St. Catherine of Siena

Catherine Benincasa was the youngest of 25 children, a twin and one of 13 siblings to survive to adulthood. Though born into a respected and worldly guild family, Catherine appears to have had tendencies toward mysticism and extreme forms of self-denial from an early age. At the age of six, while looking across a valley at a church, she experienced the first of many spiritual visions, this one of Jesus and of Sts. Peter, Paul, and John the Evangelist. After this vision she appears to have developed a scrupulous conscience and given herself over to meditation and varieties of deliberate and extreme self-mortification ranging from fasting to scourging as a strategy of atonement for sins. She took a private vow of chastity, imploring her family's consent to be a nun instead of marry, going so far as to cut off her hair to make herself less marriageable. Only when smallpox or a similar serious disease disfigured her--it is not clear whether the disfigurement was permanent--did her family consent.

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ding well beyond Siena and well beyond a small community of faithful townsfolk advocates. The turning point in her public life came about gradually, as soldiers and men and women of authority, influence, and property began to seek counsel or to receive it in the form of correspondence initiated by her. The precise mechanism by which Catherine "became a chief figure in the drama the that was unfolding" in Europe, which was nothing less than the shakeup of medieval society and the impending decline of the Church vis-a-vis the initial rise of secular nation-states, is not agreed upon by various authorities. Ward says that Catherine incited a correspondence with influential people regarding a crusade preached by Pope Gregory XI in 1372. According to Undset, Catherine was called to a meeting of Dominican hierarchy in Florence in 1374 to be tested for heresy and doctrinal purity, fallout of widespread reports of what may conveniently be called her religious teaching, and from Florence was dispatched to Avignon with an embassy to the pope, thus embarking on a formally structured public life. In the background of Catherine's private and intense mysticism and her public life was the fact that the Church was beset by crisis from many s
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Approximate Word count = 3114
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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