A Novena to Saint Catherine of Siena
Gesù dolce, Gesù amore
Twenty-Fifth of Twenty-Five
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
Catherine was born in Siena on 25 March 1347, the twenty-fifth child of Jacopo Benincasa, a wool-dyer, and his wife Lapa. She had a twin sister who died in infancy, and about half her brothers and sisters did not survive childhood.
The Vision at Six
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
Catherine reported that at about six years old, walking home with her brother, she saw Christ enthroned above the church of San Domenico in Siena. She said nothing of it at the time, and her brother noticed only that she had stopped in the road and would not answer him.
The Refusal
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
Catherine vowed virginity at about seven. When her family pressed her to marry her dead sister's widower she cut off her hair to make herself unmarriageable, and they responded by dismissing the household servant and giving her the work instead, which she is said to have done without complaint until they relented.
The Mantellate
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
At about sixteen Catherine joined the Mantellate, Dominican tertiaries who were laywomen, mostly widows, living in their own homes rather than in a convent. They were reluctant to admit anyone so young, and she never became a nun in the ordinary sense; she remained a laywoman all her life.
Three Years in a Room
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
Catherine spent roughly three years in near-total silence and solitude in a small room in her father's house, leaving it only for Mass. She then came out and began working among the sick and the poor of Siena, and never returned to that manner of life.
The Plague, 1374
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
Catherine nursed victims during the plague that struck Siena in 1374, burying the dead herself when others would not approach them. Several of her own family died in it.
Nearly Four Hundred Letters
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
Around three hundred and eighty of Catherine's letters survive, dictated to secretaries and addressed to popes, monarchs, mercenary captains, prisoners and prostitutes. She learned to read only as an adult and probably never wrote fluently by hand.
Avignon, 1376
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
The papacy had been resident at Avignon rather than Rome for nearly seventy years. Catherine travelled there in 1376, at twenty-nine, and pressed Gregory XI in person to return. He left Avignon that September and made his entry into Rome on 17 January 1377.
Rome, 1380
The Novena Prayer
Heavenly Father, your glory is in your saints. We praise your glory in the life of the admirable Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and Doctor of the Church. Her whole life was a noble sacrifice inspired by an ardent love of Jesus, your unblemished Lamb.
In troubled times she strenuously upheld the rights of his beloved spouse, the Church. Help us to pass unscathed through the corruption of this world, and to remain unshakably faithful to the Church in word, deed and example. Grant, through her intercession, the favour we now ask.
Catherine died in Rome on 29 April 1380, aged thirty-three, worn out and having eaten almost nothing for months. She was canonized in 1461 by Pius II, a fellow Sienese, declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970 among the first two women ever so named, and made a patron of Europe in 1999.
The prayer that opens each day is the traditional novena prayer to Saint Catherine, of unknown authorship and long in circulation, given here as it is commonly printed. The Latin above is not Latin but her own Italian, the phrase she closed her letters with. What follows each day is a fact from her life, one per day.
