Catherine of Siena and the Wounds She Asked Me to Hide

I found Catherine already listening to Me before she had words for what she was hearing — the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children born to a wool-dyer's family in Siena, a girl who at six years old, walking home with her brother, saw Christ above the church of the Dominicans, robed as a bishop, and stopped in the street to look, unable to move until the vision passed. Her family wanted an ordinary marriage for her, as families do, and she resisted it the ordinary way saints resist things they know are not for them: quietly, at first, and then, when quiet failed, by cutting off her hair so that no suitor would want her. She was received into the Mantellate, the Dominican tertiaries of Siena — laywomen, mostly widows, who lived a life of penance and service in the world rather than a cloister — at eighteen, over the objections of women who did not think a girl that young belonged among them.

I drew close to her in the years that followed, closer than I draw to most, and I gave her, around 1367 or 1368 by the account of her confessor and biographer Raymond of Capua, a mystical espousal — a vision in which Christ, with the Virgin Mary and a company of saints present, placed a ring on her finger in token of union with Me that no earthly marriage would ever have offered her. She told Raymond she saw that ring on her hand for the rest of her life, though it was never visible to anyone else. That is how I most often work: the confirmation is given to the one who needs it, not paraded before those who would only argue about it.

In 1375, in Pisa, before the crucifix in the church of Santa Cristina, I gave her the stigmata — the wounds of Christ's Passion pressed into her own body in a moment witnesses described as leaving her nearly unconscious with the force of it. And then she asked Me for something I have granted to very few of the souls I have marked this way: that the wounds remain invisible to everyone but herself, visible in no way except the pain of them, which she bore without display for the rest of her life. Padre Pio's wounds, centuries later, I let the whole world examine under a microscope, because that was the testimony the age of X-rays needed. Catherine's I hid at her own request, because the testimony her age needed was not spectacle but obedience carried in secret, and I gave each of them the kind of proof their century could actually use.

What I built through her hidden wounds was public and enormous. She could not read or write fluently in Latin and dictated her letters — hundreds of them survive — to scribes, addressing popes, cardinals, kings, and condottieri with a bluntness no one else in Christendom dared use on them. She wrote to Pope Gregory XI, exiled with his court in Avignon for nearly seventy years of what history calls the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy, and told him plainly that he owed obedience to Me before he owed comfort to himself, that the Bride of Christ needed her Bridegroom's vicar in Rome and not in France. She traveled to Avignon in 1376 to press the case in person. In January 1377, Gregory returned the papacy to Rome — historians debate how much of that decision was Catherine's persuasion against the many political pressures already pushing him homeward, and I will not pretend the ledger is simple, but I will say that no other voice of that age spoke to a pope with the plainness Mine gave her, and he heard it.

She wrote The Dialogue, a record of her conversations with Me set down near the end of her short life, and worked ceaselessly through the Great Western Schism that broke out after Gregory's death, defending the legitimacy of Urban VI until her own body gave out from the austerities and labors she had never spared herself. She died in Rome on April 29, 1380, thirty-three years old. Pope Paul VI named her a Doctor of the Church on October 4, 1970, alongside Teresa of Avila — the first two women ever given that title — because the words I gave her, dictated by an unlettered woman to scribes who could barely keep pace, had outlasted every pope she corrected.

The Record

St. Catherine of Siena (born Caterina Benincasa, March 25, 1347, Siena, Italy) was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children of a wool dyer. She joined the Dominican Third Order, the Mantellate, as a teenager. Her confessor, Blessed Raymond of Capua, recorded her mystical espousal to Christ (c. 1367–1368) and her reception of the stigmata at Pisa on April 1, 1375, in his biography the Legenda Maior, completed around 1395; at Catherine's request, the wounds reportedly remained invisible to others during her lifetime. She dictated hundreds of letters to popes, cardinals, and rulers, and the mystical treatise The Dialogue (Il Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza), composed around 1378. She traveled to Avignon in 1376 to urge Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome, which he did in January 1377, ending nearly seven decades of the Avignon Papacy; historians note that multiple political pressures contributed alongside her appeals. She supported Pope Urban VI's legitimacy during the outbreak of the Western Schism in 1378. Catherine died in Rome on April 29, 1380, at age thirty-three. She was canonized by Pope Pius II on June 29, 1461, named co-patroness of Italy by Pope Pius XII in 1939, and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI on October 4, 1970 — one of the first two women, with St. Teresa of Ávila, to receive the title. Feast day: April 29.