Saint Catherine of Siena

“ 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. ”

“ 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 thee in His precious Blood, with desire to see thee clothed in true and perfect humility—for that is a little virtue which makes us great in the sweet sight of God. This is the virtue which constrained and inclined God to make His most sweet Son incarnate in the Womb of Mary. It is as exalted as the proud are humbled; it shines in the sight of God and men; it binds the hands of the wicked, it unites the soul with God, it purifies and laves away the soil of our sin, and calls on God to show us mercy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ CHAPTER II. THE SAINT'S BIOGRAPHER.
A great number of devout writers have occupied their pens on "legends" and biographies of St. Catherine, more or less complete in their scope and pretensions. The public library at Siena contains no less than seventy-nine works, of which the popular Saint of the city is the subject. Almost all of them, however, seem to be based more or less directly and avowedly on the work of "the Blessed" Raymond of Capua. ”

“ In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary:
Dearest daughter in Christ sweet Jesus: I Catherine, thy poor unworthy mother, want thee to attain that perfection for which God has chosen thee. It seems to me that one wishing so to attain should walk with and not without moderation. And yet every work of ours ought to be done both without and with moderation: it befits us to love God without moderation, putting to that love neither limit nor measure nor rule, but loving Him immeasurably. And if thou wish to reach the perfection of love, it befits thee to set thy life in order. ”

“ Such a one is like a manful knight, who does not avoid blows. Nay, he holds him unworthy of so great grace, as it seems to him to be, to bear pain, temptations and vexations for Christ crucified. All is through the hate he has for himself, and the love he has conceived for virtue.
So you see that we are not to flee nor to grieve in the time of darkness, since from the darkness light is born. O God, sweet Love, what sweet doctrine Thou givest, that through the contrary of virtue, virtue is won! Out of impatience is won patience ”

“ Now is the time, dearest father, wholly to lose one's self, not to think of one's self an atom: as the glorious workmen did who were ready with such love and desire to give their life, and watered this garden with blood, with humble continual prayer, and with endurance unto death. Beware lest I see you timid; let not your shadow make you afraid; but be a manly fighter, and never desert that yoke of obedience which the highest pontiff has placed on you. Moreover, in the Order do what you see to be to the honour of God ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ So, considering that if you were clothed in fleshly and personal love, you could not help the servants of God, and that he who does not help himself with virtue and holy zeal for justice, cannot help his brothers' city, I say that it is needful for you to be clothed with the New Man, Christ sweet Jesus, and His immeasurable charity. But we cannot be clothed therein unless first we divest us—nor could I divest me unless I see how harmful it is to me to hold my old sin, and how useful the new garment of divine charity. For when man has seen his sin, he hates it, and strips it off ”

“ 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 ”

“ You who were a legitimate daughter, tenderly beloved of her father, the Vicar of Christ on earth, Pope Urban VI., who is really the Pope the highest pontiff, have divided yourself from the bosom of your mother, Holy Church, where for so long a time you have been nourished. Oh me! oh me! one can mourn over you as over a dead woman, cast off from the life of grace; dead in soul and dead in body, if you do not escape from such an error. It appears that you have not known God's truth in the way I spoke of ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The mind is baffled in seeking to find human speech which shall even adumbrate reality. What Catherine has to describe is the culmination of her earthly life: the final triumph of faith over despair, the final offering of herself as a sacrificial victim, in obedience, as she believes, to the express Voice of God. The second letter is more calm. The sacrifice has been accepted. She is dying, not indeed by the violence of men, like the martyrs for whose fate she has yearned, but by the agony of her own heart, breaking for the sins of Holy Church. ”

“ And then three from amongst these six miracles were finally approved by Rome, on April 5, 1737, as efficient towards Canonization.
And at last, on April 30 of the same year, Feast of St. Catherine of Siena, Pope Clement, “in order that the faithful of Christ may, in Blessed Catherine, have a perfect example of all the virtues, and especially of the love of God and of their neighbour; and that a new honour and ornament may shine forth for the Republic of Genoa ”

“ She flees all causes that may incline her to vice or hinder her perfection. So she annuls her self-will, which is the cause of all evil, and subjects it to the yoke of holy obedience, not only to the Order and its chief, but to every least creature through God. She flees all glory and human indulgence, and glories only in the shames and sorrows of Christ crucified: insults, outrage, ridicule, injuries, are milk to her ”

“ But now I say and will that thou grow yet more in hunger and desire, and hold thee ready to lay down thy life, if need be, in especial, in the mystical body of Holy Church, for the reform of My Bride. For when she is reformed, the profit of the whole world will follow. How? Because through darkness, and ignorance, and self- love, and impurities, and swollen pride, darkness and death are born in the souls of her subjects. So I summon thee and my other servants to labour in desire, in vigils, and prayer, and every other work, according to the skill which I give you ”

“ 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. ”

“ Catherine is in correspondence with both d'Estaing and Du Puy. On April 22nd, Gregory, in full consistory, announces his intention of returning to Rome.
1373. Italy is devastated by petty strife: "It seems as if a planet reigned at this time which produced in the world the following effects: That the Brothers of St. Austin killed their Provincial at Sant' Antonio with a knife; and in Siena was much fighting. At Assisi the Brothers Minor fought, and killed fourteen with a knife. And those of the Rose fought, and drove six away. ”