Faith Filled Friday: My St. Catherine of Siena Statue

I wonder if this could count as a miracle.  It’s certainly wondrous and remarkable.  Every so often I enjoy surfing through the St. Dominic Store.  To quote their website it’s a “religious goods online store associated with the Lay Provincial Council of the Lay Fraternities of St. Dominic of the Holy Name of Jesus (Western) Province of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans); and, St. Dominic's Store is affiliated with the Third Order of St. Dominic.”    Simply put it’s a gift shop of the Lay Dominicans of the western province of the United States.  A little over a week ago I came across a twelve inch high statue of St. Catherine of Siena.  My heart leaped, and it was only $37 dollars! 

It was beautiful, made in Italy of paste marble (whatever that is) and hand painted.  Everyone here knows my love for everything Santa Catarina.  I’ve always wanted such a statue and never found one to my liking.  This looked perfect.  Of course I ordered it, along with a couple of small items, just to make the order worth it.  But the statue was the key.

In the week that it took to get to me, I got antsy and wanted to see the statue again.  I returned to the website.  I couldn’t find it.  I went through every category, “Statues,” “St. Catherine,” “Dominican Items,” nothing, not there.  Huh?  Where did it go?  Did I buy the last one?  If so it would say sold out or something like that.  If anyone can find it there, please send me the link.

So this got me motivated to look for this statue elsewhere.  Did it really exist?  I checked Amazon.  No not there.  I did a search under religious statues, and I could not find it.  Finally I did find the very statue at a website for the gift shop at the Basilica Caterina in Siena, Italy.  It was the very one: “STATUE OF SAINT CATHERINE. CROWN OF THORNS SIZE 41”  They sold it for 58 Euros.  I quickly looked up the conversion of Euros to dollars, and it translates to about $70.  So I got it for half the price and didn’t need to pay shipping costs from Italy.  Wow!

This is all very strange and certainly divinely sent.  Thank you God.  Thank you St. Catherine.

So once it arrived I took some pictures to show you.  First the entire length.

 

Next, mid body up. 

 

The book she is holding indicates she is a Doctor of the Church and the lilies that she was a life-long virgin.

 

The base says “Santa Caterina.”  Of course you realize that’s Italian for “St. Catherine.” 

From the back.

 

The halo has a crown of thorns around it.  Finally some close ups of her face.

 

Isn’t she beautiful?  What a wonderful sacramental this will make.  I still can’t find it on the St. Dominic Store website.  This was heaven sent.

Lent and What Jesus Saw from the Cross

I want to introduce one of my Lenten reads for this year.  Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.  I hope you got your ashes across your forehead today.  You don’t have to be Catholic to receive ashes from a Catholic church.  Ashes are not a sacrament but a sacramental, and so anyone can receive them.  What’s a sacramental?  According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “sacramentals are sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments” but “do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1667-1670).  That’s rather theological, so let’s just summarize it as an action or outward sign that helps you get closer to God.  Ash Wednesday is a reminder that one is dust (“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return") and a calling to repent (“Repent, and believe in the Gospel"). 

So this starts Lent where one is called to self-denial, penance, increased prayer, and alms giving.  This Lent I’m giving up the usual deserts and snacks and alcoholic beverages.  Someone also suggested one give up buying all “wants” and make purchases only of necessities.  I thought that was a brilliant self-denial, and so this year I will limit purchasing things only to things that are basic needs.  That’s going to be hard to do with limiting myself from buying books, but it will be a good test.

During Lent I increase devotional and spiritual reads, and a few weeks ago I mentioned I was going to read Compassionate Blood by Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P. on meditations of Christ’s passion through the words of St. Catherine of Siena.  Now that’s a relatively short read.  A lengthier read is going to be What Jesus Saw from the Cross, published in 1930 by the French Dominican Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P. 

The book is basically just what the title implies, a meditation on what Jesus saw looking out while hanging on the cross.  It’s objective is stated in the Prologue:

St. Paul exhorts us to “to on Jesus Christ, and in his words, understood in the spiritual sense in which he intended them, are of immeasurable importance.  However, there is perhaps another sense in which it is not impossible, nor without importance, to put on Jesus Christ.

We may put on Christ in imagination, placing ourselves not at the foot of the cross, nor before it, but upon it, with head bowed beneath the inscription, wearing the crown of thorns, pierced by the nails, feeling the cold, rough wood between our shoulders.  In short, we can make our own the sphere of vision and the emotions that were His, seeing with His eyes and feeling with His heart, remembering, judging, and foreseeing with Him so that, still in this same sense of imaging that we have changed places with Him, it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us.

It was in Jerusalem that this thought came to me, while I stood (as I frequently did) on a spot which is uniquely suggestive of such reflections.

Now that’s enticing.  Then I read the first chapter, “The View from the Cross,” and it blew me away.  Here’s a sample:

Having established the site of Calvary and described the Cross, the question still remains, in what direction was the Sufferer facing?  There are mystical authors who orient the Cross to the west—that is to say, they “disorient” it.  Their idea is that the look which regenerates is turned toward us, Israel and the Old Law being forsaken.  This theory, besides being a priori and not free from partiality, finds no confirmation in the situation of Calvary.

As you pass out of the Gate of Ephraim you are facing Mount Gareb, of which Calvary is a small foothill: to turn the gibbet to the west would be to make it face the hills and to hide it from the people.  The idlers of the gate and the loiterers of the esplanade, the passerby who met in great numbers at the crossroads, the folk that clustered everywhere about, the dwellers in the tents set up in the open air for the feast, all these would have been foiled.  The public example made of the victim would have been thwarted; furthermore, the erection of the gibbet and the management of the execution would have been made difficult.  In every way, it would have been a bad arrangement.

No, Jesus faced the gate by which He had come forth, through which came His insulters and those who were greedy for a spectacle.  He offered Himself to those who hated and mocked Him.  He lent Himself to the convenience of His executioners. 

And, if reasons of appropriateness must be added, the new Man looked toward the beginnings, toward the end of the earth from which came civilization together with the light.  He faced as the apse of a church faces, having before His eyes the rampart of a world beyond which He had passed, although He had not forsaken it.  His final glance saluted the Temple, His Father’s house, and the rising sun.

That is excellent prose.  I assume the original French was just as finely written.  For some reason the book doesn’t list the translator, but it does say it was translated in 1948.  A great subject, outstanding writing, intense spirituality, profound meditation, all through the thoughts of a Dominican friar—this is going to be a great read.  I’ll try to post again as I get deeper into the book.