Saint Catherine of Siena

She was the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth child of a Sienese dyer, born in the year the Black Death reached Europe, and she grew up in a house full of vats and noise. At about six she saw a vision over the church of San Domenico; at seven she privately vowed her virginity to God; at fifteen, when her family pressed her toward marriage, she cut off her hair to spoil her looks, and was punished by being made the household servant. She seems to have decided that this was fine, and to have served without complaint until they gave up.

She joined the Dominican Mantellate — laywomen, mostly widows, who wore the habit and lived at home. For three years she left her room almost only for Mass. Then, quite abruptly, she came out and spent the remaining twelve years of her life in the middle of public affairs.

What she actually did

She nursed in the plague wards and at the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, including cases nobody else would touch. She gathered a company of followers who called her Mamma though most were older than she was. She walked into prisons to sit with the condemned — her account of accompanying Niccolò di Toldo to his execution, holding his head as it fell, is one of the most extraordinary letters in Italian.

And she went into politics, which is the part that still startles. She wrote to queens, mercenary captains, cardinals and magistrates. Above all she wrote to Pope Gregory XI, who had been in Avignon along with the entire papal court for seventy years, telling him — a young woman with no office, no education and no standing — to be a man, stop being afraid, and go back to Rome. Be manly and not fearful, she wrote. He went back to Rome.

It did not fix anything. The papacy split within two years of his return into rival claimants, and she spent her last strength on a schism she could not heal. She died in Rome at thirty-three, worn out.

The Dialogue

She could not write until near the end of her life, and possibly never wrote much herself. The Dialogue was dictated, largely in ecstasy, to secretaries who took it down while she spoke — a long conversation between a soul and God the Father about providence, obedience, discretion and the price of truth. Nearly four hundred of her letters also survive, which is why we know her voice so well: blunt, affectionate, physical, and entirely without deference.

In 1970 Paul VI named her a Doctor of the Church, one of the first two women so named. It is worth stopping on what that means: the Church declared that a woman who never went to school teaches it reliably about God.

The stigmata and the thorns

In 1375 at Pisa she received the stigmata, which at her own request remained invisible until her death. Tiepolo’s painting on this page shows both of the things she is known by — the crown of thorns she asked for in preference to a crown of gold, and the wound in her hand.

Her mysticism is not decorative and it is not comfortable. It issues directly in plague wards, prison cells and letters to heads of state; the visions and the politics are the same act.