Who Was Catherine of Siena?
Catherine Benincasa was born in Siena, Italy, in 1347, the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children born to a wool dyer and his wife. From childhood she showed an unusual intensity of devotion, and by the age of seven she had privately consecrated her life to God, resisting her family's later attempts to arrange a marriage. She joined the Dominican Third Order as a laywoman, living a life of prayer, fasting, and service to the sick and the poor in Siena.
Catherine had no formal education and could not write; her great work, The Dialogue (1377–78), was dictated to secretaries over a period of intense spiritual experience, often described as ecstasy. The book takes the form of a conversation between Catherine and God the Father, covering providence, discernment, prayer, and obedience. She also left behind nearly four hundred letters, written to popes, cardinals, rulers, and ordinary people, urging reform and repentance with a directness that astonished her contemporaries.
Catherine's public influence reached its height in her dealings with the papacy. During the period when the pope resided in Avignon rather than Rome, she pressed Pope Gregory XI, in person and by letter, to return the papacy to its proper seat – which he did in 1377, in part through her urging. She died in Rome in 1380 at the age of thirty-three. She was canonized in 1461 and in 1970 was named a Doctor of the Church, one of the first two women so honored.
Catherine is significant for TLA because The Dialogue presents an account of the soul's condition – estranged from God, restless, and incapable of producing from within itself the love it most needs – that the site's Fracturist framework recognizes immediately. Catherine does not arrive at this account through philosophical argument; she receives it, in her telling, as something disclosed to her. But the structure of what is disclosed is the structure this site identifies in literature centuries later: a rupture that the self cannot repair, addressed only by a love that comes from outside the self entirely.
In Their Own Words
“Be who God meant you to be, and you shall set the world on fire.”
– attributed“I have tasted and seen the depth of your mystery and the beauty of your creation with the light of my understanding.”
– The Dialogue, 1377–78“You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea: the more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you.”
– The Dialogue, 1377–78Selected Bibliography
- The Dialogue (The Dialogue of Divine Providence) – 1377–78
- The Letters of Catherine of Siena – c. 380 letters
- Prayers of Catherine of Siena – c. 26 prayers