Catherine of Siena: A Life of Passion and Purpose

Description

A historical and spiritual biography of Catherine of Siena, highlighting her as a visionary, a mystic, and a prophet.

transl. of Vauchez, André. 2015. Catherine de Sienne: vie et passions. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf.

"Catherine de Sienne (1347-1380) compte parmi les saintes mais aussi les Docteurs de l'Église. L'histoire retient quelle fut, au coeur de l'Europe médiévale, une femme pleine d'audace, tout à la fois mystique et engagée, ayant consumé son existence à Intervenir dans les crises religieuses et politiques. C'est le portrait de cette passionnée que dresse ici André Vaudrez. C'est en chair et en os qu'il nous restitue son itinéraire à travers l'épidémie de peste noire, la guerre de Cent Ans, les luttes fratricides de l'Italie, l'exil des papes de Rome à Avignon. C'est telle qu'en elle-même qu'il nous fait revivre cette pénitente dominicaine qui devint la correspondante, la confidente et la critique des puissants, princes, rois, évêques ou pontifes. Il fallait le savoir, le talent et la sensibilité de cet éminent médiéviste pour nous faire entrer dans la vérité existentielle, au-delà des multiples visages qu'on a pu lui prêter à travers les âges, d'une femme hors du commun et pour nous faire ressaisir toute l'actualité de sa personne et de son message. La première biographie historique et spirituelle de Catherine de Sienne, ouverte à tous."--Page 4 de la couverture.

This is a good historico-political (albeit naturalistic, anti-"hagiographical") history of St. Catherine.

ref:8.2: I can't understand why two of her 20th cen. biographers think "her spirit is acerbic" (Louis Canet, 1948), compared to St. Teresa de Ávila (ultra-sanguine), and that St. Catherine's (choleric) "boisterous nature of the Sienese, a kind of overpowering spirit, an element of tyranny" (Johannes Jørgensen, 1919) put him off‽ I really can't understand who wouldn't be attracted to St. Catherine and her gutsy fieriness.

ref:9.6: vivid description of 1348 plague which "deci"mated ⅔ of Siena's population, from 60k→20k!

ref:9.19: Sienese religious life in poor shape after plague. Sienese chronocler:

[The religious] of Saint Augustine stabbed to death their provincial in the monastery of San Antonio and had great difficulties in Siena.…In the same city, a young monk of [the monastery of] Camporeggi killed a confrère, son of the lord Cino de Montanini…and the brothers of the monastery of the Rose battled with six confrères and chased them out [of the monastery]. A violent dispute broke out among the Carthusians who were then, as a result, transferred by their general. In sum, it appears that serious conflicts have broken out everywhere and among all the religious. It followed that, no matter the order, the religious were all persecuted and reviled throughout the world.

ref:9.23: St. Catherine

must have been pretty, since, in the collection of Miracles composed by one of her admirers while she was yet living, there was a male religious who, a few years later, fell in love with Catherine and, after being rebuffed, left religious life and ended up hanging himself, after trying to kill her [I Miracoli di Caterina di Jacopo senese (di anonimo fiorentino), Fontes vitae S. Catherinae Senensis historici 4 (Florence, 1936), 14.] [!]

ref:9.26:

Did Catherine entertain this possibility [of entering a monastery]? […] one can imagine that her aspiration to perfection could not have been satisfied by the often-lax lives of most of the nuns of her own day, even assuming that her extended family—which does not seem to have been particularly devout, since it boasted of no priest or religious other than Tommaso dalla Fonte—could have and would have given her the often considerable dowry required of postulants for a religious life in community.

ref:9.31: I have also "wonder[ed] why the Friars Preacher who were close to Catherine urged her to take the habit of the Mantellate , rather than to enter the Dominican nuns of Santa Caterina in Siena." Answer: The religious and clerical life was lax, laity more pious. {Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena pp. 54-55 gives 2 related explanations: (1) her becoming a pinzochera / mantellata would enable her to reform female Dominican monasticism better; (2) it would give her "flexability and mobility" to play a political role.}

Perhaps this represented a strategy aimed at reforming their female monasteries, which were experiencing a crisis at that time. Paradoxically, it was indeed easier to achieve such reform through a laywoman, like Catherine, capable of acting from the outside, rather than by urging her to enter a convent in which her desire for perfection risked provoking negative reactions among the less zealous religious.

ref:9.96,99: In a 1376 letter to "Bérenger, abbot of Lezat and papal envoy in Tuscany, who had asked her what needed to be done in order to heal the ills of the Church", St. Catherine wrote (Letter 109):

It seems to me that, in order to rebuild the Church from top to bottom, it would be necessary for us to raze it to its foundations. Yes, I want you to really do everything that is in your power to destroy it; there is no other way.
[Egli è bisogno che, a raconciare, al tutto si guasti infino a le fondamenta. E questo è 'l guastare ch'io voglio che voi intendiate, e none in altro modo.]

ref:9.107: "I extended his [Niccolò's] neck on the [guillotine] block […] And then, fixing my attention on the divine goodness, I said: 'I do.'" (as though St. Catherine were marrying Niccolò-become-Christ!) "Then my soul rested in peace in the quiet, in such an odor of blood which I could not bring myself to get rid of his that had sprayed onto me."

ref:9.123: In 1377 she founded "the monastery of Saint Mary of the Angels [Santa Maria degli Angeli] in Belcaro, near Siena".

ref:9.150: "She then indicated to each of her disciples, male and female, the religious order into which she wanted each to enter after her death."!

ref:10.12:

the master general of the Dominicans, Martial Auribelli, who was poorly disposed toward the [Romish Dominicans of Strict] Observance, which the pope wanted to see disseminated throughout the whole order. Pius II himself wrote the office of the saint, whose liturgical feast is celebrated on April 29 [April 30 as of 1962 calendar].

ref:10.13: "Franciscan pope Sixtus IV" interdicted images depicting her stigmata (1478)

ref:10.15: "the influence of Catherine of Siena made itself felt also in the Regola del governo di cura familiare, written by the Dominican Giovanni Dominici for those who were living in the world and in the married state."

ref:10.17: "In 1630, the prohibition against representing her stigmata was lifted by Pope Urban VIII" (the "Galileo affair" pope).

This recent biography is interesting, but it's of a naturalistic bent (though doesn't exclude supernatural / "hagiographical" interpretations). Claims St. Catherine had the "neuropsychiatric" (ref:12.2) disease anorexia (& ∴ her inedia wasn't miraculous?) {claims, ref:12.4, she even received "a little wine" "during communion", yet ∄ Communion under both kinds, did it? Yet 12:39: "she left behind an impression of her teeth in the metal" of the chalice!}, yet unlike anorexics who have no control over their non-eating, St. Catherine could desire to eat, in obedience to her spiritual director, yet she vomited up most everything when she tried. She seemed to have a digestive/nutritive illness, not a "neuropsychiatric" one. But perhaps she had bolemia? Saints can and certainly have had illnesses.

ref:12:3: Her courageous letter to Mona Lapa her mother, telling her that she only loved St. Catherine's body and not soul!

ref:12.36: "Catherine should thus not be considered a feminist, as she never openly criticized the division of functions among the sexes that existed in the Church and society of her day."

ref:12.69: "Tommaso Caffarini did not hesitate to say on this occasion that she should be honored as a doctor of the Church [‽] just like Hugh and Richard of Saint-Victor, who, even though not canonized, were luminaries for the Christian people. [Caffarini, Libellus de supplemento , pars III, tract. 4, art. 4, p. 344 [PDF p. 424 doesn't say 'she should be honored as a doctor of the Church'! cf. Sel de la terre n° 98 automne 2016 'Doctoresses de l'Église?'.].]"

[un dominicain m'a écrit:] on considère en effet que sainte Catherine a eu une science infuse. Mais il n'est pas dans la Tradition de l'Eglise de déclarer des femmes docteurs, comme fait hélas l'Eglise conciliaire pour avoir les grâces du féminisme actuel, puisqu'ils vont dans le sens de tous les préjugés du monde. Une femme parle davantage de son expérience, et ne fait pas de traité de théologie systématique, comme peut le faire un homme. C'est la différence, par exemple entre les écrits de saint Jean de la Croix et ceux de sainte Thérèse d'Avila. Saint Paul dit d'ailleurs [2 Tm. 2:12] qu'une femme ne doit pas parler à l'église. Donc avoir une auréole de docteur: jamais on aurait soutenu cela dans l'Église avant Vatican II.

ref:12.87: Why is St. Catherine's "expression of desire and of will in writing is not at all typical for a woman"? Biblically, women are considered to be desire.

ref:12.91 ff.: "Catherine and the Dominican Observant Reform Movement and a New Religious Project for Women" was very interesting! St. Catherine's letters showed that the monastic state > secular state she lived in (cf. ref:13.3 infra). Yet why didn't she enter an order of strict observance, then? They seemed to have existed.

ref:12.105:

Catherine’s influence likewise made itself felt on another level at the end of the fifteenth century. We can indeed place in this same line the great preacher Girolamo Savonarola , a Dominican of the Observance who strove in his treatises and sermons to realize in Florence the program of moral and religious reforms that Catherine had tried in vain to get accepted throughout the whole of Christianity through the papacy.

ref:13:3: Her interpretation on 1 Cor. 7:

When one of her disciples wrote to ask her whom he ought to marry among three choices he had available, she curtly answered him that she had no advice to give him in this area and that it would be better if he did not marry at all, since he would then be freer to serve God. Not that Catherine was in principle against marriage; but, like Saint Paul, whom she admired a great deal, she reckoned that “in these times which are the last” and in the critical situation in which the Church found itself, there were better things to do.

[…] in her letters, she does affirm her conviction—several times—that the monastic state is superior to the penitential life that she had chosen, as it is “more certain and more perfect” in its practice of obedience. Thus, she wrote to the Mantellata Daniela d’Orvieto, “I regret, miserable poor woman that I am, to never have followed this teaching [= on the monastic life]. I did exactly the opposite and, I admit, I have not infrequently judged my neighbor [= those who have made this choice].” [Letter 65, to Daniella da Orvieto, in Catherine of Siena, Letters , 3:233–40, at 240 (see intro., n. 4).]

ref:9.107: Letter 273, to Raymond of Capua, in Catherine of Siena, Letters, 1:85–89 [PDF pp. 142-150], here especially on 88–89:

Then, he [Niccolò Toldo (or di Toldi)] arrived, meek as a lamb. As soon as he saw me, he began to smile. He wanted me to make the sign of the cross over him. After I did so, I said to him: “Kneel down here: this is the marriage rite, my beloved friend; soon you will taste the life that never ends.” He lowered himself with great meekness. I extended his neck on the block, I leaned in towards him and reminded him of the blood of the Lamb. His mouth never stopped murmuring: “Jesus! Catherine!” It was while he was saying these names that I received his head in my hands. And then, fixing my attention on the divine goodness, I said: “I do.” Immediately, I saw the God-and-man [Christ] as one sees the brightness of the sun. In this blood, there was the fire of holy desire given and hidden in his soul by grace. He [Christ] received it [that holy desire] in His divine charity. Once He had received the blood and the desire, He received the soul which He had placed in this refuge which is His side, open and full of mercy….While the hands of the Holy Spirit pushed him to make it further, he [Niccolò] made a small gesture, capable of delighting a thousand hearts, and I was not surprised since he was already tasting the divine sweetness. He turned like one newly married who, having arrived at the threshold of the spouse, turns around to look and bows her head towards those who accompanied her in order to show them her gratitude. He died. Then my soul rested in peace in the quiet, in such an odor of blood which I could not bring myself to get rid of his that had sprayed onto me.