St. Catherine of Siena

April 29 is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), the Dominican tertiary, mystic, and Doctor of the Church. Born Caterina Benincasa, the twenty-fourth child of a Sienese dyer, she entered the Mantellate — the lay Dominican women — at sixteen and lived in her father's house in Siena, in a small cell she had built for herself. There she had the mystical experiences she dictated, in her Dialogue of Divine Providence, to her secretaries, because she never learned to write.

Catherine's life is one of the great political spiritualities of the late Middle Ages. She wrote to Popes Gregory XI and Urban VI, to the Queen of Naples, to the rulers of the Italian city-states; she went to Avignon in 1376 to persuade Gregory XI to return to Rome, and she served as papal envoy to the city-states in the War of the Eight Saints. Her letters — over 380 of them survive — are one of the great literary and spiritual corpora of the 14th century.

Catherine died in Rome in 1380, at the age of thirty-three, after a stroke brought on by her asceticism. Her body lies in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in Rome, and her head is venerated at the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena. She was canonized in 1461 and proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970 — the first woman to receive the title — and co-patron of Europe by John Paul II in 1999. From Siena, where she lived, to Rome, where she died, the April 29 feast is the feast of the doctor of the papacy.