Catherine of Siena

“ In time, not only the dyer but all Siena came to realize that Catherine possessed a mind and spirit far above ordinary standards, so that, while in her simplicity she would accept the meanest household tasks, she had yet so great an understanding of the larger issues of life that she could read the cause of each man or woman’s trouble who came to her, and suggest the remedy they needed to give them fresh courage or hope. ”

“ We hear of picturesque scenes, where men and women afflicted of demons are brought writhing into her presence, to be welcomed, cared for, and healed. She had the comfort of the company of several confessors; the first of these letters shows them labouring with homely eagerness, quaintly expressed, for the religious welfare of the wild soldiery. Absorbed, as ever, in the inward life, Catherine was as tranquilly at home here in the mountains, among the great ladies of the Salimbeni family, as in Siena or in the papal court. ”

“ The whole family appears for once to have unanimously agreed that Catherine’s piety had overstepped the bounds of common sense. The loss of her child’s hair left Lapa infuriated. Exasperation grew so intense that for a time, with the view to breaking her stubborn spirit, Catherine was deliberately ill-treated. A servant had been kept for rough work in the kitchen; she was dismissed, and Catherine made to take her place. But the girl had not a temperament that could be cowed. She was a true Sienese, [Pg 7] and Boccaccio, as well as others, speaks of the virile character of the people of Siena. ”

“ The pictures—with fine Renaissance pilasters between—date from the latter part of the sixteenth century onwards, and represent scenes from St Catherine’s life, with other Saints and Beati of Siena. In contrast with those in the lower oratory, they are largely concerned with her later life and with her public actions; her saving the souls of the tortured felons; her freeing a woman from an evil spirit (by Pietro Sorri) ; her persuading the Roman People to submit to Pope Urban (by Alessandro Casolani) ; and her inducing Gregory to return to Rome. ”

“ Catherine confronted a humanity at enmity with itself, a Church conformed to the image of this world. Her external policy proved helpless to right these evils. The return of the Popes from Avignon resulted neither in the pacification of Christendom nor in the reform of the Church. The Great Schism, of which she saw the beginning, undermined the idea of Christian unity till the thought of the Saint of Siena was in natural sequence followed by the thought of Luther. Outwardly her life was spent in labouring for a hopeless cause, discredited by the subsequent movement of history. ”

“ I, Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His precious Blood, with desire to see you compassionate to your own soul and body. For if we are not merciful to our own souls, the mercy and pity of others would avail us little. The soul treats itself with great cruelty when of its own accord it puts the knife with which it can be killed in the hands of its foe. For our foes have no weapons with which they can hurt us. They would be very glad to, but they cannot, because will alone can hurt us ”

“ Queen Giovanna of Naples, having conspired against Urban's life, is excommunicated.
LETTERS TO MONNA ALESSA DEI SARACINI The young widow of noble family to whom this letter was written was the most cherished among Catherine's women friends. She seems, as often happens with the chosen companion of a fervent and powerful nature, to have been a person simple, lovable, and quietly wise. Having after her husband's death assumed the habit of St. Dominic, she distributed her possessions to the poor by Catherine's advice, but she evidently retained her home in Siena. ”

“ LETTER FROM ST CATHERINE TO STEFANO MACONI
(Dictated by her to Barduccio Canigiani)
Lombardi, Siena at her temerity. In one respect she was more successful. Her impassioned pleading overcame the pusillanimity of Gregory, and in September he left Avignon for Rome. Catherine—in spite of the paintings that you may still see in Rome and Siena—did not accompany him to the Eternal City. She met him again at Genoa, where her indomitable will prevailed over the counsels of the Cardinals, and prevented him from turning back. Then he went on his way, and she saw him no more. ”

“ Her "love for souls" was no cold electric illumination such as we sometimes feel the phrase to imply, but a warm understanding tenderness for actual men and women. It would be hard to exaggerate her knowledge of the world and of human hearts.
Yet sometimes Catherine appears to us austere and exacting; unsparing in condemnation, and unrelenting in her demands on those she loves. Many of her letters are in a strain of exhortation that rises into rebuke. The impression at first is unpleasant. We are tempted to feel this unfailing candour captious ”

“ Catherine of Siena lived on not only in her writings but in her disciples. During her short course she gathered round her a devoted company of men and women trained to labour for the reformation of the individual, the church and the state. ”

“ Wherever the plague raged there she went and nursed the sick; wherever there was strife she appeared to try to calm the waters. She won her great reputation by the actual good works that she did, but people were so fond of ascribing miracles to her that she came to seem really more than human. After her death she was officially proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church, but before that Italy had come to believe her such a being.
In Siena to-day Catherine's house is regarded as a sacred place, and all through that quaint medieval city there are relics and reminders of her. ”

“ The reputation of the latter order was, however, similarly raised in the next century by the occurrence of the same wonder in the case of a sister of the third rule of St Dominic, Catherine Benincasa—better known as St Catherine of Siena. ”

“ Catherine had learned a hard lesson. She saw in human beings not their achievements, but their possibilities. Therefore she quickened repentance by a positive method, not by morbid analysis of evil, not by lurid pictures of the consequences of sin, but by filling the soul with glowing visions of that holiness which to see is to long for. She never despaired of quickening in even the most degraded that flame of "holy desire" which is the earnest of true holiness to be. ”

“ Catherine stands as mediator between the two parties. Not for a moment condoning the sin of a rebellion heinous indeed in her eyes, she yet does not allow the Pope to forget that the chief cause of the trouble has been the unjust and iniquitous things which the Florentines have endured from the Legates—men "whom you know yourself"— so she writes with vigorous plebeian candour—"whom you know yourself to be incarnate demons"! Let God's vicegerent, then, show forth the love of God, and find in the divine attitude toward rebellious man an example for his own attitude toward his rebellious cities. ”

“ With such qualifications and opportunities, he certainly would seem to have been the most competent [Pg 11] person imaginable to give the world an account of his saintly penitent's career. This he has done in a work often reprinted, and most recently at Milan, in two good-sized octavo volumes, in 1851. The "Life of Saint Catherine of Siena, the Seraphic spouse of Jesus Christ" forms volumes nine and ten of an "Ecclesiastical Library," brought out at a very cheap rate, as a means of supplying the people of Italy in the nineteenth century with wholesome and profitable mental food. ”

“ It is never the sins of the world that most torture Catherine: always, as here, the sins of the Church. She does not pause till she comes to the terrible climax: "I see the Christian religion lying like a dead man, and I neither mourn nor weep over him." It is the very light of most holy faith that has confused the vision of men. And again we hear the familiar refrain, "I believe that my iniquities are the cause of it." ”

“ Urban grew so uncertain that there was talk of sending Catherine—nearly dead through the strain already—to Paris, as the only ambassador likely to draw the French king over to the true Pontiff. She wrote instead, and while her letter was on its way, Charles V. joined the Anti-pope party.
When Rome, at least, had grown comparatively reconciled to Urban, Catherine returned to Siena. She was thirty-three, and the radiance that had magnetized men into contemplating even death with tranquillity, if she was only with them, had to a great extent gone out of her. ”

“ Her place is in the heart of the humble; children belong to her sisterhood, and the poor crowd her shrine on festivals.
Catherine died at Rome on the 29th of April 1380, in her thirty-third year, surrounded by the most faithful of her friends and followers; but it was not until 1461 that she received the last honour of canonisation from the hands of Pius II., Æneas Sylvius, her countryman. Æeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was perhaps the most remarkable man that Siena has produced. Like S. Catherine, he was one of a large family; twenty of his brothers and sisters perished in a plague. ”

“ Francis, and were the peculiar seats of religious enthusiasm. Art followed the current of life, [Pg 23] just as it did in Florence or Venice or Padua; and Umbria—"the Galilee," as it has been called, "of Italy"—thus produced a distinct type in painting, marked by a quality of sentimental pietism. The influence of Siena, whose artists worked at Perugia, must have made in the same direction, and it is interesting to notice in this room one picture of St. Catherine of Siena (249) , and two of her namesake of Alexandria (693, 168) . ”

“ There were devout women too, who robed themselves in the same black and white habit of penance, some of them from the noblest families of Siena: Alessia Saracini and Francesca Gori, the two whom we see with her in Bazzi’s frescoes; several of the Tolomei; and, later, Lisa, the widow of Catherine’s brother Bartolommeo. Presently there were added to these several young men of noble birth, who acted as her secretaries and legates, united to her by what seems a wonderful blending of religious enthusiasm and spiritualised affection: Neri di Landoccio de’ Pagliaresi, a scholar and poet ”

“ Catherine reached the Eternal City at the end of November 1378, with a band of her disciples of both sexes, including Alessia, Francesca and Lisa, Neri di Landoccio and Barduccio Canigiani. Stefano Maconi remained at Siena, but Frate Raimondo was already in{63} Rome. The city was in a parlous state. Sant’ Angelo was held by the soldiery of the Antipope, who kept Urban out of the Vatican; the Breton mercenaries threatened the gates, and there were savage tumults in the streets. ”

“ The palace contains a large collection of pictures in a long series of rooms. A few only are of importance. Here are several pictures by Beccafumi, conspicuous among which is a large altarpiece, curiously imitating the style of Fra Bartolommeo’s stately creations in this kind and representing the Sposalizio of St Catherine of Siena, in the presence of St Peter and St Paul and other Saints. It was originally in Santo Spirito. “This work,” says Vasari, “which was executed with much judgment and design, gained for him great honour.” ”

“ Catherine is then saved from any touch of Pharisaism by her remarkable identification of herself with the person to whom she writes. But to understand her attitude we must go further. For she never pauses in reprobation of evil. Full of conviction that the soul needs only to recognise its sin to hate and escape it for ever, she passes swiftly on to impassioned appeal. Her words breathe a confidence in men that never fails even when she is writing to the most hardened. ”

“ In this way you will come and attain the reformation, giving good priests to Holy Church. Fill her heart with the ardent love that she has lost; for she has been so drained of blood by the iniquitous men who have devoured her that she is wholly wan. But comfort you, and come, father, and no longer make to wait the servants of God, who afflict themselves in desire. And I, poor, miserable woman, can wait no more; living, I seem to die in my pain, seeing God thus reviled. Do not, then, hold off from peace because of the circumstance which has occurred at Bologna, but come ”

“ Catherine was born at Siena in 1347. She was of great beauty and had a genius for virginity; and though her parents wished her, at the age of twelve, to engage herself in marriage, she resisted, and thereby brought on herself systematic tyranny and insult. ”

“ Returning to the loveliest of all the stories concerning Catherine’s girlhood, it must be remembered that the prisons of Siena were almost more filled with political prisoners than criminals. During the whole of the Renaissance political prisoners were in themselves almost sufficient in number decently to fill Italian dungeons. Catherine, who had the understanding to love sinners, habitually visited condemned offenders. ”

“ San Domenico should be visited on the day of St Catherine’s Feast, which in Siena is kept on April 29th. The nave is hung with the bright banners of the contrade; Mass after Mass is offered up without intermission throughout the morning at the shrine, while crowds of the devout humbly and silently approach the altar, to be fed with that Bread of the Angels, “which,” says the collect for that day, “sustained even the temporal life of the blessed Virgin Catherine.” The curtain is raised, and behind the gilded bars of the shrine the pale, strange face appears, its features still recognisable. ”