Retreat With St. Catherine of Siena: Day 2, “Self-Knowledge”

Day 1 was actually a Lenten Retreat with St. Catherine, but since Lent is over and today is St. Catherine’s Feast Day (April 29^th), I am going to call these future posts as Retreats with St. Catherine.

 

What is self-knowledge?  From Marriam-Webster’s Dictionary:

“knowledge or understanding of one's own capabilities, character, feelings, or motivations : self-understanding”

To reach self-knowledge, one needs a fair amount of introspection. 

What exactly are you striving for spiritually when you are seeking self-knowledge?  Knowing one’s capability in shooting basketball foul shots will not exactly lead you to understand your relationship with God. 

Also, related to self-knowledge, but in an inverse way, is self-absorption.  When does meditating on one’s self-understanding cross over into self-absorption?

St. Catherine of Siena has a lot to say on these questions.  From Elizabeth A. Dreyer’s, Living the Truth in Love: A Retreat with Catherine of Siena.

 

From the Introduction:

[Catherine] was certainly no stranger to the lure of selfishness.  She cautions her readers over and over again that the great enemy of the spiritual life is self-preoccupation.  She writes, “Every scandal, hatred, cruelty, and everything unbecoming springs from the root of selfish love” (The Dialogue, Trans. Suzzane Noffke, New York: Paulist Press, p.35).  Terms like “selfish self-centeredness,” “selfish sensuality,” “self-complacency” and “self-opinionatedness” pepper her texts.  (p. 34)

On this second day of retreat, we reflect on the human condition as the great contrast with the reality of God.  We delve into a most basic truth about ourselves—that we are creatures, not the Creator; sinners, not the sinless One.   (p. 34)

Opening Prayer:

Ineffable Creator

…

You are proclaimed

The true font of light and wisdom

And the primal origin

Raised beyond all things.

Pour forth a ray of Your brightness

into the darkened places of my mind;

disperse from my soul

the twofold darkness

into which i was born:

sin and ignorance.

 [The Prayers of Catherine of Siena, Ed. Suzanne Noffke, New York: Pualist Press, 1983, p.82]

 

Spiritual Talk:

Three quotes out of the retreat talk.

Catherine’s works are full of references to self-knowledge and knowledge of God.  Often she places both phrases in the same sentence, since she sees them intimately related to each other.  Perhaps because she spent three years in solitary prayer in her room in her parent’s home, she often refers to the “cell” or the “house” of self-knowledge.  She may also have felt compelled to emphasize the “cell within” to counter her critics, who would have preferred to have her in her cell than traveling about Europe, conversing with popes and princes.  In a letter to her first spiritual director, Tommaso della Fonte, she describes the “cell of the soul” as a well in which there is both earth [our poverty] and living water [the very core of the knowledge of God’s will that we be made holy] (The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena.  Vol 1, Trans. Suzzane Noffke, p. 44).  One comes to know oneself by turning inward in quiet reflection.  She encourages us to enter into the depths of this well, into loving transformation.  (p. 36)

In order to force us to confront our sinfulness with honesty and courage, [Catherine] employs a rather dramatic metaphor.  She compares sin to leprosy (Dialogue, p.180).  Adam’s sin, she says, oozed with deadly pus, until the incarnation effected a cure, draining the pus out of Adam’s sin, leaving only its scar (Dialogue, p.52).  No doubt this imagery was impressed on Catherine’s mind as she went about nursing those who suffered from plague and other diseases.  (p.37)

Catherine’s insistence on self-knowledge bears the mark of her intense personality.  Nowhere is this more visible than in her awareness of her own sinfulness.  In her Prayers, she is constantly juxtaposing her sinfulness and the sinfulness of the world with God’s loving mercy.  The phrase, “I have sinned against the Lord; have mercy on me!” runs like a leitmotif throughout.  In a letter to two of her friends, Catherine writes, “I, Caterina, a useless servant, am in agony with desire as I searched the depths of my soul; I grieve and weep when I see and really understand our foolish apathy, our failure to give our love to God after God has given us such great graces with so much love” (The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena.  Vol 1, Trans. Suzzane Noffke, p. 80).  (p.40-1)

Catherine’s self-knowledge—her sinfulness, her smallness in the face of the Creator, and her sinfulness with respect to God’s purity—leads her to write from the mouth of God the eternal Father spoken to Catherine: "Do you know, daughter, who you are and who I am? If you know these two things you will have beatitude within your grasp.  You are she who is not, and I AM HE WHO IS." (Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Siena, 92).  Knowledge of self for Catherine requires the awareness that one is not God and that God is many things she is not.

For Reflection:

Throughout her Prayers, Catherine repeats over and over again: “I have sinned against the Lord.  Have mercy on me!  Do not look at our sins, all-powerful, compassionate, merciful God.”

Closing Prayer:

“Cancel out our sin today, then,

O true God,

and wash our soul’s face

with your only begotten Son’s blood,

poured out for us,

so that dead to ourselves

and living for him

we may offer him a return for his suffering

with bright face and undivided soul.”

              (Prayers, p. 65)

 

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.

Faith Filled Friday: St. Catherine of Siena’s Letter to the Queen of Naples

Today, April 29^th, is the feast day of St. Catherine of Siena, patron saint of this blog and my personal patron, as many of you know.  In honor of this day I want to go through one of her letters, a letter to Giovanna d’Angiò, also known as Joanna I of Naples, the queen of Naples in Catherine’s day.  This letter is remarkable for several reasons, which I’ll get to. 

First some context.  Suzanne Noffke in her editing of The Letters of Catherine of Siena provides this biographical note about Queen Joanna:

 

GIOVANNA D’ANGIÒ (Jeanne d’Angou): Letters T133, T138, T143, T312, T317, T348, T362.

Great-granddaughter of Charles Martel, she became queen of Naples in 1333, when she was only seven.  She was licentious, violent, and fickle, an opportunist of the first degree.  It was she who had sold Avignon (which she owned as Countess of Provence) to the pope for a nominal sum in 1347 after convincing him of her innocence in the murder of her husband, Andrew of Hungary.  She ruled over the liveliest and most splendid court in the peninsula, and eventually sided with the Clementine cause in the schism of 1378.  Urban VI excommunicated her in 1380 and enthroned Charles of Durazzo in her place. (p. 540, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, Vol 1, 2000)

The “T133, etc” are a numbering scheme of Catherine’s letters, and it shows that Catherine sent seven letters in all to Joanna in her life.  We also see that Joanna was a very worldly woman, experienced in court intrigue going back to her childhood.  She came from a long lineage of famous aristocracy, and was a very powerful woman who had to kill off a husband in order to retain power.  She herself would later be murdered as well.  The letter we are going to examine is T143, and despite the numbering sequence, this is the second letter to Joanna.  The first letter was to ask Joanna to contribute to a crusade that Pope Gregory XI was trying to organize. 

There are six paragraphs to the letter after the heading and introduction, and I’ll number them at the beginning for clarity.  The letter was written on the fourth of August in 1375, before Catherine’s trip to Avignon to convince the Pope to move back the papal court to Rome.  Since her first letter, it seems from the language that Joanna has written back to Catherine.  The letter is also taken from Suzanne Noffke’s The Letters of Catherine of Siena, Volume 1.

 

To Giovanna d’Angiò, Queen of Naples

4 August 1375

 

In the name of Jesus Christ Crucified and of gentle Mary

 

Honorable and dearest mother, milady the queen,

 

(1) Your unworthy servant and the slave of Christ’s servants is writing to you in the precious blood of God’s Son.  I long to see you a true daughter and spouse consecrated to our dear God.  You are called daughter by First Truth because we were created by God and came forth from him.  This is what he said: “Let us make humankind in our image and likeness.”  And his creature was made his spouse when God assumed our human nature.  Oh Jesus, gentlest love, as a sign that you had espoused us you gave us the ring of your most holy and tender flesh at the time of your holy circumcision on the eighth day.  You know my reverend mother, that on the eighth just enough flesh was taken from him to make a circlet of a ring.  To give us a sure hope of payment in full he began by paying this pledge.  And we received the full payment on the wood of the most holy cross, when this Bridegroom, the spotless Lamb, poured out his blood freely from every member and with it washed away the filth and sin of humankind his spouse.

We see in the first paragraph Catherine’s humble diminution of herself, “servant” and “slave”and taking on Christ’s mantle by writing in His “precious blood.”  The blood imagery is of paramount importance to Catherine, and we’ll see it in the body of this letter. Now here’s one of the amazing things of this letter.  Catherine was a twenty-eight year old uneducated woman of no title, and yet she tells the queen “I long to see you a true daughter and spouse consecrated to our dear God.”  Who is Catherine to tell the queen she wants to see her in any manner at all?  We will see this sort of chutzpah throughout the letter. 

Now the italic writing is Noffke’s way of showing Catherine’s spontaneous breaking from addressing the letter’s recipient to addressing Christ in prayer.  “Oh Jesus, gentlest love, as a sign that you had espoused us you gave us the ring of your most holy and tender flesh at the time of your holy circumcision on the eighth day.”  Now here we get the second remarkable thing of this letter, Catherine’s imagery of ring when envisioning the snipped off flesh of Christ’s circumcision, when “on the eighth just enough flesh was taken from him to make a circlet of a ring.”  And then she calls this flesh and loss of blood an initial payment for the final payment of blood He will make on the cross.  Isn’t that unbelievably creative, to see that particular piece of flesh as a ring?  Catherine had poet’s eye for imagery and it spills over in all her writing.  Let’s continue with the letter.

 

(2) Notice that the fire of divine charity gave us a ring not of gold but of his own purest flesh.  This gentlest of fathers celebrated his wedding with us in a feast not of animal flesh but of his own precious body.  This food is Lamb, roasted over the fire of charity on a wood of the sweet cross.  So I beg you most courteously in Christ Jesus to lift up your heart and soul with all your affection, energy, and caring, to love and serve so gentle and dear a Father and Spouse as God, high eternal Truth, who tenderly loved us without being loved.

Here she continued with the ring imagery, the wedding imagery, the crucified Christ imagery, and her exhortation for the queen to be holy. 

 

(3) Let no one then, nor any status or grandeur, any power or other human glory (all of which are empty and vanish like the wind) lure us away from this true love, our soul’s life and glory and happiness.  So will we show that we are faithful spouses.  And when we love no one other than our Creator and desire nothing apart from him, then everything we love and everything we do is for him.  Whatever we see to be outside his will—vice and sin, all injustice and every other wrong—we hate so much that, because of the holy hatred we have conceived against sin, we would sooner die than break faith with our eternal Spouse.  Let us, oh let us be faithful, following in the footsteps of Christ crucified, scorning vice and embracing virtue, undertaking and accomplishing for him every great deed!

Now here’s the third remarkable moment in the letter, telling the queen not to seek status, grandeur, power, or glory!  This is Queen Giovanna d’Angiò she is writing to.  Catherine may not know the queen’s full history, but she must know the queen has a reputation of seeking power.  Or perhaps not.  Now here’s another bit of irony, telling this queen they should be “faithful spouses” of Christ.  Giovanna will be married four times and one of her husbands she had killed off.

 

(4) I want you to know, my reverend lady, that my soul is jubilantly happy after receiving your letter.  It gave me great consolation because, it seems to me, you have a holy and wholesome readiness to give both your possessions and your life for the glory of the name of Christ crucified.  You can show no greater sacrifice or love than to be ready to give even your life, if necessary, for him.  Oh what a great joy it will be to see you giving blood for blood!  May I see the fire of holy desire so growing in you at the resemblance of the blood of God’s Son that you may be leader and patroness of this holy crusade just as you bear the title of the queen of Jerusalem.  Thus the holy place will no longer be held by these evil unbelievers but honorably possessed by Christians, and by you as something of your own.

Now in the fourth paragraph Catherine finally gets to the point of the letter.  She is responding with gratitude in what seems the queen’s letter back from Catherine’s request to contribute to the crusade was in the affirmative.  And then Catherine prays that the queen will be the leader of the crusade to take back what she thinks is Joanna’s rightful title of Queen of Jerusalem.  Now she cannot be alluding to Joanna as another Joan of Arc, who was not born for another 37 years.  But it does seem to give imagery of Joanna off to battle in a suit of armor.  I’ll just provide the last two paragraghs:

 

(5) I want you to know that the holy father wants this very badly.  So I would like you to show your good will (which the Holy Spirit has put into your soul) by sending him word of it to even further increase his desire.  I would like you to ask to make this holy crusade—you in particular, and all the other Christians who might want to join you.  For it would stand up and declare your willingness to do this, and if you put your holy resolution into action, you will find Christians very willing to follow you.  I beg you for love of Christ crucified to be zealous about this.  And I, as far as my weakness allows me, shall pray God’s supreme eternal goodness to give you clear guidance in this and all your good works, and to increase in you desire upon desire.

 

(6) Ablaze with the fire of love may you go forward from your reign in this poor fleeting life to that eternal city of Jerusalem, the vision of peace, where divine mercy will make us all kings and queens, lords and ladies.  There he who in his tender love helps us carry every load will himself reward our every effort.

            Keep living in God’s holy love.

            Jesus!  Jesus!  Jesus!

                                                                                    Done on the fourth day of August.

I love the passion of Catherine’s exhortations.  Unlike the queen she has a simple innocence.  The future letter will not have Catherine speaking so reverently to the queen.  In 1378 the Church experienced the Great Western Schism, and Catherine and the Queen fell on opposite sides of the issue.  Indeed, Queen Joanna would be excommunicated for her support of the schismatic pope.  Catherine would not be pleased with the queen.  I wrote about this later interaction when I discussed Catherine's biography.  

I pray that all who read this receive God’s blessing on St. Catherine’s feast day.

Faith Filled Friday: St. Catherine on Fastening to the Cross

There was a marvelous meditation in the June 2021 Magnificat taken from a letter of St. Catherine of Siena.  The Magnificat editors pull parts of that letter to form this wonderful quote:

 

In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and of gentle Mary.  I Caterina, useless servant of Jesus Christ, send you my greetings.  I long to see us united with and transformed into the gentle pure eternal truth, the truth that rids us of all falsehoods and lies…I shudder at the thought of the devil’s deceptiveness.  My only trust is in God’s goodness.  I do not—I know that I cannot—trust in myself…

 

I am always fearful of my own weakness and the devil’s cleverness.  For I realize that though the devil lost beatitude he did not lose his intelligence—or better, cleverness—I know, as I said, that he could deceive me.  But then I turn to the tree of the most holy cross of Christ crucified; there I lean; there I want to nail myself fast.  I have no doubt that if I am nailed fast with him in love and in deep humility, the devils will have no power over me.  And this is not because of my own power but because of the power of Christ crucified.

 

Keep living God’s holy and tender love.  Gentle Jesus!  Jesus love!  O fire, oh abyss of charity!  You are a fire ever burning but not consuming.  You are filled with gladness, with rejoicing, with gentleness.  To the heart pierced by this arrow, all bitterness seems sweet.  Oh sweet love the feeds and fattens our soul!

 

Yet even though we said it burns without consuming, I say also that it burns and consumes: it dissolves and destroys all sin, all ignorance, all indifference in the soul, for charity is not inactive; no, it does great things.  (Magnificat, June 2021, p. 421-2)

That is such an incredible quote, and the entire letter can be found in Suzanne Noftke’s The Letters of Catherine of Siena: Volume I.  Indeed, I found it and it’s identified as “Letter T92/G305/DT19” for those who understand that numbering scheme, and the letter is addressed to “a religious person in Florence.”  There was no name provided of the addressee but from the contents of Catherine’s letter we can tell she was responding to a religious person, that is, one with religious orders.  Also from the entire content of Catherine’s letter we can see that the religious person has written to her criticizing what he sees as her severe fasting, which he suggests can be at the result of the devil.  The letter is dated as being between “July 1375 to early 1376.”  This would put St. Catherine as being twenty-eight to twenty-nine years old.  She died in 1380.

For those that may not know, St. Catherine did subject herself to severe fasting, especially from her late teens to her early twenties, which in time caused her digestive system to shut down.  And in this letter, which I think is the central intent of the letter, is to explain her situation and that she no longer can hold food down and that she prays for this to change. 

So in the quoted part from Magnificat, we see that in the first stanza, after her typical way of opening a letter, she acknowledges she cannot trust herself.  In the second paragraph she acknowledges that the devil is capable of deceiving her.  But then in that paragraph she identifies what ultimately saves her: “But then I turn to the tree of the most holy cross of Christ crucified; there I lean; there I want to nail myself fast.  I have no doubt that if I am nailed fast with him in love and in deep humility, the devils will have no power over me.  And this is not because of my own power but because of the power of Christ crucified.”

The third paragraph is one of her typical disjointed digressions—but which are so poetic—where she starts speaking to Christ.  Notice that she ends that it is Jesus who “fattens her soul.”  So while addressing the thinning of her physical body, she refers to the fattening of her soul.

She concludes by modifying her metaphor to say that by grasping the cross with crucified Jesus, it consumes sin, ignorance, indifference, and leads her to holy charity.

St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us!

St. Catherine of Siena, Being One with God’s Will

Today, April 29^th is St. Catherine of Siena’s feast day.  She is the patron saint of this blog and one of my personal patron saints.  I try to honor this day every year.

Last year on this date I mentioned acquiring three of the four volumes of her annotated Letters.  Just as last year I want to highlight a particular letter in honor of this day.

Letter T41/G105/DT3, from The Letters of Catherine of Siena, Volume 1, Translated and Annotated by Suzanne Noffke, O.P., Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, Arizona, 2000.

To Frate Tommaso dalla Fonte, in San Quirico.  Noffke dates this letter as before 1374 but possibly 1368, making her 21 years old, and a year after she famously exited her self-imposed cell.  Tommaso is her cousin who as a child came to live at Catherine’s household, and so they grew up as siblings.  Tammaso has become a Dominican friar and priest at the time of this letter, and is living away from Siena in San Quirico.  I’m going to take one key paragraph from this letter which is thick with Catherine’s theology.

Dearest Father, I beg you to fulfill my longing to see you united with and transformed in God.  But this is impossible unless we are one with his will.  Oh sweet eternal will, to have taught us how to discover your holy will!  If we were to ask that gentlest most loving young man and most merciful father, this is how he would answer us: “Dearest children, if you wish to discover and experience the effects of my will, dwell within the cell of your soul.”  This cell is a well in which there is earth as well as water.  In the earth we recognize our own poverty: we see that we are not.  For we are not.  We see that our being is from God.  Oh ineffable blazing charity!  I see next as we discover the earth we get to the living water, the very core of the knowledge of God’s true and gentle will which desires nothing else but that we be made holy.  So let us enter into the depths of that well.  For if we dwell there, we will necessarily come to know both ourselves and God’s goodness.  In recognizing that we are nothing we humble ourselves.  And in humbling ourselves we enter that flaming, consumed heart, opened up like a window without shutters, never to be closed.  As we focus there the eye of the free will God has given us, we see and know that his will has become nothing other than our sanctification.

I am always amazed at how a young uneducated girl could reach such heights of theological reasoning.  I am also amazed at how she as a twenty-one year old has the chutzpah to instruct an educated priest.  First she implores the friar to holiness by uniting his will with that of God.  And then she has a rhetorical flourish by switching perspective and offering advice on how to do so by speaking through the voice of God: “Dearest children, if you wish to discover and experience the effects of my will, dwell within the cell of your soul.”  Here she speaks of her concept of the soul as a “cell” from which you can reach God.  Then she uses the metaphor of a well to explain the cell.  It contains earth, which is our poor humanity, but deeper one reaches a spring of water, where we reach God.  Of course there is the Biblical allusion there of the woman at the well in John’s Gospel. 

There are a couple of other concepts in that short paragraph.  She says in recognizing our poverty in the earth that “we see that we are not.”  Noffke annotates this as an early expression of Catherine’s future, more developed thought that “God is, and we are not.”  It is the realization that God creates us and maintains our existence through His will, and that our will has nothing to do with our existence. 

In realizing this poverty of humanity, we humble ourselves before God.  And in this humility we are able to enter into Christ: “we enter that flaming, consumed heart, opened up like a window without shutters, never to be closed.”  Noffke’s note here is that Catherine is alluding to Christ as the door, taken from a Sermon from St. Augustine of Hippo, “the entrance opened for you when his side was pierced with a lance” (Sermones CCCXI, Chapter III).  Catherine could be alluding to St. Augustine, but I find it hard to believe she read it.  The open hole in Christ’s side is an image she could have picked up anywhere.  Nonetheless, this is a remarkable passage of profound theological insight.

So go deep into the well of your soul and find God’s will.  St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us.

Letters of St. Catherine of Siena: Catherine Extols Mary Magdalene

I recently acquired new three of the four volumes of Suzanne Nofke’s wonderfully edited The Letters of Catherine of Siena at the ridiculously low price of $10 each.  These are each 600 hundred page scholarly, hardcovers for research libraries.  They should easily go ten or twelve times that each.  I have Volumes I, III, and IV.  I am missing Volume II.  Oh I would love to complete the set.  Right now Amazon lists available one used copy of Volume II for $250, and it is only in an “acceptable” condition.  I’m holding out for something more affordable, or at least in better condition.  You can read about Sr. Susan Nofke O.P. and her translation of the letters here.  

In honor of today, St. Catherine of Siena’s feast day—and bear in mind, she’s my patron saint—I want to post something from them.  Here’s is a paragraph from the very first letter, identified as “Letter T61/G183/DT2,” dated “Before May 1374” but one scholar dates this as early as 1365 or 1366.  That would make Catherine eighteen or nineteen years old. 

Some context to the letter.  The letter is addressed to Mona Agnesa Malavolti, a widow and a member of one of the leading families of Siena.  She is also a Montellate, which was a group of Dominican tertiaries which Catherine herself was a member.  The letter’s intent is to bring her order into unison with St. Mary Magdalene, who, as one of the first Resurrection preachers of Christ, holds a special place in the Dominican Order. 

Catherine in her letters has a habit of breaking into dialogue with a saint or God, and so the italicized sections of this paragraph are actually addressing the Blessed Virgin or Magdalene herself.

Oh sweet virgin, how well you imitated that devoted disciple Magdalen.  See, dearest daughters, how Magdalen knew herself, and humbled herself.  With what great love she sat at our gentle Savior’s feet.  And speaking of showing him love, we surely see it at the holy cross.  She wasn’t afraid of the Jews, nor did she fear for herself.  No, like a passionate lover she ran and embraced the cross.  Indeed, in order to see her Master she was bathed in blood.  Surely you were drunk with love, oh Magdalen!  As a sign that she was drunk with love for her Master, she showed it in her actions toward his creatures, when after his holy resurrection she preached in the city of Marseille.  And, I tell you, she had the virtue of perseverance.  You showed this, dearest Magdalen, when you were seeking your beloved Master after not finding him in the place where you had laid him.  So, oh Magdalen, love, you were beside yourself; you had no heart, since it was buried with your dearest Master and our dear Savior.  But you took it upon yourself to find your dear Jesus.  You didn’t give up; you didn’t stop grieving.  How commendably you acted!  For you found out by your persevering you were able to find your Master.

Legend has it that Mary Magdalene, after the Gospel accounts, traveled to southern France (Marseille) to preach and convert.  That’s part of why the Dominican order hold her as one of their patronesses. 

In many ways Magdalene is almost a stand in for Catherine herself here.  She seems to be projecting herself into Magdalene’s situation.  It’s Catherine who is always embracing Christ crucified and his blood.  I am also amazed that a eighteen or nineteen year old girl speaks in this manner to someone above her in experience and station.  My dear Catarina was not shy.

Today, April 29^th, is the feast day of St. Catherine of Siena, my patroness.  Pray for us St. Catherine of Siena.

Faith Filled Friday: The Church Scandals and St. Catherine of Siena, Part 2

Last week I posted my comments on a discussion we had at Catholic Thought book club at Goodreads on the Church abuse scandals and I promised to write on how St. Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of blog, has been mentioned in several articles should be a model for we laity in forcing the issue on our Church leaders.

First let me finish with my comments.

Comment 6

I've commented on categories (a), (b), and (c) I think the last thing I have to comment on is the recent Cardinal Vigano letter (it's 11 pages by the way, not 13) accusing Pope Francis of knowing that Cardinal McCarrick was an abuser and active homosexual and not only not following up with reprimands but undoing the restrictions Pope Benedict XVI had put in place while McCarrick was under investigation.

Technically this falls under criteria (b) of a bishop - this time the Bishop of Rome - knowing about an abuse by an underling. If true, Pope Francis technically should be relieve of his office, but as Pope there is no person that can relieve him of his office or method of relieving him of his office. You cannot force a sitting Pope to abdicate. That is what led to the schism of the 1340s.

I can't seem to find the letter itself in any search. So I have not read it. All I get are articles that reference the letter and quote from it. If anyone knows of a link to the actual letter I would love to see it.

What to do? The allegations seem credible to me. We know for a fact (I think it's a fact) that Pope Francis eased the restrictions on McCarrick, so the dispute is whether the Holy Father knew of McCarrick's abuse.

So there are two possibilities, either he knew or he didn't know. If he didn't know, then no harm done, it was an innocent mistake. If he knew, we have a problem. Pope Francis has refused to answer the allegation. This leads us to suspect he did know.

So here's my opinion on it all. If he didn't know he should come out and say it and put it to rest. If he knew, then I would just let sleeping dogs lie and move on and never address the issue. Pope Francis was not overseeing McCarrick in that kind of detail. It amounts to more administrative bungling. The harm to the Church of having a Pope forced out and perhaps create a schism just when the church has been weakened would be huge and would not justify the maladministration. Pope Francis is 81 years old. He's not going to be there much longer, either from passing away or reaching a point where he can't keep up with the job and feels it's best to retire. Whatever political points some are trying to strike against Pope Francis (and I'm a conservative) are wrongheaded and counter productive.

Comment 7

This is a fascinating read. The author of this takes the Pennsylvania report, crunches the statics, compares it with the historical dat, and draws some insightful conclusions. "The Pennsylvania Report; By the Numbers": 

That last paragraph in my comment six, starting with “So here's my opinion on it all,” took some criticism.  It was written at the end of August with the crises fresh in people’s minds, and it looked for sure that Pope Francis would be compelled to do something or a revolution would take place to force him out.  Well, Pope Francis has done nothing and a revolution hasn’t taken place.  It’s amazing how a leader can change the subject and a raging issue can be mollified.  Pope Francis will not be forced to resign over this as some thought.  However the Church keeps puttering along, never seeming to resolve the issue.

With that, I want to bring in St. Catherine of Siena. 

During the scandal, I came across three separate articles on why we need another St. Catherine of Siena to come along to push the Pope and Bishops toward true reform. 

Over at The Catholic World Report Mary Rezac wrote, “The Siena Option: What one saint did in the face of a troubled Church.”  Rezac gives the background to the situation in Catherine’s day.  It too was filled with corruption and amazingly, homosexuality, and the height of the problem was the Avignon relocation of the papacy.  Rezac quotes Catherine scholar, Fr. Thomas McDermont, O.P..

When St. Catherine talked about the Church, she often referred to it as the Body of Christ, in the tradition of St. Paul, McDermott noted.

“She says the face of the Church is a beautiful face, but we’re pelting it with filth,” he said. “It has a beautiful face, that’s the divine side of the Church, but we human beings are pelting it; we’re disfiguring the body of Christ through our sins.”

Catherine, who was essentially a mystic and a local doer of good deeds, somehow decided to get involved on a global scale.

Catherine was drawn into the Church politics of her time not because of a misplaced sense of ambition, McDermott said, but because she loved the Church as she loved God.

“It wasn’t her motive to be involved in the politics of the Church, but what was best for everyone and for the church led her into politics,” he said. “But it’s not like she was interested in politics itself.”

As part of her attempts at solving the problems of the Church, Catherine joined the call of many other Catholics of the time for the Pope to return to Rome.

After some correspondence, Catherine set out on foot with her followers to go meet with the pope in person.

“It was a remarkable thing for Catherine who was a homebody to take off on foot for France with her disciples, but she was prepared to do anything for the Church because the Church was the Body of Christ,” McDermott said.

After scores of people pleading with the pope to return to Rome between 1309 and 1377, St. Catherine seemed to prove most persuasive.

During her visit, Catherine referenced parts of the pope’s dream, about which he had told no one.

“It was astounding to him (that she knew about the dream) and he took that as a clear sign from God that he was speaking to him through this woman,” McDermott said. So after decades of exile, within a few weeks of Catherine’s visit, the pope packed up his things and headed back to Rome.

Rezac then goes on to speculate how Catherine would handle today’s crises.  She quotes Dr. Karen Scott, a historian of Catholic studies at DePaul University.

“What would she say today? I think that’s a dangerous question,” Scott said, “because we can’t say how she would relate to the current issues and complex questions, except that she would know very well what the moral stance is, that bishops and priests and lay people should all follow.”

Catherine would set the highest of standards for honesty and integrity and pastoral concern for the laity, Scott said, as well as the highest standards “for avoiding schism and being close to the papacy.”

“Beyond that I think she would advise people to take the time to pray and discern and not have knee-jerk reactions to things,” she added.

Another article comes from Msgr Charles Pope’s blog, Community in Mission, titled ‘“This Is All I Can Do Now” – Applying a Practice of St. Catherine of Siena to Our Current Crisis.’ 

Msrg Pope gives a similar background to Catherine’s times, and concludes that with this:

She loved the Church but remained gravely concerned with the condition of the beloved Bride of Christ. Particularly egregious to her was the condition of so many clergy, right on up the ranks. Even the popes of her time, whom she acknowledged as the sweet Vicars of Christ, and her beloved father could not escape her expressions of grave disappointment and her calls to conversion.

The monsignor quotes extensively from St. Catherine’s Letter 74, to [Pope] Gregory XI at Avignon.  Here are a couple of excerpts of the excerpt.  She starts off as she starts a number of her letters:

In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and of gentle Mary, mother of God’s Son.

Very loved and reverend father in Christ Jesus,

I Caterina, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ and your poor wretched unworthy daughter, am writing to you in his precious blood. I long to see you the sort of true gentle shepherd who takes an example from the shepherd Christ, whose place you hold. He laid down his life for his little sheep in spite of our ingratitude …

And she gets to the heart of the issue.

You know that the devil is not cast out by the devil, but by virtue. [Mt. 12, 26-27] … You hold the keys, and to whomever you open it is opened, and to whomever you close it is closed. This is what the good gentle Jesus said to Peter …

So take a lesson from the true Father and Shepherd. For you see that now is the time to give your life for the little sheep who have left the flock. You must seek and win them back by using patience and war—by war I mean by raising the standard of the sweet blazing cross and setting out against the unbelievers. So, you must sleep no longer, but wake up and raise that standard courageously. I am confident that by God’s measureless goodness you will win back the unbelievers and [at the same time] correct the wrongdoing of Christians, because everyone will come running to the fragrance of the cross …

And then comes to her passionate exhortation.

Ah, my dear Babbo (Father), see that you attend to these things! Look for good virtuous men and put them in charge of the little sheep. …

Up, father! Put into effect the resolution you have made concerning your return and this crusade. You can see that the unbelievers are challenging you to this by coming as close as they can to take what is yours. Up, to give your life for Christ! Isn’t our body the only thing we have? Why not give your life a thousand times, if necessary, for God’s honor and the salvation of his creatures? That is what he did, and you, his vicar, ought to be carrying on his work. It is to be expected that as long as you are his vicar you will follow your Lord’s ways and example.

And finally Msgr Pope calls for us lay to follow her example:

Such words still ring true today! We must exhort Pope Francis to hear our cries for investigation and reform. We must speak in love and with respect, but we must also speak insistently and with clarity.

Finally the third article is by Kathryn Jean Lopez writing in Angelus News, titled, “What St. Catherine of Siena would say to today’s bishops.”

Lopez focuses mostly on Catherine’s letters where she finds exhortations to the religious of her day to reform the Church. 

If you’ve ever dipped into the letters of St. Catherine of Siena, you know she is forever encouraging holiness.

She wants people inflamed with “blazing charity” and bathing “in the blood of Christ crucified.” She wants to see people be who God made them to be and she wants his Church seeking to be worthy of her identity as the bride of Christ.

So, she would urge sisters and cardinals and the pope and lay people alike to “keep living in God’s holy and tender love” and go on in some detail about how that might look in their specific lives.

Her letters were written during a time when the Church was in serious trouble. While the Black Death ravaged Europe, the papacy had relocated to Avignon, France, and several of the republics and principalities of Italy, including the Papal States, were at war with one another. Many clergy had fallen into corruption.

Lopez quotes from a letter to Pope Urban VI, who’s election after Pope Gregory XI caused a schism in the church.

“You cannot with a single stroke wipe out all of the sins people in general are committing within the Christian religion, especially within the clerical order, over whom you should be even more watchful. But you certainly can and are obligated to do it, and if you don’t, you would have it on your conscience. At least do what you can. You must cleanse the Church’s womb — that is, see to it that those who surround you closely are wiped clean of filth, and put people there who are attentive to God’s honor and your welfare and the good of holy Church. …”

And she warns:

“Do you know what will happen to you if you don’t set things right by doing what you can? God wants you to reform his bride completely; he doesn’t want her to be leprous any longer. If your holiness does not do all you can about this — because God has appointed you and given you such dignity for no other purposes — God will do it himself by using all sorts of troubles.”

And she quotes from a 1376 letter to an apparently wayward priest.

“Where is the purity of the ministers of God’s Son? Reflect that just as you demand that the chalice you carry to the altar be clean and would reject it if it were dirty, so God, supreme eternal Truth, demands that your soul be pure and clean, without stain of deadly sin, especially the sin of impurity. ... These days we are seeing the exact opposite of the purity God requires! Not only are they not God’s temples carrying the fire of God’s word, but they have become stalls, lodging for pigs and other animals! They carry within the house of their souls the fire of anger, hatred, animosity, and ill will. For they harbor pigs, a filthiness that is incessantly rolling about within them like a pig in the mud. ... How bewildering to see Christ’s anointed ones giving themselves over to such wretchedness and immorality!”

Wow, I can see St. Catherine in writing that in fury.  And she was not shy about speaking similarly to a Cardinal. 

“Shame, shame, on our human pride, our self-complacency, our self-centeredness, when we see how good God has been to us, how many gifts and graces he has given us — and not because he has to but because he wants to! Obtuse as we are, we seem not to see or feel this love so hot that, if we were made of stone, it would long ago have burst us open! ... I can see no other reason except that the eye of our understanding is not on the tree of the cross. For there is revealed such warm love, such gently persuasive teaching filled with life-giving fruits, such generosity that he has torn open his very body, has shed his life’s blood, and with that blood has baptized and bathed us. We can and should make use of that baptism every day with continual remembrance and great love.”

And Lopez concludes her survey of Catherine’s letters by returning to thecurrent scandal.

Reading Catherine’s letters we are reminded we are in this journey — which is about eternity — together.

Reading testimony and accusations against a former cardinal archbishop of one of the most prominent episcopal sees in the United States — one of which involves the first child he ever baptized as a priest — we are all called to urgent duty to prayer and service, including encouraging and insisting on Christ in our daily lives and Church leadership. Anything short of it is not of God.

I’ve only given you the gist of these articles.  Go read them in their entirety.  They show what a pillar of strength St. Catherine of Siena was, and how she would be appalled at today’s crises, and how she is a model for us to force our Church leaders to the right direction.