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It is late at night, almost seven hundred years ago, in the lovely central Italian region of Tuscany. Inside a small room, a young woman is speaking animatedly about God.
Her hands fly back and forth, flickering in the candlelight. Opposite her, struggling to listen but barely able to remain awake, sits her confessor—a trained theologian and a saintly man.
Finally the young woman loses patience. “Fr. Raymond, have you no interest in God? Would you neglect your soul just to get a little sleep?”
No wonder the priest is trying not to doze off! The frank, dynamic speaker is Catherine of Siena, a mystic whose insights are treasured by the church. So valuable are Catherine’s teachings and writings, in fact, that Pope Paul VI declared her, along with St. Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the Church in 1970. They were the first women to join this group of thirty saints, which includes such prominent figures as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
Most of the Doctors were bishops or scholars whose homilies, treatises, and other writings have inspired Christians for centuries. Like Teresa, they were in the religious life. Catherine, though, was quite different. She was a laywoman. She came from a family of modest means and never received an education; indeed, she was illiterate most of her life. Her written work, dictated to assistants, consists of only one book and about four hundred letters. What could such a seemingly disadvantaged young woman have to teach the church?
Catherine’s World. Catherine was born in 1347 in Siena, Italy, the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. Politically and culturally, her world was in transition. Prosperity was on the rise, and, along with it, spiritual discontent and restlessness. Much of the church had grown corrupt and attached to wealth, as well as entangled in European politics.
It was a world torn by frequent wars, and worse. A few months after Catherine’s birth, the Black Death broke out in Sicily. By the time the disease had run its course over the next few years, at least a third of Europe’s population—and more than seventy-five million people worldwide—had perished.
Corruption, wars, plague—to many Christians, it seemed that God had abandoned his church. Far from abandoning his people, however, God was revealing his presence by sending saints like Catherine.
Holiness Attracts. Catherine was only six when she had a mystical experience that gave her life its fundamental direction. She saw Christ, who said nothing but only smiled and blessed her. Irresistibly drawn, the bright and cheerful girl decided that she wanted nothing more than to belong to Jesus.
Right away, Catherine worked hard to find ways to be alone with Jesus in prayer—not an easy task in her bustling family home. As she grew older, she refused to prepare for marriage. Her mother could never quite understand this behavior, and a great deal of tension ensued. Her father, though, knew his daughter well and demanded that the family leave her in peace.
At about sixteen, Catherine joined the lay branch of the Dominicans and spent the next four years in prayer and penance at home. This period ended when she had a vision of Christ, who refused to enter her room but invited her instead to come out and become active in the life of the city. Catherine found this difficult, for she had become quite shy, but she emerged nonetheless and worked with the sick and the poor.
Catherine’s compassion for the suffering, as well as her passion for their salvation, were evident right away. As she nursed the sick, she also prayed for them and brought many to conversion and reconciliation with God. In addition to this ministry to the sick, Catherine began getting together with a few friends for evening conversations. Though quiet and disinterested when it came to the local gossip, Catherine became positively vivacious when talking about God. Siena’s young people often listened to her well into the night, captivated by her burning love and stunning insight.
Word of miracles swirled around Catherine, and more and more people sought her out for prayer and advice. Soon she was preaching to crowds—her message underscored by her reputation for remarkable charity and compassion toward the sick. (Imagine a twenty-something Mother Teresa!) As a result, a group of followers, some quite a bit older and more prominent, assembled around this young woman who was so in love with God and such a compelling model of holiness.
Unlikely Counselor. As her reputation spread beyond Siena, this unschooled young woman became a mediator and peacemaker at the highest levels of the church. Catherine’s new role began around 1374, when Pope Gregory XI asked her to pray for him and for the church. Indeed, there was serious need for prayer during this period, sometimes called the “Babylonian exile” of the papacy.
Decades before, a French cardinal had been elected pope. Following a series of events that delayed and then obstructed his move to Rome, he had settled the papal court in the southern French city of Avignon. His successors remained there—a situation which, for a variety of reasons, became a scandal for the church. Pope Gregory, who was also French, had publicly promised to return to Rome, but many cardinals opposed him, as did the French king. Gregory needed someone to stiffen his resolve.
This Catherine did, in a remarkable set of letters. Bluntly but charmingly, she urged him to stand firm and to deal with his problems like a man, “following Christ, whose vicar you are.” She warned Gregory against self-love, which would surely cause him to fail in his duties. A bishop who loves himself more than he loves God will avoid potentially unpopular words and actions, she wrote. Instead of urging people to avoid sin, he will “plaster over vice” for fear of starting a quarrel. In this way, the desire to be at peace with everyone can be the “very worst cruelty.” Like a physician who prescribes a painful but necessary treatment, a bishop must witness to the truth of the gospel, even if people dislike him for it.
Again and again in her letters, Catherine demanded that her “beloved Papa” fulfill his promise to return to Rome. She further urged him to reform the church by rooting out corrupt ministers and appointing bishops who would be “holy and true shepherds.”
Not everyone could have gotten away with lecturing a pope this way, but Catherine’s way of life commanded Gregory’s attention and respect. In the end, he acted on her advice and moved the papacy back to Rome in 1377.
Talks with Jesus. Near the end of her life, perhaps anticipating that her time was short, Catherine was inspired to write. The book she produced in 1378—perhaps her most important contribution—was not like the theological and scriptural expositions of other Doctors of the Church. It was something new, written for laypeople as well as religious. Cast in the form of a dialogue between God and herself, it explores what a person must know and do to seek holiness.
Catherine’s Dialogue of Divine Providence attracted a wide audience. In the following century, when the printing press was invented, it was one of the first books published in Italy and has remained in print, in many languages, ever since. What can we learn from it? Here are three of many key points.
Holiness begins with self-knowledge. But beware! Catherine does not take self-knowledge to mean clarity about one’s wants, weaknesses, and strengths. For her, it is knowledge about how we are related to God—namely, as creatures who are utterly dependent on a loving Creator, the only source of happiness and fulfillment.
We grow in love for God as we extend love to other people. This, Catherine insists, is the way to extinguish the self-love that keeps us from God. Though our families and neighbors may test our patience, they provide the means by which we develop the virtues that God wants to see in us. This love takes many forms: service, prayer for others’ needs, restraint in judging their faults, willingness to speak the truth in love. It perfects the soul and draws people to Christ.
Never lose heart! Catherine’s devotion to the truth made her painfully aware of scandals and sins in the body of Christ. Even as she counseled the pope and rebuked wayward priests, she prayed constantly for reform. At the same time, she did not lose faith, as many of her contemporaries did. Even when high-ranking clerics sought to humiliate and discredit her, Catherine accepted the challenges gracefully without becoming bitter. She never lost her confidence in the church as the body of Christ.
God of Surprises. Shortly after finishing her Dialogue, Catherine was asked by the new pope, Urban VI, to assist him in Rome. She spent the last full year of her life there, urgently working for the unity of the church in the face of dramatic internal conflicts. Early in 1380, she fell gravely ill, perhaps as the result of a heart attack. It left her weak and barely able to walk. Still, every day for the next few months, she made her way to St. Peter’s, a mile and a half away, to spend the day in prayer with her beloved Jesus. She never recovered and died on April 29. She was thirty-three.
In her short life, Catherine did not advance theological reflection in the way of an Augustine or an Aquinas. She was not a learned moral teacher, like Gregory or Alphonsus, nor an expert in Scripture, like Jerome. But through her life and her popular-level writing, she taught practical lessons about love and fidelity that are as relevant now as they were in her day.
When Paul VI named Catherine a Doctor of the Church, he insisted that she deserved a place among the greatest saintly thinkers. Without following the usual path, he said, “without ever having had a human teacher, she was richly filled by God with gifts of wisdom and knowledge.” Along with them came a special “charism of exhortation” that equipped her to announce these truths in a way that built unity, changed lives, and filled hearts with a burning love of God.
Who ever would have picked an unknown, underprivileged young woman to be a major player in the church and the world of her day? Who but the God who sent our Savior into the world as a humble and ordinary-looking child?
Robert Kennedy holds a PhD in medieval studies. He is a professor and chair of the Department of Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.