Catherine of Siena, Being Weird, and Bothering the Pope
Hi friends,
I hope you’re doing well as we move into spring. My kids are on spring break this week, and we’re spending the week outside of the city at a little house built to look like a castle (a thing my knights-and-dragons-loving kids are enjoying greatly). It’s good to get out of our tiny apartment, it’s good to have a break from the near-constant construction noise on our block, it’s good to have a change of scenery and outdoor space for running around and a husband on vacation. April’s gonna be good, I can feel it.
It’s no secret that I love the medieval mystic saints. They’re often weird and they’re always interesting and I find the physicality of their spiritual lives to be inspiring. They seem to have a particular flavor of intense fervor that speaks deeply to me. One of my favorites among these saints is Catherine of Siena, whose feast day is April 29th. Saint Catherine was nothing if not intense. A true mystic, she had visions which started when she was a young girl and continued throughout her life. The most famous of these was what she called her mystical marriage to Christ. It occurred when she was 21. In this vision, she saw herself being married to Christ and receiving a ring made of Christ’s foreskin (!!), visible only to her. She also had a vision of her heart being taken by Christ and replaced with Christ’s own, after which her heart would throb when she received the Eucharist. She claimed to have received the stigmata later in her life, though this too was visible only to her. She lived by a rigorous abstinence, fasting with extreme rigor and eventually surviving on only the Eucharist in an attempt to achieve incorporeal union with God. Catherine was a weird one, and I say that with the deepest affection. She is even the patron saint of, among other things, people ridiculed for their piety.
Catherine of Siena’s mystical weirdness is only a part of her story, though. I also personally like to think of Catherine as the patron saint of Bothering The Pope. Catherine’s spiritual sensibilities were always deeply tied to her religious devotion. Even her earliest visions, ones of Jesus surrounded by the Apostles Peter and Paul and John, had associations with the Church. She lived during a time of much social and political tension, and was drawn to intervene in the political life of the Church. She travelled with her followers through Italy advocating for clergy reform. She carried on long correspondences with higher-ups in the Church, including Pope Gregory XI. It is believed that she had a hand in Gregory XI returning the papacy to Rome from Avignon. She spent much time between Florence and Rome, wielding her considerable influence to attempt to keep peace between the Papal States. And she did all this with relish! She was a humble woman, but she also never felt like it wasn’t her place to tell political leaders how to be better leaders, to tell priests how to be better priests, to tell the pope how to be a better pope. Catherine loved the Catholic Church. Indeed, she loved it enough to push it to be better than it was.
What I love most about Catherine of Siena is not her mystical strangeness or her political activism, but the way she somehow managed both, the way in which each one fed the other. She defied all expectations of the women of her time, a time when women had the choice of being either a married woman or a nun. She resisted both marriage and motherhood and became instead a lay member of the Dominican Order, which allowed her to live and move and work outside the convent walls while also remaining unmarried. It’s very interesting to me, the way her mystical spirituality fed her political activity, and vice versa. They can’t really be separated. She took a deep interior passion and creativity, and brought it outwards to make tangible change in the world. As someone who also has a weird religious streak and as someone who feels more and more compelled lately to use my layperson voice to be opinionated-in-love about the Catholic Church, I like to keep Catherine of Siena close. May we all see so clearly who we are meant to be and may we all feel so comfortable being so.