Virgin Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena was born Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa in 1347 in Siena, then an independent republic in Tuscany. Her father Jacopo was a wool dyer; her mother was Lapa Piagenti. She belonged to a very large household and is commonly identified as one of the youngest of some twenty-five children; a twin sister died in infancy. In childhood she reported a vision of Christ seated in glory with the apostles, an experience later treated as the beginning of her interior life. When her family pressed her toward marriage in adolescence, she cut off her hair, adopted plain dress, and refused suitors. She received the black-and-white habit of the Mantellate, Dominican tertiary women who lived in their own homes rather than in a cloister, and for several years she remained largely withdrawn in a cell-like room in the Benincasa house, given to prayer, extreme fasting, and works of penance.

From about the late 1360s she turned outward to serve the sick and poor of Siena, including during plague. A circle of disciples, later called her bella brigata, formed around her: Dominican friars, secular clergy, and lay men and women who regarded her as a spiritual mother. She was illiterate in the ordinary sense of formal schooling and dictated her letters and treatises to secretaries. In the 1370s those letters went to popes, cardinals, queens, mercenary captains, and the governments of Italian cities. She urged moral reform of the clergy, peace among warring communes, and the return of the papal court from Avignon to Rome. In 1376 she traveled to Avignon and was received by Pope Gregory XI; contemporaries and later historians credit her exhortations as one factor in his decision to restore the papacy to Rome in 1377. After Gregory’s death and the outbreak of the Western Schism she supported Urban VI, the Roman claimant, and spent her last years in Rome attempting, without success, to rally obedience to him and to heal the division of the Church.

Her principal book is the Dialogue (also known as the Book of Divine Providence), dictated in the late 1370s as a conversation between a soul and God on providence, prayer, obedience, and the reform of the Church. A large surviving correspondence and a set of prayers complete the authentic writings. Dominican and later hagiographical tradition holds that she received the stigmata, which remained invisible during her lifetime at her petition. Weakened by years of severe fasting and by the strain of her public labors, she died in Rome on 29 April 1380, aged thirty-three. She was first buried at Santa Maria sopra Minerva; her body was later placed under the high altar of that basilica. Her head, and a thumb, were translated to the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena, where they remain objects of veneration.

Pope Pius II, himself a Sienese, canonized her in 1461. There was no separate modern-style beatification; medieval canonization absorbed that step. In 1939 Pope Pius XII named her, with Francis of Assisi, a principal patron of Italy. In 1970 Pope Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, among the first women to receive that title. In 1999 Pope John Paul II named her a co-patron of Europe. Her feast is kept on 29 April in the General Roman Calendar. She is invoked by nurses and the sick, against fire, and by those ridiculed for piety, among other causes. Historical study distinguishes the well-documented public career and the dictated texts from later legendary accretions, but the outline of her life, her role in the return from Avignon, and the authenticity of the Dialogue and letters are firmly established in fourteenth-century sources.