A bad time for humanity
St. Catherine of Siena lived in what many thought was for sure the end of the world. The fourteenth century suffered so many “strange and great perils and adversities”. Catherine was born into it, just one-year-old when the plague hit her city, killing half of Siena, while wiping out roughly 30-60% of Europe’s total population. Its disorders cannot be traced to one cause alone, however. They were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision: plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, famine, and schism in the Church. It was violent, tormented, bewildering, and disintegrating; to many, it appeared to be a time of Satan triumphant, “a bad time for humanity.” But the final horseman —“schism in the Church”—may be the deepest tragedy. The Church was supposed to offer the divine medicine for the trauma caused by the other six horsemen. Instead, the medicine cabinet itself had been corrupted and fractured by corporate, mercenary pastors. It is accurate to say, that from a very young age, God was preparing Catherine to not only bear the heartbreak of a church estranged from its moorings but was going to do something about it.
A legacy of reformers
From the Apostolic Age and Early Desert Fathers and Mothers to the reform movements of the 13th century Mendicant orders of Francis and Dominic, leaders and their movements battled against the corruption, wealth, and secular power of the Church. A remnant of the Dominican movement resided in Siena, a capstone church which included a vibrant house of higher education packed with brilliant theologians and massive libraries. As a young woman of 16, and a new recruit to the Dominican tertiary order, Catherine retreated into a space she called her cell for three years, where she began her education with both earthly and spiritual instructors. Her cell was not an escape from the pain of the world; but the factory where the heart of Christ was forged so it could survive the world.
After the three years, she left her cell to become an itinerant servant of the Lord, trained to do street ministry, healing the sick and serving the poor. She was equipped with an education, mentors, and blessed with a community of people who believed in her calling and her capacity. She would become famous for taking on the most repellent conditions, recognizing she had been given a grace to see each person with God’s love. Testimonials include the miraculous.
Catherine learned to read. Still unable to write, she began dictating her abundant cash of letters that would one day be published. The first of this group of letters, comes from this period, written primarily to this band of brothers and sisters to encourage them to stay the course. 400 letters, alongside her masterpiece called “The Dialogue”, and her cache of prayers combined are what qualified her as a Doctor of the Church.
In the Dialogue Catherine writes about “The Five Tears”, detailing what it takes to endure years of carrying grief, rage, despair and contempt. She teaches how it is possible to move past an initial wall of cold, bitter cynicism; through places of feeling abandoned; stretching us to find spiritual consolation where our tears are no longer a sign of weakness – but an active form of spiritual warfare and labor. This instruction comes out of her own tears: from the suffering of her neighbors, from testing, from assignments as an ambassador to bring regional peace to war, and eventually from her call to address the church in its seat of power.
For Catherine, possibly the worst of the calamitous 14th century was the corruption of the church. Rome had become an economic and social disaster, riddled with human debris. Monasteries and convents were decimated by the Plague, and unsuitable candidates replaced the positions abandoned. For these reasons and more, the papal court and all its riches moved to Avignon France, taking its wealth, greed and avarice with it. This period, where the church fled its role as shepherds of the people, in its time of greatest suffering, went to where it could escape and live an indulgent existence in irresponsible opulence. They called it, the Babylonian captivity of the church. Catherine would say “the face of the Church is a beautiful face, but we’re pelting it with fifth; 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.” For seventy years the papacy resided at Avignon. Walking into the lavish Palais des Papes, Catherine’s heart broke in a new way as she witnessed the cold, bureaucratic apathy of the French court. She saw a Pope paralyzed by cowardice and cardinals obsessed with earthly comfort while Italy burned.
