Saint Catherine of Siena

Catherine Benincasa was born in Siena on 25 March 1347, one of the youngest of the many children of a prosperous wool-dyer. At six she had a vision of Christ blessing her, and at seven she vowed her virginity to God. When her parents wanted her to marry she cut off her hair. At about eighteen she was received among the Mantellate, laywomen of the Dominican Third Order who lived at home.

For three years she stayed almost always in her small room, in prayer and fasting. Then she understood that Christ wanted her to go out and serve her neighbour. She nursed the sick in hospitals and in the plague of 1374, cared for the poor, and visited prisoners. A group of disciples, priests and lay people, gathered around her and called her “Mamma.”

She could hardly write at first, but she dictated nearly four hundred letters to people of every rank, among them popes, kings, soldiers and her own mother, full of fire and tenderness. For almost seventy years the popes had lived at Avignon in France. In 1376 Catherine went there herself and urged Gregory XI to return to Rome, and in January 1377 he did. When the Great Schism divided the Church in 1378, she worked tirelessly for the Roman pope, Urban VI. She also dictated a book of mystical teaching, The Dialogue.

Worn out by penance and labour, she died in Rome on 29 April 1380, at thirty-three. She was canonized in 1461. In 1970 Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, the second woman after Teresa of Ávila. She is patroness of Italy with Saint Francis, and of Europe.