded by those who held her most dear, Catherine Benincasas, beatapopolana, was released "from this body of death.”