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COMMENTARY
April 29, 2006
Catherine of Siena
Today is the 626th anniversary of the death of St Catherine of Siena, at age 33. (It is also my birthday, so I’ll write what I want to.) This Catherine is a figure not only in hagiography, but also in world history. She changed its course by persuading a weak pope to return from Avignon to Rome, in defiance of a French king and the entire papal curia, to face greater dangers. She was the decisive influence in stopping a civil war, forging unexpected and fruitful alliances between Italian city states. By such means, she helped restore a papacy that had all but disintegrated, and put it back on what the Marxists call, “the right side of history”.It was a moment, in the 14th century, when Europe might have ceased to be Catholic. There have been several such moments; and in remembering them, we might even find hope today -- supposing we ourselves are on the right side of history. She was no mere Helen of Troy, inspiring events limply. Catherine of Siena forged them by her own command. Or rather, as she insisted, by the command of God, through the vehicle of her own strange, otherworldly person. As a small child, she began having visions, and consecrated her virginity to Christ. She died so young, probably from the cumulative effects of her austerities and mortifications. Modestly born, female, the second-youngest in a huge family, never taught to read and write, she was by her late twenties exhibiting remarkable learning. (Today, she is accepted as a “Doctor of the Church”.) Hundreds of her surviving letters give shape and colour to this extraordinary life. Her writings are among the formative masterpieces of Italian literature. She has been called the “prose Dante” for her Dialogue -- presented as dialogue with God -- which gives a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven that, like Dante’s, will resonate in every human heart that grants it full attention. Her very existence -- far from mythical; documented in precise, credible detail by contemporaries, so many of whom themselves found her larger than life -- brings into question most of what we think we know about human limitations. In her own time, it was hardly taken for granted that she spoke as an oracle for God. Yet the age was sufficiently faithful, that her holiness was discerned, and finally mostly accepted -- even by the most powerful players on the public stage. Her teachings could not be dismissed as mad, because they answered to reason. They were so compatible with what Christians had received from Bible and Tradition, as to be attributed to the same Source. Here, for instance, Catherine -- repeating what she says she has herself received from God -- explains how to act counter-intuitively towards the highest human objective: "Up to the present, I have taught you how a man may serve his neighbour, and manifest, by that service, the love which he has towards Me. Now I wish to tell you further, that a man proves his patience on his neighbour, when he receives injuries from him. "Similarly, he proves his humility on a proud man, his faith on an infidel, his true hope on one who despairs, his justice on the unjust, his kindness on the cruel, his gentleness and benignity on the irascible. Good men produce and prove all their virtues on their neighbour, just as perverse men all their vices.” This is how we show fortitude, and make it “serious”; how we test whether our fortitude is real. I gave it only as an example of the sound of her authority; of how it speaks for itself. There have been a lot of Catherines in my life -- Catherine of Alexandria (who came to me as an ancient wood-carving in a museum), Catherine of Genoa (the subject of Friedrich von Hugel’s great work, The Mystical Element of Religion), “Catherine the Great” (not the queen of Russia, but some personal nemesis from years ago). Catherine of Siena I should like to share, with any reader who has the ambition of thinking his way “out of the box” of our impoverished contemporary notion of reality. Learn what you can about her and her time, and ask yourself what you think. P.S. after tomorrow’s column (on the late Jane Jacobs) I’ll be off and wandering for five weeks -- on my annual leave. Please don’t write to ask if I’ve been fired! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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