This Tuesday, April 29, the Church celebrates the Memorial of Saint Catherine of Siena — Virgin, Doctor of the Church, and one of the most astonishing figures in Catholic history. I have been thinking about her this week and wanting to share her with you.
Catherine Benincasa was born in 1347 as the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children to a wool dyer in Siena. From the time she was a small child, God was pulling at her heart. At six years old, she had a vision of Christ enthroned in glory, and she quietly made a vow: her whole life would belong to Him alone. Her family had other plans. They pressed her to marry, as any good family would for a daughter of her time. She resisted — fasting, praying, cutting her hair short to be less attractive to suitors. Eventually, her parents relented. At sixteen, she joined the Third Order of Saint Dominic.
For years, almost no one knew what God was doing in her. She lived largely in seclusion, in a small room, in deep prayer. She seemed unremarkable to the world. Then, around the age of twenty-one, she heard Christ say to her: "I have placed you in the midst of your brothers, so that you can do for them what you cannot do for Me." And everything changed.
She began serving the sick and the dying — including plague victims whom others feared to touch. She gathered disciples. She wrote nearly four hundred letters to popes, cardinals, kings, and commoners. She dictated her spiritual masterpiece, *The Dialogue*, in five days of ecstasy. She traveled to Avignon and confronted Pope Gregory XI face to face, urging him — sometimes sharply — to return the papacy to Rome. He listened. He went. She was thirty years old.
She died at thirty-three, worn out by fasting, penance, and tireless service to the Church she loved.
In 1970, Pope Saint Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church — one of the first two women ever to receive that honor, alongside Saint Teresa of Ávila.
St. Catherine was an amazing woman — the miracles, the letters, the popes who listened, the Church she helped restore. But behind all of it was a woman alone in a small room learning to hear God. The years in that small room were not wasted — they were the foundation for everything that came after. She could speak with authority because she had first learned to listen in silence.
Saint Catherine's most famous words seem made for this moment: "Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire." And sometimes that fire looks like an ember — small, quiet, and sustaining, warming the one person standing closest to you in the cold.
May begins on Friday, and with it the Church enters the month she has always set apart for Our Lady. It is no small thing that Catherine was a daughter of Mary in a deeply personal way. In a vision granted to her in prayer, it was Mary herself who took Catherine's hand and placed it in the hand of her Son. Mary was present at the very moment Catherine gave herself entirely to Christ. Her espousal to Christ calls to mind one of my favorite saints, St. Gemma Galgani, whose feast day is upcoming May 16th. Both women had an intimate relationship with Christ and his wounds and both bore the stigmata — Catherine invisibly and Gemma visibly.
That is what Our Mother does. She brings us to Jesus. Mary still performs this service in your life, in your formation, in every grace that has led you to where you are today. As May begins, I encourage you to let her walk closely beside you. Pray your Rosary slowly this month with me. Ask her to do for you what she did for Catherine — to take your hand and place it in her Son's, as you are commissioned to a life of service and a journey to more fully know God.
I am praying for you this week and during Eucharistic Adoration every Thursday, asking Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Gemma, and Our Blessed Mother to intercede for your formation and your steadfastness.
*Robert Trimble, MD*
Vocations Committee — St. Peter Prince of the Apostles