Episode VI: Why Catherine Now? From Admiration to Imitation

Why Catherine Now?

We did not come this far to collect a saint. Catherine is easy to admire at a distance. We have met the girl in her father’s house and the woman who learned to carry an interior cell into the world. We have met the Mantellate, the Bridegroom, the Church she could rebuke without despising, and the Dialogue, where she thinks in pictures and gives us Christ as the Bridge. Admiration can leave all of that safely on a shelf. The question at the end of the series is what happens when admiration becomes imitation.¹

I have lived with Catherine for a long time as a patroness. I have lived with the Dialogue. I made a Jubilee pilgrimage to Siena in 2000, and later Sigrid Undset made me see the woman again. What I cannot do is turn Catherine into a mascot for work I already intended to do. Fides et Ratio is not the Mantellate. A reparation prayer group is not San Domenico. If her life only baptizes what I already intended, I have not met her. I have used her.²

So the question became simpler. After meeting the woman, what does it mean to imitate her without copying her chain, her century, or an office she never held? When people say they love a saint, what do they usually mean? What would that love have to become if it were going to cost something, perhaps this week?

The Spiritual Family Resemblance

Sara began with the meaning of love itself: to love is to will the good. We cannot will some further good for a saint who already enjoys the beatific vision, so the question turns back toward us. What did Catherine love? What mattered to her? If we call ourselves her spiritual children, where is the family resemblance? Natural children carry something of their parents in their faces, their eyes, their gestures. Spiritual children should carry something too. Perhaps it is love for the poor. Perhaps it is the courage to speak to authority with charity. Perhaps it is suffering quietly for another person. The spiritual genes, as Sara put it, ought somehow to make their way through us.

That resemblance cannot come from collecting quotations or keeping a saint at the level of an idea. It comes from relationship. The more we know Catherine through her life, her letters, her prayer, and her own thought, the more clearly we remember that she is not a fictional person on a page. She is a canonized saint who sees Christ. The Communion of Saints means that she is not merely available to us through literature. We may ask her help. We may ask her to teach us how to know Christ more deeply. Sara’s point was wonderfully simple: if Catherine is truly a friend, we have to give her time.

The Traveling Cell

One of the things I kept returning to was Catherine’s traveling cell. She learned to carry that interior place with Christ wherever she went. She did not have to leave the world, abandon the people around her, or divide herself between Christ and the vocation already in her hands. The cell traveled with her.

Sara said that reading Catherine made her aware of the instability of her own intellectual life. What struck her was that Catherine, from such a young age, possessed this profound interior recollection. And that brought us to something very practical. How do we do that? How do we remain recollected when we are not in a chapel, when the door is being knocked on, when dinner has to be made, when the people God has given us actually need us?

It is not compartmentalization. Catherine was not spiritually in one place while giving only part of herself to her family. We began talking instead about the mystery that when we give something to Christ, we do not thereby take something away from someone else. Christ can take what we give Him and make us more present, not less present, to the people He has given us.

That made me think of Brother Lawrence. He was given the ordinary work that had to be done, and yet he learned the presence of God there. Catherine was not in a convent either. She did not have to withdraw from ordinary life in order to find Christ. She carried the cell with her.

And that is part of why Catherine matters in 2026. The question is not how to reproduce her fourteenth-century life. The question is how to keep that recollection now, in the life we actually have.

1. Keep a traveling cell.
2. Imitation means becoming faithful in the rooms we already have and walking the Bridge toward the Father with the people God has actually given us.

Sara stopped me there and asked me to read that sentence again. I did. That is where admiration begins to become imitation.

The Rooms We Already Have

The series has already given us the pattern. Catherine stayed when staying was required. She told the truth without making contempt a virtue. She did not teach us to manufacture suffering, and her life warns us against confusing severity with holiness. She carried an inner cell into the world. She understood that sin touches the neighbor, and that what we receive from God is not simply ours to keep.⁴

That is why Catherine remains relevant. The temptations have not aged. We can leave when fidelity asks us to stay, or remain silent and call the silence fidelity. We can treat the body as an enemy, or treat holiness as comfort. We can collect Doctors of the Church without ever opening the door through which they are trying to lead us.

That sentence gathers the point of the series. It is not resignation in the sense of giving up. It is the acceptance of the place, the people, and the duties through which God is already asking us to become holy. We do not need Catherine’s century. We do not need her chain. We do not need an office she never held. We need the fidelity with which she answered Christ where He actually found her.

Questions for Journaling

1. After these episodes, which part of the pattern is yours to keep this month: stay, speak, refuse a false cross, keep an inner cell, or give the neighbor what love requires?
2. Where have you been admiring Catherine from a safe distance?
3. What is one concrete act, small enough to do this week, that would count as imitation rather than collection?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, Bridge who joins heaven and earth, you called Catherine in the rooms of her father’s house and sent her toward your Bride without letting her despise that Bride. Teach us to imitate her by staying, by telling the truth without contempt, and by loving the people you have already placed in our hands. Save us from collecting saints. Make us faithful.

Saint Catherine of Siena, pray for us.

In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. 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.

Notes and Sources

1. This final episode gathers the series’ own formulations rather than attributing them to Catherine. The governing movement is from admiration to imitation: staying faithfully, speaking truth without contempt, refusing to manufacture a cross, keeping an interior cell, and giving the neighbor what love requires.
2. Personal witness: Catherine as patroness; The Dialogue; Jubilee pilgrimage to Siena in 2000; relics at San Domenico; later encounter with Sigrid Undset, Catherine of Siena, trans. Kate Austin-Lund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). Fides et Ratio and the Eucharistic Sacred Heart of Jesus Reparation Prayer Group are named here by distinction, not equated with Catherine’s Mantellate or San Domenico.
3. For Catherine’s interior cell and her remaining in the world, see Undset, Catherine of Siena, 25–30, 39, 53–54, and Episode II of this series.
4. For the series pattern gathered here: household staying, Undset, 19–25, 28–29, 51–54; Catherine’s fidelity to the Church amid crisis, Warren H. Carroll, The Glory of Christendom, vol. 3 (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1993), 418–424, and Undset, 117, 139; austerities and the warning against manufactured suffering, Undset, 78, and Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns, O.P.; neighbor and the debt of teaching, Suzanne Noffke, O.P., trans., Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue (New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), 35, 41. “Fidelity is not silence. Contempt is not courage,” “Do not manufacture the cross,” and the sandals-dust image are series formulations, not quotations from Catherine.
5. The Bridge image comes from The Dialogue. Noffke identifies chapters 26–87 as “the central and most important part of the whole book”; the section begins on p. 64. The capitalized Bridge in this episode refers to Christ.
6. Closing prayer composed for this episode, inspired by the life and witness of St. Catherine of Siena. It is not attributed to St. Catherine.
7. Cover of Noffke, Dialogue (Paulist): Joseph Trepiccione after a portrait of St. Catherine of Siena by Andrea Vanni. The series featured image is original digital artwork based on that Trepiccione/Vanni likeness; it is neither the fresco nor the Paulist cover.