Florentine Virgin Katherine di Ricci

Saint Catherine de' Ricci (born Alessandra Lucrezia Romola de' Ricci) was a Florentine Dominican nun of the sixteenth century, known for her mystical life and for her long service as prioress of the convent of San Vincenzo in Prato. She was born in Florence in 1522 into the Ricci family, a lineage of standing in the city. Her mother, Caterina Bonza, died soon after her birth, and she was brought up by a stepmother. Contemporary and later accounts describe an early attraction to prayer, fasting, and the Dominican ideal associated with Saint Catherine of Siena, whose name she would later take in religion.

Around the age of thirteen she entered the convent of San Vincenzo at Prato, a community of women of the Dominican Third Order who lived in enclosure and followed a regular observance. There she received the habit and the name Catherine. The first years of her religious life were marked by illness, interior trial, and a degree of opposition or misunderstanding within the community. Over time her sisters came to regard her as a model of obedience and charity. She was chosen as prioress on multiple occasions and is remembered for combining strict enclosure and liturgical regularity with practical care for the convent's temporal needs and for the poor of Prato.

From about the early 1540s she became known beyond the convent walls for extraordinary mystical phenomena. For a period of some twelve years she experienced weekly ecstasies of the Passion, typically beginning on Thursday and continuing into Friday, during which observers reported signs of the stigmata and a seeming participation in Christ's sufferings. Dominican and other Catholic sources of the period also ascribe to her additional charisms, including prophecy and bilocation. She maintained an extensive correspondence with prominent figures of Catholic reform, notably Saint Philip Neri in Rome and Saint Charles Borromeo; tradition holds that she and Philip Neri knew one another spiritually though they did not meet in the ordinary way. These contacts placed her within the network of Italian Counter-Reformation sanctity.

Catherine died at Prato on 2 February 1590. Devotion to her developed quickly in Tuscany and in the Dominican Order. She was beatified by Pope Clement XII in 1732 and canonized by Pope Benedict XIV in 1746. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 13 February. She is invoked as a patron of the sick, and her cult remains centered on Prato, where her relics are preserved in the church associated with her convent, later raised to the status of a basilica under the joint patronage of Saint Vincent Ferrer and Saint Catherine de' Ricci.