Saint Catherine of Siena

Saint Catherine of Siena was a lay Dominican tertiary, a mystic, and a peacemaker. She urged the pope to return from Avignon to Rome, and her teaching led to her being proclaimed a Doctor of the Church. Her liturgical memorial falls on April 29.

She was born on March 25, 1347, in Siena, in the Fontebranda district, the twenty-fourth of the twenty-five children of the dyer Jacopo Benincasa and his wife Lapa. According to tradition, as a six-year-old girl she had a vision of Christ, and a year later she made a vow of virginity. When her parents wanted to give her in marriage, she cut off her hair and shut herself away at home. Her family finally gave way, and in 1363, at sixteen, moved by a vision of Saint Dominic, Catherine joined the Mantellate, the Dominican tertiaries.

She did not live in a convent, but in her family home she gave herself to prayer, penance, and works of charity, above all for the sick. She learned to read with difficulty and to write only as an adult. At about the age of twenty she experienced a mystical espousal with Christ, and in 1375, according to tradition, she received the stigmata. Disciples gathered around her, lay people and clergy, who called her mother.

In time people of every walk of life sought her counsel, from the powerful and politicians to ordinary people, clergy, and religious. There were also those who distrusted her, and so in 1374 the General Chapter of the Dominicans summoned her to Florence to question her. Raymond of Capua, later Master General of the Order and author of her first complete biography, then became her spiritual director. Catherine reconciled feuding families and cities, and in working for peace between Florence and Pope Gregory XI she put her own life at risk.

In 1376 Catherine went to Gregory XI, who was residing in Avignon, and pressed him to return to Rome. The pope returned in 1377. After his death in 1378, the dispute over the election of Urban VI gave rise to the Great Western Schism. Catherine took the side of Urban VI, who called her to Rome, and to the end she prayed and worked for the unity of the Church. She called the pope “sweet Christ on earth.”

Her teaching is contained in the Dialogue of Divine Providence, in several hundred letters to popes, rulers, and ordinary people, and in a collection of prayers. She died in Rome on April 29, 1380, at the age of thirty-three. According to Raymond of Capua, on her deathbed she assured her disciples that she was giving her life for the holy Church. Her body rests beneath the altar of the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Pope Pius II, himself from Siena, canonized her on June 29, 1461. Pius IX declared her co-patroness of Rome, and in 1939 Pius XII made her, together with Saint Francis of Assisi, principal patroness of Italy. In 1970 Paul VI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, and in 1999 John Paul II named her co-patroness of Europe.