BIOGRAPHY

Saint Catherine was born in the central Italian city of Siena, the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. Despite her family's expectations, Catherine was uninterested in marriage. Instead, she spent much of her youth in the nearby Dominican church, eventually receiving the Dominican habit at age eighteen. For the next three years, she was a recluse in her parents' home, leaving her room only for mass. Although she had no formal schooling, during this time she somehow learned to read.

Catherine's home in Siena is now a chapel and a museum.

At twenty-one, she reentered the world and began a lifelong practice of caring for the poor and ill. On several occasions, she ministered to those who had the plague, putting her life at great danger. In 1370, she had an ecstatic union with God, which she described as her "mystical death." But rather than leading to further isolation, this experience led her to deeper involvement in church reform and in church-state politics.

For the rest of her short life, Catherine acted as emissary for the pope in disputes with various city-states in Italy. While traveling on diplomatic missions, she also heard confessions, and as a woman she was given the rare privilege by Pope Gregory XI that those who confessed to her were to be absolved of their sins. She also found time to write a number of letters, which convey her basic ideas. During a break from church diplomacy in 1377, Catherine had another intense mystical experience, which led to her writing the Dialogues. The last years of her life were spent in a disappointing attempt to organize a new crusade to the Holy Land. In 1461, Catherine was canonized, and in 1970 she and the Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) were the first women given the title "Doctor of the Church."

Catherine's mummified head is on display at the San Domenico Church in Siena

Many of the hundreds of letters she wrote show Catherine's emphasis on love. Catherine explains that God loves us only because God chooses to love us--there is no necessity in divine charity. Our highest calling is to love God and show our love by loving others. In propounding this doctrine of love, Catherine hints at the necessity of free will as a prerequisite for such love.

In Catherine's Dialogues, she makes explicit this connection between free will and God's love. After an introduction and discussion of the nature of suffering, Catherine asserts that although God "created us without our help, he will not save us without our help" (Dialogues, 23). This notion of free will is clearly quite different from that of Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume II