Badass Monastics: Catherine of Siena

Catherine is born as the first wave of what we now call the Black Death is sweeping across Europe and into North Africa from Asian trade routes. Fuel is added to this season of sickness by poverty, war, and famine. Modern scientists and scholars may have even pointed to a moment of climate change. When Catherine and her twin are born, her mother had already birthed 22 children. A lifetime of pregnancy and in the midst of waiting for birth, her family has witnessed the death of half of its children. Their loss is not unusual or extraordinary. It is a grim time in history and Angola di Tura of Siena writes a year after her birth in 1348.

“Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices ... great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night ... And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug ... And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

In this grim world, Catherine is a bright spot. Her parents are laborers in the art of wool dying and her mother might be poetic. When they see Catherine’s broad and easy smile and joyful presence, they name her “little gayety.” Her father delights in her giving food and such to folks that need it around her, and folks who write about her tell stories of how she, as a child, imagines a monastic life over the life of a princess. At seven, putting bread under her arm and heading out to find a cave to be a hermit. Apparently this little one marching out of the city gate to the nearby hillsides doesn’t stay there forever. She dreams of a monastic life, even as she is vibrant and young and beautiful. Her long blonde hair was rare in northern Italy and, even through Barbie dolls were 500+ years away, somehow in the 14th century, long blonde locks were the height of beauty. Catherine may be flirting with life in the church, but her mother wants her to marry. In fact, eventually she wants her to marry her sister’s widower. Catherine watches her beloved older sister die in childbirth and, if she was on the fence before, she is no longer. She wants a life of celibacy and a life of a monastic. She refuses to marry and, to prove her point, she cuts off her beautiful hair and begins to cover her head like a monastic. At long last, her family gives up on containing her call and she dives into her adventure. 

She joins a community of laywomen, the Mantellates, most of whom are the age of her grandma. They seem unsure  of what to do with this young, beautiful woman and they are not the only ones. She has ecstatic experiences of God; she shares what she hears and her wild visions and she attracts a crowd (and perhaps some concern). She chats with everyone, including priests, monks, and a woman who works as a prostitute. Some folks delight in these moments and interactions; they remember them and are changed by them: like one young, wealthy man who commits to fidelity to his wife and a cleric who said he had theology, but not the spirit. Catherine is drawing attention and folks are getting nervous because they can’t manage her voice. Leaders resort to the easiest way to discredit her integrity: stop her progress and silence her. They call her a “slut” (well, that’s not the exact word they use, but it’s the one we use today when we do the same thing). They accuse her of having sex with the priests and the monks, rather than believing that they find her a worthy theological conversation partner. They say she is faking her experiences of God. They ban her from communion and push her from the church. Even the people she helped with food and clothing fail to support her in public. But she will not stop. She submits to an invasive vaginal exam to prove her innocence and eventually the community that feared her, embraces her. 

By 20, she has formed a famiglia - a community that supports her - and it is a wildly diverse community: lay and clergy, monks and bankers, wealthy ladies and folks in poverty are all around her and they all call her “Sweet Mother.” At 27, her community will be recognized and she will be named its leader by the Dominican order. These folks flocked to her radiant energy long before the full approval of the church. She had a faith based in visions and static experiences. She preached from her learnings that God was the sea and we like the fish. She called God a fool for love; for loving such imperfect creatures, prone to such inhumanity at times. She preached in conversation, “What is my nature, you unfathomable love?” She asked God and then she answered for God to preach for us, “It is fire, because you yourself are nothing but a fire of love. God was fire of love and she spoke of herself as blood and fire. She struggles with severe mental health, which I imagine in a world of plague, war, and poverty she can not be alone in this struggle and trauma. She takes this heartbreak to God and envisions Christ with her; with her in a vision of divine marriage and ring of skin only she could see. She writes to Christ: “ My Lord, where were you when my whole life was filled with horrors?” And she answers for him, “I was in your heart.” She envisions Christ in her heart quite literally as she has a vision of Christ placing his heart within her chest and a dialogue that calls her to action. “You shouldn’t be useful only to yourself, but to others as well, and for that I, too give you my grace. But I don’t send you away from me - on the contrary, love for people will bind you still more solely to me.” 

Her faith draws her from prayer to service, with deep care for those in poverty and those in hospitals. She says, you can’t pray for peace and ignore the sounds of war. So she gets political. She writes 380 letters and she isn’t even literate until later in life. She is the daughter of a laborer and reading is a privilege in her world. So she dictates letters to people across Europe and biographers will write of how she could dictate a letter with brilliant arguments, vivid Tuscan poetic images, and sound theology - all without a pause or a reminder if she already said this or that. She writes shoemakers and Popes with the same direct spirit. Her faith teaches her that everyone is small and no one is too important or too powerful for her to write. She writes the Pope and, rather than addressing him with some high title or even Mr. Pope or just Gregory, she calls him “My Sweet Daddy.” It may not mean the same thing as it does today, but there is something badass about a wool dyer’s illiterate daughter writing the most powerful man in the world and assuming they have a relationship that he should tend to and care about. She calls him “My Sweet Daddy” but her letters are never very sweet. She does not hem and haw on the fence about “oh, you are so amazing and it would be so nice if you would consider the possibility of maybe doing this thing that would help a few people, and of course, they would think you are amazing.” She lays it all out, she calls him the name of family and then tells him to stop being a “fearful baby, be a man.” She writes “The reform of the church is the most urgent and important task” and when she writes this, it means a reform of church and state for the betterment of the most vulnerable. She names selfishness as the cause of the desolate condition for the church and states that “wretched selfishness has poisoned the whole world and the mystical body of Christ.” She calls the clerics “Parasites and bloodsuckers of the soul” that “blather away in unbridled vanity and are only after the good life.” She writes, “You are not aromatic flowers, but the stench that contaminates the whole world.” She quips that church leaders are blades of straw rather than pillars of the church, that the bishops are bloated with pride and she chides priests for dealing ruthlessly with their fellow man and woman while filling their bellies and decorating their rooms. The whole world is struggling with poverty. Violence and greed and ego are at the root and she is biased the way Jesus is biased: for the poor and vulnerable. She is direct at every turn and, even when the Pope makes changes, she wants more. Sometimes leaders will attempt to use her voice for their agenda, but her agenda will always be the poor of Europe. She will be disappointed even when she wrote, “Do Not Disappoint Me” and she will feel surrounded by a world of Pilates referencing Jesus’ crucifixion when all of these men fail over and over to let go of power and make real change in the world. We read her today, a peasant girl with a sharp voice, and stand amazed that she is invited to high places to speak her mind even more directly against war, violence and greed. 

I love hearing her call powerful people out.  Perhaps you do, as well. Perhaps we can all take courage in our history as Christians when we follow in their path and remind our own leaders to stop “blathering away in unbridled vanity;” to stop being fearful babies. I believe this is a gift she offers us but, even as a Saint, she is not perfect. She will advocate for the Crusades, one of the most vile moments in Christian history. She, in a sense, does this to draw the warring practices of European leaders away from one another and to focus together on a new mission of Jerusalem under Christian rule. It’s an ugly vision (at least for us today) and I think it is a sign of how deep the violence seeps into us when it is all around us. She also has a theology that is hard on the body; her body in particular. Ascesticism is not new in the 14th century and I believe her practices are the culmination of a theology that emerges with the Church fathers about 1000 years before her birth; a theology that struggles with the body and sees the spirit as not only separate, but preferred. This drive to control the body (or even punish rather than celebrate it) means that her zeal for fasting will lead to starving herself; at some points in her life only eating communion. She will whip herself, sometimes even with chains. These are not practices I can understand or encourage. I think they speak to the harsh world in which folks are living - where life is often bleak and life has little value. So like all humans, there are gifts and there are learnings that teach us a lesson for our time even if we do not follow it exactly. We can take her deep faith, her commitment to justice, her courage to call for the truth and even her bright smile, but we don’t have to hold people as perfect, even Saints. We can love her fire and leave her theology of “Holy Hatred” of her self behind. 

I leave you with this final invitation to her voice. It is a bit modified quote that I think we can understand her hopes of what reform of self and the world might mean for us today. “When people overcome their own ego and they rejoice over every kind of person they meet, varieties please them better than the uniformity of the sort of people who would all go the same way. And God’s greatness is much more readily visible this way.” 

May we have the courage to speak up, to not listen to the world when it tries to put us in our place, and may we have the relentless fire of God’s great love sparked within when we need it most. May it be so. Amen. 

P.S. Interested in reading more? Well, you can Google her, the Black Death, and you may love God’s Gentle Rebels by Christian Feldmann. There are history text books that have a bit of footnotes and at least give a sense of the context, but Feldmann is a good story teller and fun to read. Thanks to Rev. Dr. Jane Florence for introducing me to her [Catherine of Siena] and even once comparing me to her, though I would never cut my hair.