Caterina Benincasa — 1347 to 1380
It is a fitting providence that you should ask for her life today, the very day on which her soul departed this world for the embrace of her Eternal Bridegroom. Saint Catherine died in Rome on April 29th, 1380, and on this anniversary the Church remembers one of her most luminous daughters — a virgin clothed in the habit of Saint Dominic, a mystic who bore the wounds of Christ in her flesh, a counselor of popes, and one of only a handful of women whom Holy Mother Church has honored with the title Doctor.
Childhood and Hidden Life
Catherine was born in Siena on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, 1347, the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children of Giacomo Benincasa, a wool-dyer of modest but honest standing, and his wife Lapa. Of these children, half did not survive infancy — among them Catherine’s twin Giovanna, whose early death the saint would later reckon as the first occasion of grace in her life, that her own soul might be spared for divine purposes.
At the age of six, while returning home with her brother Stefano along the road below the Dominican basilica of San Domenico, she beheld in a vision the Lord Jesus Christ enthroned in glory, vested in pontifical robes, with Saints Peter, Paul, and John the Evangelist beside Him. He smiled upon the child and blessed her with the sign of the Cross. From that moment she was changed. The following year, only seven years old, she made privately a vow of perpetual virginity, taking the Most Blessed Virgin Mary as her mother and pledging her heart to Christ alone.
Her adolescence brought the inevitable contest. Her parents, particularly Lapa, sought to arrange a marriage. When pious counsel failed to dissuade her, Catherine cut off her long hair to make herself unattractive to suitors. The household responded with severity: she was made a kind of servant in her own home, deprived of her private cell, burdened with menial labor. She bore this with the equanimity of one who had already learned the secret of which Saint Augustine wrote — that the soul rightly ordered finds its cloister within. Fac tibi cellulam in corde tuo — “make for thyself a little cell within thy heart” — was the counsel she lived before she knew the words. In time her father, observing a dove descend upon her head as she prayed, relented and granted her liberty.
The Mantellate and the Three Years of Solitude
Around the age of sixteen, Catherine received the habit of the Mantellate — the Sisters of Penance of Saint Dominic, a confraternity of widows and consecrated virgins who lived a rule of life in the world rather than in cloister. She was unusual among them in being unmarried and so young, but a serious illness, providentially permitted, persuaded the sisters to admit her.
There followed three years of almost unbroken solitude in a small room of her family’s house. She left only for Mass. She spoke only to her confessor. She ate little — chiefly bread, raw vegetables, and water — and slept upon a board with a stone for her pillow. These were the years of her mystical formation, in which Our Lord Himself was her catechist. She learned to read, it is said, miraculously, that she might recite the Divine Office. She experienced both the consolations of divine union and the assaults of the demons — visions of obscene phantoms, blasphemous suggestions hurled against her purity. When at length the trial passed and Christ appeared to her, she asked, “My Lord, where wert Thou when my heart was so afflicted?” He answered, “Daughter, I was in thy heart.” Such is the manner of the saints: their consolations and their crosses come from the same hand.
The years of solitude were crowned, on the last day of Carnival in 1366, by the Mystical Espousal. Our Lord, accompanied by the Blessed Mother, Saint John, Saint Paul, Saint Dominic, and the Prophet David playing upon his harp, espoused Catherine to Himself, placing upon her finger a ring visible to her alone for the rest of her life. Then He commanded her to leave her cell. The years of receiving were ended; the years of giving were to begin.
The Apostolate and the Bella Brigata
What followed astonished Siena. The young woman who had been shut away for years now moved through the city tending plague victims, washing the wounds of cancerous old women whom no one else would touch, ministering to condemned criminals at the scaffold. The most famous of these was the young Niccolò di Toldo, a Perugian noble condemned for slight cause and raging in despair against God. Catherine visited him in his cell, calmed him, brought him to confession, and on the morning of his execution accompanied him to the block. She held his head in her hands as the blade fell, and beheld in vision his soul received into the side of Christ. Her letter recounting this episode is one of the great documents of Christian charity.
She gathered around her a remarkable spiritual family — priests, religious, lay men and women — whom her followers called the bella brigata, the “fair company.” Among them were Blessed Raymond of Capua, her confessor and biographer who would become Master General of the Dominican Order, and Stefano Maconi, who later entered the Carthusians. To these and to many others she wrote the letters — nearly four hundred survive — which, together with her Dialogue of Divine Providence, constitute her doctrinal patrimony.
The Stigmata and the Service of the Church
In 1375, while praying before a crucifix in the church of Santa Cristina in Pisa, Catherine received the sacred stigmata. At her request the wounds remained invisible during her lifetime, though their pain she bore unceasingly; only after her death did they appear upon her body, as her companions testified.
It is here that her life acquires its peculiar grandeur. The Church in the fourteenth century lay in a wretched state. The popes had resided at Avignon, in subjection to French influence, for some seventy years — what Saint Catherine herself called the Babylonian Captivity of the West. Italy was in revolt against papal legates; the city of Florence stood under interdict. Into this turmoil stepped a Dominican tertiary who could barely write her own name, and who addressed Pope Gregory XI as Babbo mio dolce — “my sweet Daddy” — while commanding him in the name of Christ to be a man: “Siate uomo virile e non timoroso!” — “Be a manly man and not fearful!” She traveled to Avignon in 1376 and pressed upon him in person what she had pressed in letters. By the grace of God working through her, the Pope returned to Rome in January 1377, ending the captivity.
The schism that followed the death of Gregory and the election of Urban VI was a crueller burden still. With cardinals at Fondi electing an antipope and Christendom torn between obediences, Catherine spent her last strength in Rome at Urban’s summons, writing letters to princes and prelates throughout Europe, offering herself as victim for the unity of the Church. Her body, never nourished by ordinary food in those years — she lived almost wholly upon the Holy Eucharist — gave way under the weight. She was struck with paralysis, and on the 29th of April, 1380, surrounded by her spiritual children and murmuring “Sangue, sangue!” — “Blood, blood!” — and at the last “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my soul and my spirit” — she yielded up her soul. She was thirty-three years old, the age of her Beloved upon the Cross.
Her Doctrine
Saint Catherine left no systematic Summa, yet her teaching is marvelously coherent. The heart of it is the figure given her by Our Lord in vision: Christ as the Bridge spanning the abyss between fallen man and Heaven. The Bridge has three steps — His pierced feet, His wounded side, His sacred mouth — which correspond to the three states of the soul: servile fear, the love of friends, and filial love. She teaches the absolute necessity of self-knowledge joined to knowledge of God: “Conosci te, conosci Me” — “Know thyself, know Me” — for the soul that knows its own nothingness without knowing God’s mercy falls into despair, and the soul that presumes upon mercy without knowing its own misery falls into pride. The middle way is the cell of self-knowledge, in which both truths are kept always before the eyes. Her doctrine of the Precious Blood, of the priesthood (which she venerated even in unworthy ministers as the channel of the Sacraments), and of holy obedience belongs to the patrimony of the Church.
Veneration
Her body rests beneath the high altar of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, save for her sacred head, which was returned to Siena and is enshrined in San Domenico, where she once received Holy Communion from the hand of Christ Himself. She was canonized by Pope Pius II in 1461. The traditional Roman Calendar keeps her feast on April 30th, since the 29th was anciently the feast of Saint Peter of Verona, Martyr.
A Lesson for Imitation
What shall the faithful soul take from such a life? Let it be this: that the cloister of the heart is open to every Christian, in every state of life, and that fidelity to that interior cell is the seed from which every great work of God in the soul will grow. Catherine did not begin by counseling popes; she began by sweeping floors and bearing in silence the displeasure of her mother. The Lord raised her up because she first sat down at His feet.
A Practical Application
For this day, take up some small thing in her honor: a quarter-hour of mental prayer in silence, the recitation of the Anima Christi (a prayer she loved), or an act of bodily mortification freely offered for the unity of the Church and the sanctification of her shepherds — petitions that consumed Saint Catherine’s own life.
A simple petition you might make her own:
O blessed Catherine, Virgin of Siena and Doctor of the Church, who didst love the Bride of Christ unto thine own immolation, obtain for me the grace of self-knowledge in the cell of mine own heart, that knowing my misery I may know His mercy, and that loving His Church I may serve her in whatsoever station He hath appointed me. Amen.
Should you wish to continue, the Lives of the Saints path can take you next to Saint Catherine’s spiritual father in the Order of Preachers, Saint Dominic himself, or to her great Carmelite namesake and fellow Doctor, Saint Teresa of Jesus, with whom she shares the rare crown of doctrinal authority granted to a woman. Alternatively, the Theology and Doctrine path would open her Dialogue of Divine Providence directly, that you might drink from the spring rather than from the cup I have here poured.
Sancta Catharina Senensis, ora pro nobis.