April 29th is the feast of St Catherine of Siena, an Italian mystic and pious laywoman, and one of the outstanding figures of the medieval church. Born in 1347 and raised in Siena, Catherine wanted from an early age to devote herself to God, against the will of her parents, and firmly opposed their wish for her to marry. She began fasting and praying and even went so far as to cut her hair short so that she would be less attractive to young men. Eventually, her parents accepted her vocation.
In 1363, just three days after her sixteenth birthday, Catherine joined the Third Order of Saint Dominic, an order of lay people who wore a religious habit but lived at home and worked in the world rather than in a cloister. They served the poor and sick and performed charitable works. For the first several years as a Third Order Dominican, Catherine lived mostly a life of seclusion and prayer.
At around the age of 21, she entered into what would later be described as “mystical marriage” with our Lord. While praying, Jesus appeared to her, along with the Virgin Mary and King David as a harpist. Jesus placed a ring on her finger and departed. The ring remained for the rest of her life, although Catherine was the only one who could see it. She then began a more active ministry to the poor, sick and imprisoned of Siena. When the black death struck Siena, she and her companions remained hard at work, caring for those affected.
As time went on Catherine started to get involved in controversies that were plaguing the wider Church and State, writing hundreds of letters to kings, queens, nobility, religious, priests, and even to the pope himself. A dominant focus of her letters to the Pope was to urge him to leave Avignon in France and return to Rome – where anti-popes were elected and confusion was widespread. Eventually he listened and returned to Rome in 1377.
Catherine died on 29 April 1380, exhausted not only by her rigorous fasting, but by extensive travel to towns that were warring against the papacy. Here she rallied the people, gained many followers, addressed political, cultural, and moral abuses, as well as making an ongoing witness to Christ crucified through her penitential life.
Pope Urban VI led her funeral and she was buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. She was canonised by Pope Pius II 1461 and declared patron saint of Rome in 1866 by Pope Pius IX, and of Italy (together with Francis of Assisi) in 1939 by Pope Pius XII. In 1970 she was the second woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church, by Pope Paul VI, only days after Teresa of Ávila. In 1999 Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a patron saint of Europe. She is also venerated as patron saint of nurses, the sick, and those ridiculed for their piety and is invoked against fires, miscarriages, temptations!
Picture above: Extract from St Catherine of Siena by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, dated around 1746. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer.
