St Catherine of Siena and her times

Written way back in 1906 this Classic Bio comes free on Kindle and can also be read online here:


https://archive.org/details/saintcatherines00robegoog

Just before I get into the book I would like to write a little about the usefulness of Kindle for Catholics in itself. I have loved reading the lives of the saints and Catholic Spiritual books since I was a child. Happilly I nearly always have access to dusty wonderful old Catholic libraries. I say happilly because as you have probably noticed Catholic books and goods are usually much more expensive than there secular version.

Also the Classics, the older books I much prefer tend to be out of print, often or very ,very hard to get.

Kindle has a free books section with a huge range of Catholic books that are free. It is very easy indeed to build up your very own Catholic library, any size you want for free. This is priceless.

I post a few examples below:

 

Thanks for the heads up Padriag. I was baptised in a Church dedicated to St. Catherine of Sienna.

 

Saint Catherine is a great favourite of mine, Miriam.

One thing really strikes me reading this great bio again (for the umpteenth time) is how loveable, how joyous what a pleasure to be with she really was. This is true of course of all the saints but it just seems to stream out of Catherine like a light since she was a child. People just could not get enough of her. Even in modern Sienna the citizens still seem to be in love of her.

An example of this is that during the harsh times of the Bubonic Plague when the ladies were struggling they were promised as a reward that they would get to nurse with Catherine on some occasion . This was like a promise of winning the Lottery to them.

She must have been just overwhelming.

"Love transforms one into what one loves." Dialogue 60


Sienna

 

I have also ,down the years developed a fondness for the redoubtable Donna Lapa, Catherine's mother and the 'mother of 24 other children (believe it or not) . The only mother of a saint in history to actually walk in her child's own canonisation procession.

poor Donna Lapa was boss of all she surveyed until it came to Catherine. She must have been in turns infuriated, baffled, and proud of her young daughter. Her personality comes across so vividly in the stories. A fitting extraordinary mother for an extraordinary daughter who was a great saint and Doctor of the Church.

 

The best way of getting to know St Catherine is through her letters:

http://www.drawnbylove.com/Scudder letters.htm

 

One touching fact. The ladies of Catherine's Dominican Third Order, The Mandellatta were nursing the local s who were sick of the plague, nearly all forty women in all died of it. They were nursing for free as volunteers. We do not even know their names. Mothers, wives, sisters ,sweethearts. All heroes, they knew the risks and went out and took them, paying the high price of a truly terrible death.

All saints in my book.

 

St. Catherine is my patron saint this year. I will redouble my efforts to read her Dialogue. She is quite extraordinary!

 

One of my favourite stories concerns Catherine's father. He seems to have been a good devout Catholic, a buinessman, the father of a very large and cantankerous household (not to say wife )

A measure of his goodness and wisdom was when Catherine took to her own unique religious path the whole family turned against her apart from the da, who put his foot down and warned them all off. So they all shut up, including her mother and left her in peace. Good for him.

But when he lay dying Catherine, who knew her dad faced a painful stretch in Purgatory offered herself up in his place. True enough Catherine found herself on the rack in his place. But the da got a free pass to heaven.

This teaches us so much about the Communion of the Saints in action.

http://www.traditioninaction.org/SOD/j125sdCatherineSiena_3-29.htm

 

I was baptised on her Feastday.

 

I always lie to take things like this as little signs.

 

In St Catherine's day women by our standard were not so much repressed as buried. It was considered quite normal for instance for a husband to keep her, 'in order ' and few indeed in the Church would have had any difficulty in this. Women appear to have been infantilized by their circumstances being uneducated and illiterate.. They had two choices in life either to be a wife or to enter a convent. If they entered a convent they had the the very , very strict restrictions of the cloister, the freedoms of an active order were unknown. If they choose to enter married life they were restricted to the home. They could go out into the streets but always accompanied, with the violent fueding and violence it would have been to violent to go alone.

Still they were gaps were I suspect people could have carved a space, a local spa for instance were people went for a day out. ..and no doubt there was visiting house to house. In either case society as a whole would have been more restrictive than today.

Catherine however broke the mould in a hundred different ways. She took to her room and opted out for prayer for three years. She refused to marry or enter a convent. She chopped her hair off. She joined a Third Order far, far younger then anyone ever had to take part in active works of mercy at a very young age. She worked miracles, gave instruction as a Spiritual Master and attracted a devoted band of followers, men and women to her feet. She wrote to the rich and powerful of her days letters of rebuke and advice to the rich and powerful, to people who could have ordered her killed as easily as ordering a glass of wine. She roamed Europe freely , travelling for instance to France to Avignon to see the Pope and to Rome. She set all Europe by the ears.

it would not be true of course to call Catherine a feminist, what she did she did as she did because Our Lord told her to do it..and I do mean told her for she was the most astounding mystic, God seemed pretty well to walk along side her as a close ever present friend. Yet she did burst the mould and I cannot help but think that to many women at the time she must have been a symbol of all that was possible to a woman of courage in such a limited world.

But first and foremost she was a saint and for women and men everywhere a light from heaven showing the way to heaven . It was not simply though that she broke the rules, she did so with such lightness, such lightness and joy, almost as if the obstacles simply did not exist. She could not be put in a box because she did not appear to acknowledge that boxes exists.

In this was she seems so modern, timeless. A saint but more than a saint. A giant in fact.

But a very,very lovable giant indeed.

 

One of my favorite saints. She is a saint for our time methinks!

 

Yes she seems so modern, Mary, I am amazed. I could just picture her walking down High Street.

 

I am always amazed and delighted with how charitable the saints can be when it comes to gossip and back biting. I work in an office and I always keep my confessor busy at the end of the week with stories of my dreadful behaviour towards anyone who treads on my toes in the least ways during the week.

St Catherine had two real ogres to deal with right at the start of her vocation, as a matter of fact her whole life seemed marked with a whole procession of ogres.

The first was a lady in an atrocious condition with leprosy, from which she was dying. Catherine nursed her when no one else wanted to be in the same city with her as she was nasty as they come. This dreadful woman took it into her head that since St Catherine was being so good it must have been in penance for some big sin. She took it into her head that this sin was in having sex with the local friars and spread this all around the city. A lie which if course people lapped up. Not only this when Catheirne helped her she was hateful and m ade sindie comments about Catherines supposed affairres Instead of taking a hatchet to this lady Catherine appears to have been nicer than ever, even when her mother forbade her to visit on account of the awful damage that was being done to Catherines reputaion around town.

Even when compared to other saints I find this jaw dropping. What an example. Fantastic.

 

Today is her Feast Day.

View attachment 1908

 

Wow, I never knew this. There really are no accidents.

 

Holy Church, filled as she now is with the joy of her Jesus' Resurrection, addresses herself to thee, O Catharine, who follwest the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. Living in this land of exile, where it is only at intervals that she enjoys his presence, she says to thee: Hast thou seen him upon whom my soul loveth? Thou art his Spouse; so is she: she there are no evils, no separation, for thee; whereas for her, the enjoyment is at rare and brief periods, and even so there are clouds that dim the lovely light. What a life was thine, O Catharine! uniting in itself the keenest compassion for the sufferings of Jesus, and intense happiness by the share he gave thee of his glorified life. We might take thee as our guide both to the mournful mysteries of Calvary, and to the glad spendours of the Resurrection. It is these latter that we are now repsectfully celebrating: oh! speak to us of our Risen Jesus! Is it not he that gave thee the nuptial ring, with its matchless diamond set amidst four precious gems? The bright rays which gleam from thy stigmata tell us that when he espoused thee to himself thou sawest him all resplendent with the beauty of his glorious Wounds. Daughter of Magdalen! like her, thou art a messenger of the Resurrection; and when thy last Pasch comes--the Pasch of thy thirty-third year--thou takest thy way to heaven, to keep it for eternity. O zealous lover of souls! love them more than ever, now that thou art in the palace of the King, our God. we too are in the Pasch, intercede for us, that the life of Jesus may never die within us, but that we strengthen its power by loving him with an ardour like thine own.


Our God used thee as his instrument, O humble virgin, for bringing back the Roman Pontiff to his See. Thou was stronger than the powers of this earth, which would fain have prolonged an absence disastrous to the Church. The relices of Peter in the Vatican, of Pual on the Ostian Way, of Lawrence and Sebastian, of Cecily and Agnes, exculted in their glorious tombs when Gregory entered with triumph into the Holy City. It was through thee, O Catharine, that a ruinous captivity of seventy years' duration was brought on that day to a close, and that Rome recovered her glory and her life. In these our days, hell has changed its plan of destruction! men have deprivedits Pontiff-King of the city which was chosen by Peter as the See where the Vicar of Christ should reign to the end of the world. It is this design of God, this design which was so dear to thee, O Catharine! is it now to be frustrated? Oh! our aid--and through they divine Spouse, in his just anger, permits us to sufer these humiliations, pray that at least they may be shortened.


Pray, too, for unhappy Italy, which was so dear to thee, and which is so justly proud of its Saint of Siena. Impiety and heresy are now permitted to run wild through the land; the name of thy Spouse is blasphemed; te people are taught to love error, and to hat what they had hitherto venerated: the Church is insulted and robbed: faith has long since been weakened, but now its very existenced is imperiled. Intercede for thy unfortunate country, dear Saint! oh! surely, it is time to come to her assistance, and rescue her from the hands of her enemies. The whole Church hopes that thou mayest effect the deliverance o this her illustrious province: delay not, but calm the storm which seems to threaten a universal wreck! (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year: Paschal Time: Book II, pp. 389-391.)

 

I was reading St. Catherine's letter to Pope Gregory XI in which she sets him right on a few things as follows:

".... two things ravage the Bride of Christ (the Church). The first is the over-great tenderness and care for relatives, which ought to be entirely mortified (this related to the nepotism rife among Popes of the time). The other is that over great good nature which is founded on too great mercy....Christ holds three vices especially evil - impurity, avarice and swollen pride..... a strong justice is necessary to correct them, for too great pity is the greatest cruelty."

".... and if, up to this time, we have not stood very firm, I wish and pray in truth that you deal manfully with the moment of time which remains following Christ whose vicar you are"

Wow, let's hope that the Bishops in the forthcoming synod are 'fans' of the good Saint.

 

Apparently Catherine was approached by the Popes Legate as the Pope wanted to find out from Catherine the things he should fix as Pope. Catherine told the Legate three things that Jesus said he wanted done, the very first was to stop Nepotism.

This is very funny as the Legate was the Popes cousin and got his job...you guessed it ....because he was the Popes cousin.

When St John 23rd was made Pope a short time later two of his nephews turned up at the Vatican looking cushy jobs. St John sent them backing back home to Bergamo. I think Nepotism was a problem until relatively recently but not really anymore. This cheers me up as it shows deep grained problems can be solved.

But I would love to have seen the Legates face when Catherine told him.

 

Pray to St Catherine for the Pope and the current crisis of faith in the church. I regularly invoke her help. She is such an inspiration.