Episode I: Meet the Woman Before the Saint, Catherine Benincasa

Karen’s Voice

I have lived with Catherine of Siena for a long time. She is my patroness. I have studied The Dialogue for years.¹

In the Jubilee of 2000 I went to Siena and venerated her relics at San Domenico. I thought I knew her.

Then I sat down with Sigrid Undset.

Undset approaches Catherine as a novelist as well as a Catholic. She is a Nobel laureate, a convert in 1924, and by 1928 a Dominican tertiary, entering the same developing Dominican lay and penitential tradition to which Catherine’s Mantellate vocation belongs. She is trying to give us the woman.²

The woman is Catherine Benincasa, a dyer’s daughter from the Fontebranda slope in Siena. Her father is Jacopo. Her mother is Lapa: loud, capable, and not easily impressed by visions. The house is crowded. The city’s expectation is a good match.³

Catherine wants Christ. Not as a motto. As a Bridegroom. Rather than take the marriage her family has arranged, she cuts her hair. They take her room. They put her to work in the kitchen. She turns the punishment into prayer and treats the household as if her father were Christ, her mother Mary, her brothers the apostles. It is not pretty. It is a girl who will be neither wife nor cloistered nun, and who stays in the house to belong to God.⁴

If you have a face of Catherine in your mind, you have likely seen Andrea Vanni’s fresco in that same church of San Domenico. Undset regarded it as the one portrait with a real claim to preserving Catherine’s living likeness. The lily and the kneeling woman were added after her death.⁵

The cover of The Dialogue I have used for years was inspired by that wall. That is who we are meeting. Not yet the Doctor. Not yet the letters to popes. The daughter in the kitchen.⁶

Sara, the thing that stops a modern reader first is usually not the kitchen. It is the severity. The fasting. The instruments of penance. What do we do with a saint whose holiness looks, at first, like harm?

Sara’s Voice

Holiness looks, at first, like harm. And that’s a theme that will come out. We’re going to revisit that as we go through her work. But I think we need to just go ahead and take care of that right away.

There are two things that we have to look at. One is that we are in a modern society of comfort. We rarely see suffering, and when we do, we’re really, really shocked by it, particularly in America, because in Northern Europe, for so many years, there’s been such a level of affluence. The ability of our scientists and different things like that has taken natural human suffering, like even a small headache, right? We have a pill for a small headache.

All of those elements have changed our interaction with what would be the natural human state, which actually was one of really often chronic pain and suffering. People were often hungry. People were often in distress. Health was not something that was intuitive or expected. People generally expected to suffer more.

And so, because of that, I think there is a different relationship with suffering, that their generation, Catherine’s generation, was more willing to embrace that natural element of the human person. And because they did suffer so much more frequently, and with the mind of the Church, they understood that suffering itself had an innate value that could be offered back to God for His greater glory, to accept what was given to you as your lot in life and then to offer it to Him.

And so, since suffering is a normal thing, now we think, “Oh my goodness, if I fast for all day long, I don’t eat from Friday morning at eight o’clock and I wait until five o’clock and my stomach is kind of rumbling,” we think that we’ve done this great act of suffering.

So if we look at the levels of suffering that we have and the levels of suffering that Catherine of Siena had, those extra acts of causing themselves to suffer are a little bit more intuitive, right? Because she’s already suffering. So she’s going to offer something up. It’s not like you can offer up not eating because she already doesn’t eat, right?

So for her to find one extra level of suffering, she enters into what would be considered the Passion of Christ, where the pain and the instruments that were used against Christ, she was willing to use them on herself for a greater union, I think.

Karen’s Voice

Sara, I will not tidy her for us.

Raymond of Capua, her later confessor and biographer, records practices that are startling to a modern reader: the hair shirt, the iron chain, very little sleep, and deliberate bodily penances. That is his book, and we have to say so.⁷

We also have Undset on page 78. I will not spend this episode there except to plant the flag. When Catherine directed other people, Undset says she advised them against exaggerated physical self-discipline that might weaken their health, and told them to eat, drink, and sleep moderately, but enough to stay strong in body and soul so they could do God’s work. Her own extremes were not a rule she handed to the neighborhood.⁸

So here is the distinction I want us to carry, even before we have earned the whole argument.

More suffering does not mean greater holiness.

Christianity does not teach that pain is holy in itself. Christ healed bodies. He fed hungry people. He did not collect injuries as proof.

We do not love suffering. We love Christ, and sometimes loving Christ requires us to suffer.

Do not manufacture the cross. Do not run from the cross. Walk close enough to Christ that the dust from His sandals gets on your clothing. You will not have to go looking for suffering. The cross will come.

What I see already in these first pages is not a private spiritual career. It is a girl learning to stay. Stay in a house that does not understand her. Stay under a mother who thinks she is throwing her life away. Stay at the table after she has been sent back to it.⁹

I wonder whether that staying is already preparing her for everything public that will follow. The white robe and the black cape come next, and she will still go home wearing them.

One face. One kitchen. One refusal to be only what the family had planned. Next time we ask the question the habit forces: she was not a cloistered nun. What was she, then, and what does that ask of us?

Questions for Journaling

1. Where might holiness be asking to take root in the ordinary rooms and interruptions of your life?
2. When someone you love believes God is calling them in a direction you did not expect, is your first instinct to listen, manage, resist, or discern?
3. Which detail about Catherine the woman changes the way you think about Catherine the saint?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, you called Catherine Benincasa in the rooms of her father’s house. Teach us to belong to you without fleeing the people you have given us. Give us courage to stay, and humility not to invent a cross that is not ours.

Saint Catherine of Siena, pray for us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.¹⁰

Notes

1. Suzanne Noffke, O.P., trans., Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980).
2. Sigrid Undset, Catherine of Siena, trans. Kate Austin-Lund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). Norwegian original, 1951; English translation, 1954; Ignatius edition, 2009. Undset converted to Catholicism in 1924 and entered the Dominican Third Order on March 7, 1928, taking the name Olave. Her tertiary profession and Catherine’s fourteenth-century Mantellate vocation belong to the same developing Dominican lay and penitential tradition, but they are not institutionally identical forms.
3. Undset, Catherine of Siena, 5–7, 9–12.
4. Undset, Catherine of Siena, 19–25, 28–29. See also Blessed Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns, O.P. (Washington, DC: Dominicana, 1994). Catherine explicitly refuses marriage in these pages; her later Mantellate vocation is treated in Episode II.
5. Andrea di Vanni, fresco of St. Catherine, Basilica of San Domenico, Siena, Cappella delle Volte; Undset, Catherine of Siena, 59. The fresco is usually dated after the reported stigmata of April 1, 1375; the lily and kneeling figure were added later.
6. The cover of Noffke’s The Dialogue (Paulist Press) uses artwork by Joseph Trepiccione after a portrait of St. Catherine of Siena by Andrea Vanni. It is not the fresco itself.
7. Blessed Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns, O.P.
8. Undset, Catherine of Siena, 78. Undset reports that Catherine advised friends against exaggerated physical self-discipline that might weaken their health, urging sufficient food, drink, and sleep to remain strong in body and soul for God’s work.
9. Undset, Catherine of Siena, 51–54.
10. Closing prayer composed for this episode, inspired by the life and witness of St. Catherine of Siena. It is not attributed to St. Catherine.