St. Catherine of Siena

Saints are often ahead of their times. Nobody would have guessed that a phrase of St. Catherine's would become six hundred years later, the refrain for a hit song: "Like a bridge over troubled waters." Catherine used this image for Jesus in her famous spiritual testament, the Dialogue, and did not hesitate to apply it to herself. She said her mission was to be a bridge over troubled waters of the fourteenth century Church.

Catherine was born in Italy in 1347, the twenty-fifth and youngest child of Jocopo and Lapa Benincasa. Christ first appeared to her at the age of six; at twelve she cut off her hair to avoid the marriage planned by her parents; and by fifteen she became the first unmarried woman to enter the Third Order of St. Dominic. As one can see, Catherine did many things her way or perhaps it was God's Way.

During the summer of 1370, Catherine experienced a series of visions and heard a divine command to enter the public life of the world. She began correspondence with the princes and republics of Italy and was consulted by papal legates about the affairs of the Church. She is credited in persuading Pope Gregory XI to leave Avignon, in spite of opposition from the French King and some Church leaders, and to return to live in Rome.

After helping bring about peace between the Republic of Florence and the new pope, Catherine returned to Siena where she passed a few months of comparative quiet dictating her Dialogue, the book of her meditations and revelations.

After a prolonged and mysterious illness during which she was paralyzed from the waist down, Catherine died in Rome in 1380 at the age of thirty-three. This great Christian mystic was canonized in 1461 and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

Few women have had a more amazing career than this dyer's daughter who made her way from the bare little room in her parent's home to the palace of the pope at Avignon, braved revolutionary crowds, wrote letters to cardinals and kings, and all through her life preserved her uninterrupted union with God in times perhaps as unsettled as our own.