Saint Catherine of Siena

Catherine was born in Siena on March 25, 1347, in the Fontebranda district, in the Contrada of the Goose, the twenty-third of twenty-five children of the dyer Jacopo Benincasa and Lapa di Puccio. She had a twin sister, Giovanna, who died within a few weeks. At six she said she had had her first vision, and she made a vow of virginity. At twelve her parents began looking for a good match for her; she cut off her hair and shut herself in the house. In the end they let her be, and she joined the Dominican mantellate — tertiaries who lived in their own homes, not in a convent. She learned to write only late in life, and she dictated. And she dictated a great deal. Nearly four hundred letters survive, written to popes, kings, queens, mercenary captains, prisoners, prostitutes, as well as the Dialogue of Divine Providence. They are in a powerful, direct Sienese vernacular, and when she wrote to the powerful she didn’t tiptoe around them: she called the pope “babbo mio,” my daddy, and ordered him to get moving. Because that’s what she did. The pope had been in Avignon for seventy years, and Catherine went in person to tell him to go back to Rome. Gregory XI went back, in 1377, and she had played her part. Then came the schism, and she spent her last years in Rome trying to stitch back together a Christendom that was splitting apart. She died in Rome on April 29, 1380, at thirty-three. She is a Doctor of the Church, patron saint of Italy together with Francis of Assisi, and co-patron of Europe. If your name is Catherine, today is your name day.