Episode II : She Was Not a Nun Catherine and the Lay Dominican Vocation

Karen’s Voice

Last time we left Catherine in the kitchen. She had refused the marriage arranged for her. We said the white robe and the black cape were coming.

They come. She is clothed in the Dominican habit at San Domenico, and then she walks back down the hill to Fontebranda. Same house. Same Lapa. Same streets.

The women she joins are called Mantellate, a company of Dominican lay penitents. Most of them are widows. They wear the white tunic and the black mantle. They keep a life of prayer and penance. They live at home. They are not nuns behind a grille. This is the tradition that later becomes what we know as Dominican Third Order life. In her own century we should keep her own name for it: Mantellata.¹

A young unmarried girl asking for that habit is a problem. The sisters fear scandal. Undset and Raymond both say the company resisted her, then received her. Her father yields. Tommaso della Fonte, the family friar, is there when she is clothed.²

What she has now is not a convent. It is a sign, a company, and a director. First there is a cell in the house. Then there is a cell she learns to carry in her soul when the house will not be quiet.

There is something deeply human about a visible sign of belonging. The mantle told Catherine, her family, and the people who saw her that this life had a shape and a claim upon her.

Sara, we often assume that if holiness is serious it has to leave the world. Catherine puts the habit on and stays. What do you hear in that?

Sara’s Voice

It’s really, that was one of the things that I was surprised by when I was reading the book, because I had always thought that she had lived a life like that: she had gotten married and then became a Third Order Dominican later on. I had not realized that she had lived that vocation completely her whole life. So that was something that I had learned just in reading that book.

And I think it is an interesting vocation, really laying down the grounds of what has now come into our century, right, or our lived lives, as that universal call to holiness. And I like the way that you said it, that you didn’t have to set yourself apart, because really, what does holiness mean? It means to be set apart for God, right?

So when we use that traditional meaning of it, it does seem as though if you’re going to be set apart for God, for holiness’ sake or for sanctity’s sake, then you would go off. And yet God came into the world. God came into the world. Christ lived specifically in a family. He grew up in a family. He served his family first before he served the world.

And I think in that sense there are a lot of mirrors that Catherine, who is so particularly called to be the bride of Christ in a way that many other religious beings were not really called to live that vocation with Him, but she really mirrors His whole life almost from that feminine side, right, where she is born into the family. She realizes that she’s set apart very early on. She feels called to that vocation.

And then she goes out in the same way maybe that God went and was blessed in the temple, and then she comes back and does her service there until, like our Lord in 33 years, right, until Our Lady finally says, “Do whatever He tells you,” and then she’s going to go out into the world. So for me, it’s really the feminine reflection of the life of Christ lived in a very unique vocation for us to model.

Karen’s Voice

For an unmarried daughter in Catherine’s world, family and household expectations were powerful. Enclosure would have taken her into an entirely different form of life. The Mantellate gave her another way. The habit said she was Christ’s in public. The sisters prayed together at San Domenico. A friar could offer her spiritual direction. She could remain with Lapa and, as her life opened outward, serve the sick and the poor.

The obligations were real, though different from what the word “order” may make us expect. Wear the mantle. Keep a penitential life. Show up with the women. Live under Dominican spiritual direction. Undset is careful to say they were not bound to the three vows of a nun. The habit was not a pass to wander as she pleased. She later tells a sister to love many and converse with few.

They can take the little room. They cannot take the cell she builds in her soul. And that begins to show us how an intense interior life can survive amid actual people and actual responsibilities.

I don’t think it’s quite fair to compare a modern prayer group with the Mantellate, though there are some similarities, and that is something I have been puzzling in my mind. We do not wear their cloak, and we’re not clothed at San Domenico. But I do know, for example, that other prayer groups can form, and there is more of a character of vow, or promises. Maybe we want to use that word, promises.

Sara’s Voice

Well, I think that what you have is the overarching structure of the Dominicans, right? So these are not just loosely related people coming together for just a common interest. This is really an order, and the Mantellate is flowing from that order. So the structure is going to be set for them from above.

I mean, I think that many of us right now just kind of flounder because there has been kind of a, I guess in the ’70s or whatever, you know, you had the rage against the hierarchy, blah, blah, blah, so terrible, you know, the patriarchy, the patriarchy. But what it has really done, it has left a lot of us to try and figure out how to put the pieces of the house back together.

And so what you end up getting in, I think, some of the modern-day prayer groups is the flavor du jour, right? So it’s just, I think they’re just not grounded, and not in any negative way. They just don’t have the gravitas, I guess is really just kind of a good word. There’s no history for them. There’s no real belief that what you’re doing is given to you because somebody called Dominic, right? I mean, all of the people who are in the Mantellate were capable of looking back to the founder to find the order that they’re supposed to be following, and we just don’t have that.

And I think that I’ve said this before, maybe in some of the other shows that we’ve done, but there are religious orders, right? And now what we have that are coming about are not orders. I mean, there are only four orders, or maybe five orders within the Church, right? The Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Carmelites, and the Capuchins. I don’t know, maybe there’s one more. But those are the ones that are primary orders, and what they are are whole families, right? You have, in general for all of those, mother-father founders who then beget spiritual children.

You generally have a lay order, right, the third orders. You have an order of brothers. You have an order of sisters, and then you generally have an order of priests that go in there. So it’s really a familial structure. Everybody is taken care of in that group.

And now many of the modern orders, even, like, from the Jesuits on, like the Jesuits never inspired any women to be kind of their Joan of Arc kind of element, right? And so there’s, like, a defect there. Maybe they were necessary at the time, but you can see why the Dominicans struggle, I think, more. But now we’re left in our time where almost all of these orders are somewhat defective because there’s been, like, a structural break.

And maybe we start to see a revival of that because we’re far away from that against authority, because we’re, perhaps, we’re crazy. We don’t know how to tend to ourselves. And I think that you see that in society, this tendency for the youth to want to go to a Marxist or a socialist-type governance, right? Because they know that they’re running wild. They know that they need structure, and they’re going to pull it down upon their heads.

So maybe I’m extrapolating a little too far, but I do think that there is something in that where you’re seeing that lack of orderliness, or just depth that seems to be roots. I think we’re really missing roots, is what it comes down to.

Show Note: Religious Orders

A clarification to the on-air conversation: the Catholic Church has many religious orders; the list mentioned in conversation was not exhaustive. Historic religious orders include the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, Carthusians, Benedictines, Augustinians, and others. The Capuchins belong to the Franciscan family and are formally the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin.³

Questions for Journaling

1. What would a deeper life with God look like within the vocation and responsibilities you already have?
2. Where is the cell in your actual day: the place or hour where you can belong to Christ without leaving your vocation?
3. Who are the two or three people with whom you can keep a simple rule, and who is allowed to tell you no?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, you called Catherine to a life holy to you while remaining in the world. Teach us a belonging that does not flee the rhythms we already live in. Give us an inner self, faithful companions, and the humility to keep a rule we can actually carry.

Saint Catherine of Siena, pray for us. Saint Dominic, pray for us.

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

Closing prayer composed for this episode, inspired by the life and witness of St. Catherine of Siena. It is not attributed to St. Catherine.⁴

Notes

1. Sigrid Undset, Catherine of Siena, trans. Kate Austin-Lund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 26–30, 54; Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, Dominican Penitent Women (Paulist Press, 2005). The Mantellate are described first in their own historical setting; later Third Order language names the tradition that developed afterward.
2. Undset, Catherine of Siena, 30–35, 37; Blessed Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns, O.P. The episode does not assign a fixed year to the dream of St. Dominic.
3. The on-air list of religious orders was an illustrative, off-the-cuff list, not an exhaustive enumeration. The Capuchin Friars’ own constitutions identify St. Francis as their founder, describe the Capuchin form of life as flowing from the Franciscan tradition, and refer to the wider Franciscan family. The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin was approved in 1528.
4. Closing prayer composed for this episode, inspired by the life and witness of St. Catherine of Siena. It is not attributed to St. Catherine.