Saint Catherine of Genoa

“ And “one day a holy Friar,”—it was probably the Observant Franciscan, Father Angelo of Chiavasso (near Genoa) , beatified later on,—“said to her: ‘You communicate every day: what kind of satisfaction do you derive from it?’ And she answered him simply, explaining to him all her desires and feelings. But he, to test the purity of her intention, said: ‘There might possibly be some imperfection in such very frequent Communion,’ and then left her. And Catherine having heard this, fearing such imperfection, at once suspended her Communions, but at the cost of great distress. ”

“ Lived 1550-1614, worked heroically amongst the poor and pestilential sick, founded the Order of the Fathers of a Good Death, and was himself at Genoa, already gravely ill, in 1613.
[82] Vallebona, pp. 55, 56, shows, from Giuliano’s still extant will of 1497, how this income from his property in the Island of Scios alone amounted to about 30,000 modern Italian lire. We shall study the instructive growth of legend in the matter of Catherine’s “poverty” later on. ”

“ But it was the psycho-physical peculiarities of the life of Catherine, and the more or less complete incorruption of the body: these two things, neither of which has any necessary connection with that faithful and heroic use of free-will and that spirit and grace of God in which the whole substance of sanctity consists, which, each leading on and back to and strengthening the impression and tradition of the other, determined the outbreak and onflow of popular devotion in the one case, and the absence of which prevented the growth of any such cultus in the other. ”

“ Above all it can teach us, I think, with a rare completeness, wherein lies the secret of a persuasive holiness. For Catherine lets us see, with unusual clearness, how this winningness lies in the pathetically dramatic spectacle and appeal presented by a life engaged in an ever-increasing ethical and spiritual energizing,—whether in a slow shifting and pushing of its actual centre, down and in from the circumference of the soul to its true centre, and from this true centre enlarging and reorganizing its whole ever-expanding being again and again ”

“ Catherine’s fundamental conversion-experience and all her later teachings attach her Reconciliation to the entire act of ceaseless Divine “ecstasy,” self-humiliation, and redemptive immanence in Man, of which the whole earthly life and death of Christ are the centre and culmination; but though the human soul’s corresponding action is conceived as continuous, once it has begun, she loves to dwell upon this whole action as itself the gift of God and the consequence of His prevenient act. ”

“ But as to Mariola and Argentina, and their lives after 1510, we do know something. Mariola (Maria) Bastarda had, on leaving Catherine’s service, (probably only some weeks, but possibly some months before her mistress’s death) , become one of the servants, or under-nurses (filia) , of the Hospital; and, on July 7 of the following year (1511) she was clothed a Novice in the Convent of Bridgettines in Genoa, with the money left to her in Catherine’s Will. ”

“ The date of Tommasina’s birth comes from Ritratti ed Elogi di Liguri Illustri, Genova, Ponthenier; the date of the beginning of Giuliano’s illness from his Codicil of January 10, 1497, in which he declares himself as “languishing” and “infirm in body”; and the approximate date of his death from two entries in the Cartulary of the Bank of St. George, as to investments made by Catherine (copies in Documenti su S. Caterina da Genova, University Library, Genoa, B. VII, 31) , of which the first, on July 14, 1497, gives her name as “Catterinetta, filia Jacobi di Fiesco et uxor Juliani Adorni” ”

“ The Cavallière L. A. Cervetto, of the Biblioteca Civica, referred me to many useful works. The Librarian of the [xii] Biblioteca della Missione Urbana copied out for me the inventory of St. Catherine’s effects. And Signor Dottore Augusto Ferretto, of the Archivio di Stato, made admirably careful, explicitated copies for me, from the originals, so full of difficult abbreviations, of the long series of legal documents which are the rock-bed on which my biography is built.
The courteous help of the Head Librarian of the Genoese University Library extended to beyond Genoa. ”

“ Thirdly, it is certain that some reasonable doubt can be entertained as to whether Catherine’s words, solemnly emphatic though they are, were not understood too literally by Marabotto and the second Redactor. Nothing is, indeed, more obvious and striking throughout all the authentic memorials of her, than the delightfully simple, grandly fearless veracity of her mind. She never speaks but according to the fulness of her conviction: like with all souls most near unto the childlike Master, Christ, it can be said of her that “one never knows what she is going to say next.” ”

“ Men who have been devoted to her spirit. Its vitality.
No wonder then that, from the contemporary circle of her devoted friends and disciples onwards, Catherine should have attracted, throughout the centuries and in many lands, a remarkable number of deep minds and saintly characters. The ardent young Spaniard, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, and the shrewd and solid Savoyard Bishop, St. François de Sales, love to quote and dwell upon her example and her doctrine. Mature theologians, such as Cardinal Bellarmine, the hard-headed controversialist ”

“ We thus get something of which the interesting cases of “doubleness of personality,” so much studied of late years, are, as it were, purely psychical, definitely maladif caricatures; the great difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing, at all times, the consciousness and memory of both sides, of both “selves,” and of each as both actual and potential, within the range of her one great personality. Indeed it is this very multiplicity thus englobed and utilized by that higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and sanctity. ”

“ The sources are, it is true, at first sight, fairly abundant,—altogether about one hundred of the two hundred and eighty pages of the Vita ed Opere. But four peculiarities render their utilization a matter of much labour and caution.
For one thing, they certainly include no piece written by herself, and probably none written down before 1497. Catherine’s memory can no doubt be trusted, and with it much of the oldest version of those great turning-points of her inner life which occurred long before that date, and which she thus, later on, communicated to her two closest friends. ”

“ And this desire, as it gradually disappeared, will, doubtless, not have left mere blanks in her consciousness, or have reduced the sum-total of her feelings; but, with that diminution, some of her old tenderness for and interest in others, will have reappeared. And again we see how no one set of feelings, one “psychosis,” ever simply repeats itself, in even one and the same soul: for Catherine’s positive disgust with all things, which prepared and accompanied her desire for death in 1473, is absent from the otherwise similar desire of 1507. ”

“ She had now, as I think had been the case since soon after she had left her Palace, two maids in her service: the widow and Franciscan Tertiary, Benedetta Lombarda, who appears, already then as an old and valued servant, in Giuliano’s will of October 1494, and who never left Catherine till her death; and a younger, unmarried maid, either Mariola Bastarda or a certain Antonietta. Argentina del Sale, too, will have often, perhaps continually, been about Catherine, aiding her in various ways; but she will not as yet have been living under the same roof with her. ”

“ Each has its turn in the rich, free play of Catherine’s life. I will take the negative line first, and then the positive, so as to finish up with affirmation, which will thus, as in her actual experience and practice, be all the deeper and more substantial, because it has passed, and is ever re-passing, through a process of limitation and purification.
First, then, if grace and God are only within, and only without, and only above, she will and does experience contradiction and paradox in all attempts at explaining reality; she will thus find things to be obscure instead of clear ”

“ But I know well that Thou saidst several times, ‘Come, since I want to devour thee.’ ... To me it seemed that I merited rather to go under Lucifer, than into the Infinite Light (Luce) .”
We get here a number of interesting parallels and contrasts to Catherine’s teaching and practice. God’s devouring of the soul; God pictured as Light; souls conceived as higher up or lower down in space, according to their degree of goodness or of badness; even the pleasure in a play upon words: all this finds its close counterpart in Catherine. ”

“ And then we can still see fairly clearly that Catherine does not share the views of practically all her attendants, and of certainly all the later contributors to and revisers of the Vita. For even now the book still leaves intact the passages which show her as hoping to be cured by Boerio, and as then condemning herself for having rejoiced without cause,—evidently, without supernatural justification; as prepared to believe that the physicians might be able to find an appropriate remedy, and as willingly trying the remedies they actually offer her ”

“ The Dominican Censor and Battista Vernazza, re-thinking Catherine and her teaching, in other times and away from her direct influence, necessarily see her differently again: they are, as it were, spiritual grandchildren, who rather themselves absorb her and re-state her to their generation than they are themselves absorbed by her.—And there is the law of conservation, juxtaposition, and identification. ”

“ This very precise distance of time, between that humble wedding and the poor navvy’s illness, will have been derived by the Observant from Argentina herself, probably still living at the time of his writing, even now hardly sixty years old.—Hence his long-winded addition, as to the mediation of the “spiritual daughter” (certainly Argentina) , in the matter of our knowledge of Catherine’s prayer for the dying Giuliano, [372] may also have been derived from that gossipy little woman. ”

“ Such a new facing of the new problems, with a strength both old and new, enkindled indeed at her light and warmth, and yet developed also from the vigorously fresh centres of other deep hearts and virile minds and wills, we must now attempt to picture, in the case of the two greatest of Catherine’s disciples, Ettore Vernazza and his eldest daughter Battista. ”

“ And again, the period during which the corpus of Catherine’s doctrine was in process of formation was specially favourable to such large toleration. For if she died in 1510, ten years before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, with its inevitable reaction, her chief chronicler, the saintly philanthropist Vernazza, did not die, a true martyr to that boundless love of souls which he had derived from his great-souled friend, till 1524; and her Confessor Marabotto did not depart till 1528. ”

“ But she nowhere echoes the teaching reproduced here, v. 10, as to the Divine Trinity being figured in man’s three faculties of soul.
Loda XXXV gives us a sort of Christian Stoicism very dear dear to Catherine: “Thou, my soul, hast been created in great elevation; thy nature is grounded in great nobility (gentilezza) ,” v. 7; “thou hast not thy life in created things; it is necessary for thee to breathe in other countries, to mount up to God thine inheritance, Who (alone) can satisfy thy poverty,” v. ”

“ And secondly, it is, I think, not far-fetched to find in this heroic death-ride, if not a direct or even a conscious effect, yet at all events an impressive illustration of, and practical parallel to, Catherine’s teaching as to Heaven being already [332] present everywhere where pure love energizes, and to her picture of the soul’s glad Purgatorial plunge. We know that it was Vernazza himself who, say in 1497, drew forth from her that teaching ”

“ Catherine transforms over-intense and impoverishing insistence upon the pure Oneness of God, such as we find it even in Dionysius and still more in Proclus, into a, sometimes equally over-intense, conception as to the oneness of our union with Him, leaving Him to be still conceived as an overflowing richness of all kinds. ”

“ There is nothing here, at least in the Ettore’s case, that the most intolerantly robust, or even the most hysterically would-be strong, mind could suspect of sickliness. And yet, if undoubtedly much of all this fruitful virility in Catherine’s closest friend, and in Catherine’s God-daughter, proceeds from Catherine herself, it nevertheless springs up and grows within them, not as an avowed, nor probably, for the most part, even as conscious, imitation or reminiscence. ”

“ And since Catherine’s special characteristic consists precisely in the richness and variety of her life at any one moment, and in the successive, ever-accelerated enrichment which it achieves almost up to the end, any obliteration of this successive growth, or any one-sided attention to any one aspect of her life during any one of its chief periods, will readily take all life-likeness out of her portrait. ”

“ Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected already here and now, “he that believeth in Him, is not judged; he that believeth not, is already judged,” iii, 18. But the other current of doctrine, so prominent in the Synoptists, is not absent from St. John,—the teaching as to a later, external and visible, forensic judgment. And Catherine has a similar intermixture of two currents, yet with a strong predominance of the immanental, present conception of the matter. ”