St. Catherine of Siena
Patron of Italy, nurses, and those who must speak truth to power
- Feast day
- April 29
- Origin
- Siena, Italy
- Era
- 14th century
- Order
- Dominican tertiary
- Canonised
- 1461
About the saint
Caterina Benincasa was the twenty-third child of a Sienese dyer, born in 1347. She refused marriage, cut off her hair to make the point, and lived three years in near-total silence in a room of her family home before emerging to nurse plague victims and the poor.
Though she never learned to write well and dictated most of her work, she became one of the most forceful voices in Europe. She wrote bluntly to cardinals, princes and popes, and travelled to Avignon to tell Gregory XI to his face to return the papacy to Rome — which he did in 1377.
She died at thirty-three in 1380. In 1970 she and Teresa of Ávila became the first women declared Doctors of the Church.
Works
Documented miracles
The invisible stigmata
In Pisa in 1375 she reported receiving the wounds of Christ, which at her request remained invisible during her lifetime.
Pisa, 1375
Return of the papacy to Rome
Her direct appeal to Gregory XI in Avignon is credited with ending the seventy-year absence of the popes from Rome.
Avignon, 1376