Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa, TOSD (25 March 1347 – 29 April 1380), known as Catherine of Siena, was an Italian Catholic mystic and diplomat who engaged in papal and Italian politics through extensive letter-writing and advocacy. Canonised in 1461, she is revered as a saint and as a Doctor of the Church due to her extensive theological authorship. She is also considered to have influenced Italian literature.
Born and raised in Siena, Catherine wanted from an early age to devote herself to God, against the will of her parents. She joined the mantellates, a group of pious women, primarily widows, informally devoted to Dominican spirituality; later these types of urban pious groups would be formalised as the Third Order Dominicans, but not until after Catherine's death. Her influence with Pope Gregory XI played a role in his 1376 decision to leave Avignon for Rome. The Pope then sent Catherine to negotiate peace with the Florentine Republic. After Gregory XI's death (March 1378) and the conclusion of peace (July 1378), she returned to Siena.
Catherine dictated to secretaries her set of spiritual treatises, The Dialogue of Divine Providence, between 1377 and 1378. Thereafter, the Great Schism of the West led Catherine of Siena to go to Rome with the pope. She sent numerous letters to princes and cardinals to promote obedience to Pope Urban VI and to defend what she calls the "vessel of the Church". She died on 29 April 1380, exhausted by her rigorous fasting. Her funeral and burial took place in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.
Devotion to Catherine developed rapidly after her death. Pope Pius II canonised her in 1461; she was declared a patron saint of Rome in 1866 by Pope Pius IX, and of Italy (together with Francis of Assisi) in 1939 by Pope Pius XII. Pope Pius XII, Pontifical Brief, 18 June 1939. Proclamation to Doctor of the Church, Homily, 4 October 1970.Proclamation of the Co-Patronesses of Europe, Apostolic Letter, 1 October 1999. Liturgical Feast of St. Bridget, Homily, 13 November 1999. She was the second woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church, on 4 October 1970 by Pope Paul VI – only days after Teresa of Ávila. In 1999 Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a patron saint of Europe.
Catherine is one of the outstanding figures of medieval Catholicism due to the strong influence she had in the history of the papacy and her extensive authorship. Her many missions entrusted to her by the pope were rare for a woman of her time. Her Dialogue, hundreds of letters, and dozens of prayers also give her a prominent place in the history of Italian literature.
Early life
Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa was born on 25 March 1347 (shortly before the Black Death ravaged Europe) in Siena, Republic of Siena (today Italy), to Lapa Piagenti, the daughter of a local poet, and Jacopo di Benincasa, a cloth dyer who ran his enterprise with the help of his sons. The house where Catherine grew up still exists.
Lapa was about forty years old when she gave birth prematurely to her 23rd and 24th children, twin daughters, named Catherine and Giovanna. After birth, Giovanna was handed over to a wet nurse and died soon after. Catherine was nursed by her mother and developed into a healthy child. She was two years old when Lapa had her 25th child, another daughter named Giovanna. As a child, Catherine was so merry that the family gave her the pet name of "Euphrosyne", which is Greek for "joy", and the name of Euphrosyne of Alexandria.Lives of Saints, John J. Crawley & Co., Inc.
Catherine is said by her confessor and biographer Raymond of Capua's Life to have had her first vision of Christ when she was five or six years old: she and a brother were on the way home from visiting a married sister when she is said to have experienced a vision of Christ seated in glory with the Apostles Peter, Paul, and John. Raymond continues that at age seven, Catherine vowed to give her whole life to God.Raymond of Capua, Legenda Major I, iii.
When Catherine was 16, her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth; already anguished by this, Catherine soon learned that her parents wanted her to marry Bonaventura's widower. She was absolutely opposed and started a strict fast to protest the wedding. She had learned this from Bonaventura, whose husband had been far from considerate but had changed his attitude after his wife refused to eat until he showed better manners. Besides fasting, Catherine further disappointed her mother by cutting off her long hair in protest of being encouraged to improve her appearance to attract a husband.Foley O.F.M., Leonard. Saint of the Day, Lives, Lessons, and Feast, (revised by Pat McCloskey O.F.M.), Franciscan Media,
Catherine would later advise Raymond of Capua to do during times of trouble what she did now as a teenager: "Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee." Although her family often interrupted her external solitude, she cultivated an interior life of recollection and prayer that she believed no external circumstance could take away.
She also imagined her father as representing Christ, her mother the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her brothers the Apostles. Serving them humbly became an opportunity for spiritual growth. Catherine resisted the accepted course of marriage and motherhood on the one hand, or a nun's veil on the other. She chose to live an active and prayerful life outside a convent's walls, following the model of the Dominicans. Eventually, her parents gave up and permitted her to live as she pleased and stay unmarried.
A vision of Dominic de Guzmán gave strength to Catherine, but her wish to join his order was no comfort to Lapa, who took her daughter with her to the baths in Bagno Vignoni to improve her health. Catherine fell seriously ill with a violent rash, fever and pain, which conveniently made her mother accept her wish to join the "Mantellate", the local association of devout women.Catherine of Siena. Available Means. Ed. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Print. The Mantellate taught Catherine how to read, and she lived in almost total silence and solitude in the family home.
It was customary for Catherine to give away clothing and food without asking anyone's permission, which cost her family significantly. However, she requested nothing for herself and by staying in their midst, she could live out her rejection of them more strongly. She did not want their food, referring to the table laid for her in Heaven with her real family. Shortly after joining the Mantellate, Catherine started to fast for longer but found it challenging. While tending to a woman with cancerous breast sores, she was disgusted. Intending to overcome that disgust, she gathered the sore pus into a ladle and drank it all. That night, she was visited by Jesus who invited her to drink the blood gushing out of his pierced side. It was with this visitation that her stomach "no longer had need of food and no longer could digest."
Later life
According to Raymond of Capua, at the age of twenty-one (), Catherine experienced what she described in her letters as a Mystical Marriage with Jesus, later a popular subject in art as the Mystic marriage of Saint Catherine. She wrote in a letter (to encourage a nun who seems to have been undergoing a prolonged period of spiritual trial and torment: "Bathe in the blood of Christ crucified. See that you don't look for or want anything but the crucified, as a true bride ransomed by the blood of Christ crucified – for that is my wish. You see very well that you are a bride and that he has espoused you – you and everyone else – and not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his own flesh."The Letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, Volume II, Suzanne Noffke OP, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Tempe Arizona 2001, p. 184 Raymond of Capua also records that she was told by Christ to leave her withdrawn life and enter the public life of the world. Catherine rejoined her family and began helping the ill and the poor, where she took care of them in hospitals or homes. Her early pious activities in Siena attracted a group of followers, women and men, who gathered around her.
The Medieval scholar Caroline Walker Bynum with regards to Catherine's mystic marriage, imagines: "Underlining the extent to which the marriage was a fusion with Christ's physicality[...] Catherine received, not the ring of gold and jewels that her biographer reports in his bowdlerized version, but the ring of Christ's foreskin." Catherine herself mentions the ring ‘of flesh’ motif in one of her letters (#221), equating the wedding ring of a virgin with the flesh of Jesus; she typically claimed that her own wedding ring to Christ was simply invisible.
Between the years 1367 and 1374, Catherine devoted herself to helping the sick and incarcerated of Siena. With her help in the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala and within the neighbourhood that she was living, Catherine's acts of charity became well-known. This led to her being known as , or a holy woman. This reputation of holiness eventually led to her involvement in politics and a hearing with the pope.
As social and political tensions mounted in Siena, Catherine found herself drawn to intervene in wider politics. She made her first journey to Florence in 1374, probably to be interviewed by the Dominican authorities at the General Chapter held in Florence in May 1374, though this is disputed (if she was interviewed, then the absence of later evidence suggests she was deemed sufficiently orthodox). It seems that at this time she acquired Raymond of Capua as her confessor and spiritual director.
After this visit, she began travelling with her followers throughout northern and central Italy advocating reform of the clergy and advising people that repentance and renewal could be done through "the total love for God". In Pisa, in 1375, she used what influence she had to sway that city and Lucca away from alliance with the anti-papal league whose force was gaining momentum and strength. She also lent her enthusiasm toward promoting the launch of a new crusade. It was during this time in Pisa, according to Raymond of Capua's biography, that she received the stigmata (visible, at Catherine's request, only to herself).
Her physical travels were not the only way in which Catherine made her views known. From 1375 onward, she began dictating letters to scribes. These letters were intended to reach men and women of her circle, increasingly widening her audience to include figures in authority as she begged for peace between the republics and principalities of Italy and for the return of the Papacy from Avignon to Rome. She carried on a long correspondence with Pope Gregory XI, asking him to reform the clergy and the administration of the Papal States.