St Catherine of Siena A Talk by Sr Ann Catherine for the Cambridge Theological Federation

From time to time around this stage in the year we hear calls for the date of Easter to be fixed. The very reasons which are frequently urged for this – that it would rationalise our calendars, make forward planning easier and so on, have always seemed to me to indicate the wisdom, precisely, of not fixing the date of Easter. The annual interruption of our agendas by a feast whose timing is dictated by something as far beyond our control as the phases of the moon is good for our humility, I think, which is to say, for our sense of who we really are as God’s beloved sons and daughters. The winds and the waves do not obey us, the heavenly bodies do not keep to orbits we have assigned them, and our dignity, and our sanity, lies in acknowledging this. But it also keeps those of us who are preachers in Christian traditions for whom the lives of the saints are an important resource on our toes in a particular way, because inevitably, and rightly, when we come to celebrate those feasts of holy men and women that fall around this point in our Church’s calendar, we see them a little differently from year to year, either through the sombre veil of Lent or in the radiant light of Easter. And there are some of them, frankly, who seem to fit more naturally into one or other of these milieus.

At first sight, St Catherine of Siena, whose feast is kept today in the Roman Catholic lectionary, and who is celebrated with particular affection by her own Dominican Order, might perhaps seem like a pre-eminently Passsiontide saint, and one, it must be admitted, whose biography contains many features which are culturally alien, even troubling. Even by the standards of her fourteenth century, the practices of fasting and scourging and sleep deprivation by which she sought to configure herself ever more closely to her crucified God were extreme, and her earliest biographers attest that she eventually received the painful privilege of physical conformity to the cross in the form of the stigmata: bearing in her body marks resembling the wounds of Christ. She sang in lyrical tones about the blood of Christ, washing the face of the soul, as she put it, and there are far more explicit references in her extant works to the crucifixion than to the resurrection. Finally, worn out by a life of suffering partly deliberately sought and, it seems, always willingly embraced, she died at the symbolically highly significant age of 33.

But, although Catherine’s own path to sanctity comes with a fairly hefty health warning: don’t try this, or at least don’t try all of this, at home, in fact I want to suggest, the reason that there are relatively few references to the Resurrection in her writings is not that it is unimportant for Catherine; not that hers is a gloomy, death-obsessed spirituality. All her earliest biographers and her own letters agree on this, providing vivid snapshots which are far from the platitudes of conventional hagiography: the adolescent so bouncily besotted with her numerous little nephews and nieces that she speaks of wanting to cover them continuously with kisses; the little girl solemnly plotting to steal her brother’s clothes so that she could run away and join the Dominican friars; the garrulous adult Catherine telling off her spiritual director, a future master of the Dominican Order, for nodding off while she was speaking – perhaps more accurately lecturing - to him: 'I might as well be talking to the wall', she said. From a childhood in which her personality was as winningly radiant as her golden hair, to her adult genius for friendship embracing popes and prisoners, theologians and poets, her bringing comfort and dignity to the disfigured and demandingly despairing in the leper colonies and plague houses of northern Italy, her urgency in reconciling warring factions in church and civil society, and her delight in teaching little children their catechism, here is a woman on fire with love of life, to whom nothing human is alien. Hers is emphatically not a negatively otherworldly faith, and certainly not a faith that is fixated on Good Friday to the exclusion of Easter Day.

Rather, in a life motivated by compassion for humanity in all its fragility, brokenness and sometimes apparent repellent ugliness, the beauty of the Resurrection was, so to speak, the background music accompanying the song of her life, the atmosphere that sustained her every breath, almost invisible not because it is nowhere, but because, for her, it is everywhere.

What grounds do I have for this contention? Above all, I think, the evidence is found in perhaps a rather surprising place: Catherine’s all-consuming love for the Church. In order to understand this, however, we have to understand what, or rather who, Catherine thought the Church was. In a typically vibrant and provocative one-liner, Catherine tells us “the Church is Christ.”

What can this possibly mean, and what makes it particularly an Easter insight? One way into this question, I think, is to begin near the beginning of Catherine’s own story, with the dawning of her consciousness of her own particular vocation. If we listen to her biography attentively, we can hear in it, I suggest, a kind of commentary on what many of us were doubtless doing on the night of Holy Saturday: renewing our baptismal promises. We can hear, perhaps afresh, what it is to be reborn in the Risen Christ, remade as members of his very body.

Catherine Benincasa was born in Siena in the year 1347, the daughter of Jacobo the cloth dyer and his vivacious wife Lappa, into a very large family: she was the twenty-third of twenty four children, and though several, including her twin sister, did not survive infancy, the home in which she grew up was a noisy and bustling one. From a very early age – one might say unsurprisingly! - Catherine seems to have been attracted to a life of solitude and prayer, and the first of her many recorded visions took place when, at the age of six, on her way home from a visit to her aunt, she saw on the roof of the Dominican priory church in Siena, the Lord Jesus surrounded by SS Peter, Paul and John the Evangelist. Other saints, and St Catherine herself on later occasions, may have been granted a vision of Christ in the manger or on Calvary, a vision of Jesus as little Catherine might have known him from the iconography of her parish church or her pious home, but not here, at the very beginning of her vocation to service of Christ in His Church. And the Lord does not appear in the garb of a humble Galilean preacher, but in Episcopal robes and crowned with the papal tiara. He blesses her as a bishop would bless his flock, turning on her a gaze which is simultaneously tender and majestic.

And from then on, it seems, her course was set. She was just seven when she made a private vow of virginity; promising that she would have no bridegroom except Christ. Unsurprisingly, her parents hoped for a more conventional son-in-law, and, for years, they attempted to dissuade her from her vocation by, effectively, treating her as a slave in her own home. Eventually, however, in response to their own prayers, her parents were reconciled to her eccentric ambitions.

At the age of around 16, she became, for three years, a kind of domestic hermit, rarely leaving the house except to attend Mass. This period of withdrawal came to an abrupt end, when, Catherine firmly believed, the Lord himself ordered her to leave her seclusion and go and minister His love more intensively and directly to her neighbours, initially by nursing victims of the Black Death, then raging across Europe. During this time too she began to gather around her a group of “disciples”. The group that crystallised around Catherine called themselves her “family” and, as her vocation developed, they followed her wherever she went, at first within Siena, then throughout northern Italy and then beyond, sometimes several dozens, forming a kind of informal community around her, men and women, priests, religious and laity, artists and artisans, rich and poor, young and old.

Gradually, Catherine found herself called, not only to nurse the sick, but to undertake a bewilderingly wide variety of merciful tasks. Perhaps most famously she was eventually to play a crucial part in bringing Pope Gregory XI, then living in exile in Avignon, back to Rome. She spent the last two years of her own life living in Rome, visiting St Peter’s basilica every morning and remaining in solitary prayer for hours, imploring God’s mercy on the Church. Throughout this period her health was deteriorating until at the end she could barely walk, but continued to semi-crawl to the basilica until even this became impossible and she could do nothing except offer her life as a sacrifice for the Church in unceasing prayer as she lay in bed, too weak to move. She died on 29th April 1380 in the arms of one of the closest among her “family.”

What is the secret of all this dizzying activity, and of the burning charity that provided its energy?

It seems to me that it is, quite simply, that stark phrase from which we started: the Church is Christ. If we take our baptism into Christ with utter, perhaps apparently naïve, realism, though it is a naivety that St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, not to mention St Paul, would seem to share with the dyer’s daughter from Siena, we will readily realise that to be a Christian is not simply to join an organisation, but, rather, to become part of an organism. As the Fathers of the Church loved to point out, the light of the risen Christ that knocked Saul of Tarsus so decisively off course on the Damascus Road is the key to understanding our true identity and our true dignity as Christians, and the voice that accompanied that radiance asked, not 'Saul, why are you trying to destroy the outfit I set up?' not even 'Saul, why are you bent on hurting my friends?', but 'Saul, why are you persecuting me? I am Jesus, and you persecuting me.' On the Road to Damascus, Christ and Christians are revealed to be one person, and all our later ecclesiologising might be said to be so many footnotes to that tremendous statement, which Catherine reproduces in her own uncompromising language: the Church is Christ.

But if we are all part of the same organism we all, so to speak, share the same DNA and thus there is­­­­ a sense in which, in all our diversity, we share the same identity. We are not, after all, it turns out, our brother’s or our sister’s keeper, but only because, united within the body of Christ, we are our brother and our sister. And, because the identity we share is that of Jesus himself, each of us within his body is endowed, astonishingly enough, with his own royal, priestly and prophetic dignity. This is why, for example, Catherine’s childhood memory of Jesus in pontifical robes prompted her to address the Pope in later years as “Sweet Christ on earth,” even when she was ordering him around, which she did, at times vigorously. But it is also why she stooped to drink pus from the wounds of the leper in whom she saw the features of her disfigured Lord. And indeed it is why, particularly strikingly, she even allowed herself, it seems, on one occasion, to be addressed as “Jesus” by the distracted condemned prisoner she accompanied to the place of death, comforting him in his fear all the while as though she was with the Lord in Gethsemane. It is why, too, she treasured his blood, the blood of a sinner like herself, who, like herself is a member of the body of the Easter Christ, as a kind of relic when it splashed onto her clothes at his execution. The cells of an organism, of course both share the same DNA, have the common identity of the one body to which they belong, and are differentiated: some are bone cells, some blood cells and what you will. In this body, some are supreme pastors of the flock, some are mystics on fire with the divine love, some are distastefully needy and hopelessly confused. But they – we - are all Christ. This is a vision of staggeringly radical equality, and it is Easter, the Easter than enables us to die with Christ in baptism and be reborn into His body, that makes it possible. St Catherine is among the most eloquent witnesses to this most consoling and challenging of paschal truths. May her example inspire us and her prayers sustain us this Eastertide and forever.

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