St. Catherine of Siena

St. Catherine of Siena was an Italian laywoman, a Dominican tertiary, who lived from 1347 to 1380 and died in Rome at thirty-three. She never entered a convent, never held office and never learned to write easily, and she dictated around 380 surviving letters to popes, cardinals, kings and mercenaries, along with the book known as The Dialogue. Pope Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church on 4 October 1970, one of the first two women given that title.

Her public life lasted about seven years. In that time she worked for peace between the Italian city-states and the papacy, urged Pope Gregory XI to return the papal court from Avignon to Rome, and then spent her last two years defending the legitimacy of Pope Urban VI at the start of the Great Western Schism. Her feast is 29 April.

1. The Stubborn Daughter

Caterina Benincasa was born in Siena in 1347, traditionally on 25 March, into the household of a wool dyer, Giacomo Benincasa, and his wife Lapa. She was one of the youngest of a very large family, usually counted as the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth child, and her twin sister died in infancy. The Black Death reached Siena in 1348, the year after her birth, and killed a large part of the city, and further outbreaks ran through her childhood and her adult life.

Her early biographer, her confessor Raymond of Capua, reports a vision at about the age of six of Christ enthroned above the Dominican church of San Domenico, and a private vow of virginity soon afterwards. When her family pressed her to marry, she cut off her hair, refused, and was punished with the loss of her room and set to household drudgery. She answered that she would build a cell inside herself that no one could take away, and the interior cell became a lifelong image in her teaching.

Her father gave way. Around 1363 she was admitted to the Mantellate, the Dominican women of penance, laywomen who wore the habit, took no solemn vows and lived in their own homes. She spent roughly three years in silence and solitude in a small room in her father's house, and then went out. From about 1368 she worked in the hospitals of Siena, nursed plague victims, and visited prisoners. She accompanied a young man named Niccolò di Toldo to his execution, and the letter she dictated describing it is one of the most striking pieces of writing in medieval Italian.

2. "Be a Man!"

By 1376 the papal court had sat at Avignon in southern France for nearly seventy years, and Italian opinion held that the papacy had become a department of French politics. Florence was at war with the papal states. Catherine went to Avignon in June 1376, sent by Florence as a peace envoy, and dealt directly with Pope Gregory XI.

Her letters to him are blunt in a way that still reads strangely. She calls him babbo, daddy, and tells him to be courageous, to act like a man, to stop being afraid, and to do what he knows God wants. She wrote that he should be manly in the sight of God and not fearful, and she told him he would answer for the souls lost through his delay. She was a twenty-nine-year-old laywoman with no education dictating this to the pope.

Gregory XI left Avignon in September 1376 and entered Rome in January 1377. Catherine's pressure was one cause among several, and historians point out that Gregory had been planning a return for some time, that the collapse of papal authority in Italy forced the issue, and that other voices, including St. Bridget of Sweden before her, had said the same thing. Her contribution was real, and the story of a peasant girl who moved the papacy by herself flattens what happened.

3. The Dialogues

The book is one work, Il Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza, The Dialogue of Divine Providence, dictated to secretaries between 1377 and 1378, often while she was in ecstasy. It is structured as a conversation in which Catherine puts four petitions to God the Father and receives the answers, and it runs through the doctrine of the soul, the Church, obedience and the ordering of love.

Two images from it stay with readers. The first is Christ as a bridge thrown across the flood between earth and heaven, with three stairs corresponding to the feet, the side and the mouth of the crucified Christ, and the soul climbing from servile fear through love of reward to friendship. The second is the interior cell she had discovered as a teenager: the soul is a house in which God dwells, and a person does not have to leave the world to enter it. She sums up the doctrine of the self elsewhere in a sentence God speaks to her: I am he who is, and you are she who is not.

Her other works are the letters, about 380 of them, and twenty-six prayers recorded by those who heard her pray aloud. The whole body of writing was dictated. Catherine learned to read as an adult and there is evidence that she learned to write late in life, so the texts come to us through the hands of her secretaries.

The line most often printed under her name, be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire, is a modern compression of her counsel rather than a sentence found in her writings in that form. Her actual language runs closer to a call to burn with charity and to be the person God made, which is why the paraphrase caught on.

4. Avignon and What She Actually Achieved

Measured against her own aims, Catherine's public career was mostly failure. She wanted peace between Florence and the papacy, a crusade to reunite Christendom, the reform of clerical corruption and a papacy that stayed in Rome. The Florentine peace was concluded after her efforts, on terms she did not control. The crusade never happened. Clerical reform waited two centuries. The return to Rome held, and then produced the schism that broke her heart.

What she did achieve is of a different kind. She proved that a laywoman with no institutional standing could speak to the whole Church and be heard, and she left a body of writing in Italian that is still read. The letters are the record of a person who assumed that ordinary Christians are responsible for the state of the Church.

5. The Schism and Her Last Two Years

Gregory XI died in Rome in March 1378. The cardinals, under pressure from a Roman crowd demanding an Italian, elected Urban VI in April. Within months, a group of cardinals declared the election invalid and elected Clement VII, who returned to Avignon. Western Christendom now had two claimants, and it stayed divided until the Council of Constance in 1417. This is the Great Western Schism.

Catherine held that Urban VI was the true pope and spent her remaining strength on it. Urban called her to Rome in late 1378, and she wrote a stream of letters to cardinals, to rulers and to Urban himself, whose furious temper she rebuked as freely as she had rebuked Gregory's fear. She fasted severely, collapsed in early 1380, and died in Rome on 29 April 1380, aged thirty-three.

6. The Record, the Letters and the Legends

Catherine is unusually well documented for a medieval woman, because her own dictated words survive in quantity. The letters can be dated, matched against political events and read against the correspondence of the people she was writing to. Anything in this page that describes her opinions comes from that body of text.

The devotional details around her come from her confessor Raymond of Capua, who wrote the Legenda Maior after her death and knew her well, and from her early companions. He reports the mystical espousal, the exchange of hearts, and the stigmata she received at Pisa in 1375, which at her own request remained invisible during her lifetime. The invisibility became a point of dispute between Dominicans and Franciscans for centuries, since St. Francis of Assisi had received visible wounds. A reader should hold those accounts as the testimony of a devoted confessor rather than as documented events of the same order as her letters.

Her extreme fasting is another point where honesty is better than embellishment. She ate almost nothing for long stretches, and her contemporaries were alarmed by it. Raymond of Capua tried to make her eat. Modern writers have proposed medical readings of that behaviour, and the Church has never held her fasting up as a model to copy. The Catechism teaches that penance must be governed by prudence and that we are stewards rather than owners of our bodies and lives.

7. Why the Church Holds Her Up

She is a Doctor of the Church, which means her writing is held to have lasting value for the whole Church. Paul VI gave the title to St. Teresa of Ávila on 27 September 1970 and to Catherine on 4 October 1970, the first two women so named.

The doctrine she is honoured for is the union of contemplation and public responsibility. Her interior cell was never an escape from Siena or Rome, and her political letters are argued from the same theology as her prayers. She also taught obedience to the Church while telling its rulers exactly what they were doing wrong, and holding both together is the reason she is quoted by reformers of every temperament.

Her central image is the blood of Christ. Almost every letter opens with a formula about writing in the precious blood of the Son of God, and the doctrine underneath it is that the whole Christian life is bought and sustained by the Passion. Hebrews 9:14 makes the same argument, that the blood of Christ purifies our conscience for the service of the living God.

8. Feast Day, Patronage and Relics

Her feast is 29 April, the day she died. Pope Pius II, himself a Sienese, canonized her in 1461. Pope Pius XII named her a patron of Italy in 1939, together with St. Francis of Assisi, and Pope John Paul II named her one of the patron saints of Europe in 1999, along with St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She is also invoked as a patron of nurses, of people ridiculed for their piety, and of those suffering illness, all of which come from her own biography.

Her body is in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, under the high altar. Her head was taken to Siena and is kept in the basilica of San Domenico, where her cell and household are preserved nearby. The division of relics of this kind was common practice in the fourteenth century when two cities both claimed a saint.

9. What to Take From Catherine of Siena

Build the interior cell. Her one portable practice is the room inside, entered anywhere, because God dwells in the soul in grace. A commute, a shift and a hospital corridor are all places to enter it.

Say the hard thing to the person who needs to hear it. She wrote to popes without softening, and she wrote in charity and in obedience. Both halves are the lesson.

Serve bodies as well as souls. Before the letters there were the hospital wards and the plague. Her authority grew out of work nobody else wanted.

Do not measure a vocation by its success. Most of what Catherine attempted failed inside her lifetime, and she is a Doctor of the Church.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Catherine of Siena?

St. Catherine of Siena was an Italian laywoman and Dominican tertiary who lived from 1347 to 1380. She nursed the sick in Siena, dictated about 380 letters and the book called The Dialogue, pressed Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy from Avignon to Rome, and defended Pope Urban VI at the start of the Great Western Schism. She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

Did St. Catherine of Siena really tell the pope to be a man?

Her letters to Gregory XI tell him to be courageous, to act manfully in the sight of God and not to be fearful, and they warn him that souls would be lost through his delay. The blunt English slogan is a compression of that language rather than a single recorded sentence.

Did she bring the pope back from Avignon?

She went to Avignon in 1376 and urged Gregory XI to return, and he entered Rome in January 1377. Historians treat her pressure as one factor among several, since Gregory had been planning a return and the collapse of papal authority in Italy was forcing the decision.

What did St. Catherine of Siena write?

She dictated The Dialogue of Divine Providence, about 380 letters and twenty-six prayers. Everything was dictated to secretaries; she learned to read as an adult and there is evidence she learned to write only late in life.

Why is St. Catherine of Siena a Doctor of the Church?

Pope Paul VI gave her the title on 4 October 1970 for the lasting value of her teaching, particularly on the union of contemplative prayer with public responsibility for the Church. She and St. Teresa of Ávila, named a week earlier, were the first two women declared Doctors of the Church.

When is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena?

Her feast is 29 April, the day she died in Rome in 1380. She is a patron of Italy and one of the patron saints of Europe.

Back to People