St. Catherine of Siena: Letter to a Layman

Today, April 29^th, is St. Catherine of Siena’s feast day.  As you may know, she is the patron saint of this blog and my personal patron saint.

The magazine Magnificat has a meditation with today’s Mass readings by St. Catherine for her feast day.  The meditation is an excerpt of one of her letters, one of 380 letters that have survived.  The magazine does not give any details of the letter, so I looked through my volumes of her letters and after an hour of searching I found it!  The letter can be found in Volume 1 of the four volume complete collection of her letters titled, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, translated and annotated by Suzanne Noffke, O. P.  It is a magisterial collection that is a prize in my library.

So the letter is identified as T60, written in the summer of 1375 from Catherine’s stay in Pisa.  The addressee is unidentified and Sister Noffke deduces from the comments in the letter that he is a layman and a parent.  Catherine exhorts him to keep the commandments and embrace the virtues.  Her image two wings is as striking as is the image earlier in the letter of the fountain sprinkling out the blood of Jesus.  Here is the excerpt as published in Magnificat.

 

I long to see you a true servant of Jesus Christ, an observer of his commandments.  No one can have the life of grace who is not the keeper of those commandments….Once we see that of ourselves we are nothing at all, we are completely humbled at the knowledge of what our benefactor has done for us.  We so grow in love when we recognize God’s great goodness at work in us that we would rather die than transgress our dear Creator’s command.  This holy trembling brings us to tremendous love, a love we draw from the fountain of the blood of God’s Son, which was shed for our redemption just to wash away the guilt of sin….

 

I beg you then to make use of these two wings that will help you keep God’s commandments and, once you have managed the commandments, will enable you to fly into everlasting life.  The first wing is hatred and contempt for sin and for selfish self-love, the source of every vice.  The second wing is being the lover of virtue.  Once we see that virtue is essential for us, we love it; we see God wants us to be lovers of virtue and despisers of vice.  Oh how sweet it will be for you to have this virtue!  It frees you from slavery to the devil and gives you liberty, delivers you from death and gives you life, relieves you of darkness and gives you light.  Sin is just the opposite: it leads one into every sort of misery.

 

I beg you, for love of Christ crucified, let your soul’s eye be directed toward God in all that you do.  Oh what great joy and happiness you will feel when the time comes for you to be called by First Truth, knowing you are in company of the virtues, supported by the staff of the most holy cross from which you have learned God’s holy commandments!  And you will hear at the end those sweet words: Come, my blessed son, and possess the kingdom of heaven, because you conscientiously cast aside desire and affection for conformity to the world, and reared and nurtured your family in holy fear of me.  Now I am giving you perfect rest, for I am the one who repays you for all you have suffered for me (cf. Mt 25:34).

She ends with a quote from Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25, where Jesus where Jesus welcomes onto the kingdom those who taken care of the least but improvises her ow theology onto it.  This is so Catherinian.  We do keep the commandments for love of God because God has done so much for us, including the shedding of the blood of His beloved Son.  And the great sin, the sin that leads to all other sins, she identifies as “self-love,” that is, selfishness.  She is just brilliant.

Happy Feast of St. Catherine of Siena.

###

Monday is my Adult Faith Formation class and we’ve been reading Sigrid Undset’s biography of St. Catherine.  I have covered this book extensively here on the blog.  Since Catherine’s feast day fell on a Monday night class, we had a little celebration.  I brought in black and white cookies, the colors of the Dominican Order.  Fr. Eugene, our pastor, had a cake ordered and we had a special writing on top of the cake. 

 

Beloved Catherine, I hope you’re smiling on us.  Pray for us.