by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
What I want to do today is to cover as much as we can about the life, writings and significance of St. Catherine of Siena. One reason is because St. Catherine lived in a time when the Church was in, I would say, the gravest crisis of her history because there were more than one claimant to the Papacy and we know, of course, that the strength of the Catholic Church depends on the Papacy.
I’ve given you a short biography. What I’d like to do first is to go over a longer biography from a standard source, make comments as I go along and then draw on some of her teaching.
Catherine of Siena, whose family name was Catherine Benincasa, was born in Siena in 1347, the youngest of a very large family. Her father, Jacopo, was a prosperous wool dealer. We get some idea of how wealthy the family was from the home, which still exists in Siena after six hundred years. Catherine spent a normal, contented infancy during which one thing stood out, what people called her excessive gaiety. However, in adolescence, she became attracted to prayer and solitude. Her mother, Monna Lapa, did not approve of her daughter’s behavior; in fact, a problem teenager, who rebelled against her mother’s direction, in such matters as dress and amusements, resisted any suggestion of marriage and refused just as positively to become a nun, she never expressly became either a nun or married. She was a very self-willed individual. Despite disagreement from her parents, Catherine at the age of sixteen was allowed to enter the order of St. Dominic as a tertiary.
It is well to know that some outstanding people over the centuries have been Dominican tertiaries. She was one of them. The rules of this group of tertiaries allowed her to dress in the black and white of a Dominican nun while remaining in her own home. Then for three years she never left her room, and then only to go to Mass and go to confession, and as far as we know, she spoke to no one but her confessor. The priest confessor later on admitted that he never felt quite competent in directing Catherine, so much so that she survived for years on a spoonful of herbs a day and a few hours of sleep every night. All we know is that during these years she did experience some mystical phenomena that served her in good stead later on. She was told by Our Lord, in one of her revelations, to do her share of the housework, which her mother of course kept complaining, “You mystic, would you please do some work around the house?” She then began to do her share of the work in the house, to nurse the sick and to help the poor.
About the same time it became known that she had unusual discernment of souls and people came to her in crowds seeking her counsel and there were some very strange characters. There were men and women of all ages and all ranks. They formed what people called a club and because of the district where she lived, it was called the club of the Fontebranda. Among the members of this club were leaders of the nobility in that district: men of fashion, priests, religious, soldiers, artists, merchants, lawyers and politicians. She lived a most unusual life, to put it mildly. Needless to say, not everybody appreciated what she was doing. The plain people especially were very critical. “Here,” the neighbors said, “is a young woman, a kind of nun. People say she’s holy. Well, we’re not so sure. She goes about freely with young men, who are in and out of her house at all hours of the day. Who ever heard of such a thing?” They nicknamed her the “Queen of the Fontebranda” and they called her friends, who they said must be bewitched, the “Catarinati,” the “Catherinized,” the “bewitched by Catherine.” But the unique club, or the “Bella Brigata,” as they called themselves, the “Beautiful Brigade,” was not to be disbursed by jeers. The disapproval did not even cloud their happiness. They persevered. Over the centuries, that group of people has come to be called the school of mystics. They were attracted to Catherine by, on the one hand, her remarkable gaiety and joyousness of life coupled with austere asceticism. So much for the background.
The French Papacy
There was, however, at this time, a severe crisis in the Church and the immediate cause of the crisis was that the Popes decided to leave Rome and move to Avignon in France. So the Bishops of Rome did not live in Rome. They lived in the palatial residence of the French nobility in Avignon. This particularly had bad effects on the Italian people, who were always in conflict with the French papal legates. When the city of Florence in Italy declared war on the Papal States in protest against the legate’s rule, eighty towns joined them in ten days. Let’s get the picture. We are talking about the fourteenth century. That would be about a hundred and fifty years before the major break in Catholic unity caused by Martin Luther’s defecting from Rome. As we know, for some six hundred years, by then already, the Popes were civil rulers of what were called by then the “Papal States.” In other words, the Popes, while being the spiritual heads of the Church, were also the temporal heads of a large part of modern Italy called the Papal States. And that meant that the Popes, themselves, and those who worked for the Papacy engaged not only in ecclesiastical matters but in political affairs and, indeed, in military affairs. And this, I repeat, went on for centuries, and it was not finally broken until the nineteenth century. As a result of the temporal rule of the Popes, people became disenchanted by the kind of temporal authority the Popes and their assistants were administering, and as a consequence there was opposition to the Papacy originally on political grounds, but then that went over also into the ecclesiastical and spiritual spheres.
While Catherine was in Pisa (this was not her home town), working on the cause of peace (she had a reputation for being an arbitrator), she received the stigmata on the Fourth Sunday of Lent 1375, although we’re told the marks remained invisible until after her death. At a certain stage in this war between the people of Florence and the Papal States, the city of Florence asked Catherine to go to Avignon and there plead with Pope Gregory XI on behalf of their embassy. She agreed and reached Avignon in the third week of May 1376 accompanied by twenty-three members of her “brigade,” including four priests. And at least we’ve got to hear and realize we’re talking about a most unusual person. No doubt a mystic, and remember she was still a young woman. And she then went to Avignon to plead with the Pope.
Catherine received the stigmata on the Fourth Sunday of Lent 1375.
The next three months are among the most fateful in the whole history of the Church and this is one reason why Catherine of Siena has both been canonized and her writings highly regarded and most important she, along with St. Teresa of Avila, has been declared a Doctor of the universal Church. So there are two women Doctors of the Church, Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena [at the time this talk was given, neither St. Thérèse the Little Flower nor St. Hildegard of Bingen had as yet been declared a Doctor of the Church]. And the reason, the immediate reason, is because she then went to plead with the Pope that he should leave France and return to Rome where he belonged. And the one thing we better know about the Papacy is that over the now almost two thousand years of Papal history the Popes have been and some have been very, comma, very human, human beings.
Only God knows where the present situation will end including, by the way, those altar servers, whether indeed the Holy Father has approved, whether he did so under duress, whether even under duress he did so officially and I’m getting an average of two fax messages from Rome every week. This will be my twenty-fourth year in working for the Holy See. This I can tell you, not everybody working for the Vatican is on the side of the Vicar of Christ. I don’t believe I’ve ever said this publicly, but I do now. If ever we’ve prayed, in God’s name let’s pray now. There are several thousand who work at the Vatican. There’s no way, no human way the Pope could possibly have complete total control of everyone working in the Vatican – no way.
In any case it was a crisis that reached a peek in the fourteenth century. She then went to Avignon where she experienced every conceivable kind of humiliation and the women at the court in Avignon laughed at her – mocked her. Then those prelates, who asked themselves, “What’s this woman doing here anyhow?” They then subjected her to all kinds of humiliating inquisition. Then, when the people from Florence came, the very ones who had asked her to represent them; they simply refused to accept her mediation. She was being used by the political powers. Thank God, thank God that the Holy See has been freed from the political powers under which it had been, shall we say, in control for centuries. But as providence would have it the Pope received her, and then she realized that what he needed was a stronger will, a more resolute will and her task was only one, to convince the Vicar of Christ that he should leave France, and of course that meant arousing the anger of the French people. Leave France and return to Rome where, you might say, he belonged in the first place.
French Catholicism
Let me tell you, you do not begin to begin to understand the history of the Catholic Church unless you know something, and the more the better, about the role of France in the history of the Papacy, and that for a variety of reasons. Gaul, as it was called under already Julius Caesar, was a very independent people. The French, as a class, are far above normal in intelligence and extraordinarily clear and penetrating-speculative mind. For centuries no Papal document was allowed to be accepted until the French people accepted the decision, in other words, the French authorities had to accept what Rome issued and only if the French accepted what Rome had issued or published, was then the document from Rome considered authentic. And that went on into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. Then as we know in the nineteenth century, was voted the subject of Papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council. Why did the First Vatican Council vote on Papal infallibility? Why? Because the French did not accept Papal infallibility. In other words, unless the French people, especially their leaders and most especially their Bishops approved, then, and only then, were the documents from Rome accepted in France. All of this is part of the history of the French nation.
So we read: The might of France, the Sacred College, and the Pope’s own family immediately closed in around him to prevent him from taking this step. Every possible means were used to keep the Pope from leaving France and going back to Rome. It was a terrifying struggle of wills in which finally, thanks to God’s grace, the victory went to Catherine. Pope Gregory XI left France and Avignon on September 13, 1376. Had he not left France only God knows what would have been the future of the Catholic Church.
The change of climate and the difficulties with which the Pope had to cope took a heavy toll on the Pope’s frail physical condition. He died before the year was up and the new Pope, Urban VI, was from Naples, and he began his Pontificate with a zeal for reform, which immediately alienated the French Cardinals. The revolution was not over. I thought we should spend this kind of time on Catherine of Siena both because of her stature and because we need to know something at least a sliver of what is going on in the Catholic Church today. There are those who are in power in the Church, noted Bishops and Cardinals, not all of whom are on the side of Pope John Paul II. And it’s just as well that most Catholics do not know, I don’t say the whole story, but even more of what is going on. I repeat, the Catholic Church is divinely instituted and divinely protected, but she is, and I mean this from twenty-four years in working for the Vatican, she is a very human, human institution.
Because of this new Pope’s zeal for reforming the Church, he alienated the French Cardinals. Bad enough for the Pope to leave France and now for the new Pope to clean things up and that meant, of course, cleaning things up also among the Papal Curia. What did these French Cardinals do? They withdrew to the Italian town of Anagni, and there they issued a statement declaring that the present Pope Urban VI was in reality an intruder whom they had only pretended to elect, the Cardinals out of fear of the Roman mob. The Romans wanted an Italian to be elected Pope so out of fear they elected an Italian. They never really intended to, so the Cardinals said. Then to make matters worse, shortly thereafter these French Cardinals elected their own Pope, and then he went back to Avignon, to France, and thus began the Great Western Schism which lasted, my friends, for seventy years. It was the most terrible ordeal which the Church has ever had to suffer. Once there is conflict in the top echelons of the Church, then you have a crisis, indeed. Catherine went to Rome at the request of Urban VI to organize spiritual help towards ending the schism. Before leaving Siena for the last time, she dictated a book. There is really only one book that she’s identified with. It’s called The Dialogue of St. Catherine, and that, along with her four hundred letters, comprise what we call a treasury of her spiritual writings.
Saint Catherine’s Spiritual Legacy
For a whole year she lived exclusively on the Blessed Sacrament.
Once again in Rome, she pitted herself against the powers of evil that threatened to engulf the Church. For a whole year she lived exclusively on the Blessed Sacrament. We have witnesses that she got less than one hour’s sleep every night while she wrote zealous letters all over Europe beseeching help for the restoration of unity and peace. And let me tell you, almost twenty-five years in working for the Holy See; I can tell you this, pray, pray for those same two intentions, for unity and peace in the Catholic Church. There is division and the division is in some high places. She daily offered her life to God to obtain peace and unity for the Church. One evening, in January 1380, while dictating a letter to Pope Urban, she had a stroke. She partially recovered, lived in a mystical agony, convinced that she was wrestling with demons. She had a second stroke while at prayer in St. Peter’s Basilica and died three weeks later on April 29, 1380 at the ripe old age of thirty-three. She was buried under the high altar in the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Sulpa Minerva, but her head, as the Italians do, her head was removed and taken to Siena where it is enshrined in the Dominican Church in that city. She was canonized eighty-one years after her death, and her feast is celebrated in Siena on April 29, but the rest of the Church celebrates it on April 30.
