April 29 -- Feast of Saint Catherine of Siena

Catherine, who lived from 1347 to 1380, was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.  She and Teresa of Avila were the first women to be called Doctors of the Church, a title that had been used by the Roman Catholic establishment since 1298.  Coincidentally, if you type "Pope Paul VI heretic" into the Youtube,  you'll find lots of video mud thrown on his pallium.

Please don't call me Giovanna
But back to Catherine.  She was not average, even as a little girl.  To begin with, she was the twenty-third of twenty-five children born to Lapa Paigenti and her husband, Giacomo di Benincasa.  I figure she was twenty-third and her twin sister Giovanna was twenty-fourth because Lapa nursed her and Giovanna got the wetnurse.  Giovanna didn't make it, but neither did eleven of the previous kids.  A twenty-fifth, also named Giovanna, was born later and also died young.

If Catherine becomes her brother-in-law's wife, is she her own sister-in-law? 

I can't marry him -- I already married Jesus. 

The family was prosperous from Giacomo's cloth-dying business.  Catherine's marriage prospects would have been good if she had not met Jesus (in a vision) at age six and dedicated her virginity to him by age seven.  Well, actually they weren't stellar marriage prospects because her parents' first thought was to marry her to her older sister's widower.  In response, she went on a hunger strike, a tactic her late sister had employed to persuade her husband to be less boorish.  She also chopped off her hair.  Her parents caved, probably after the would-be groom bailed. 

Don't go to Casablanca for the waters, but don't bother with Bagno Vignoni either. 
Catherine sought the religious life but Lapa was still hoping for a wedding.  When Catherine broke out in hives and rashes, Lapa took her to a spa, hoping the curative waters would help.  At least one source indicated that Catherine disfigured herself with the scalding water to reduce the prospects of marriage further, but I haven't read Raymond of Capua's Vita of her to confirm that.  Anyway, when the waters didn't help, Catherine repeated her plea to become a Dominican tertiary and her mom relented.  The Dominican tertiaries weren't thrilled, however.  Prior to Catherine, that order had been reserved for widows.  Now there was a teen-age virgin who was getting the black and white habit?!  But the friars overruled them, she was accepted in the Order, her skin cleared up, and her literacy instruction began.

C. in Siena

Please Mr. Postman

It's a good thing that she learned to read and write, since he was a voluminous correspondent for the rest of her life.  She wrote to Blessed Raymond, who became her spiritual director and then biographer, and to Popes Gregory XI and Urban VI, to kings and queens all over Europe, and even to the English mercenary soldier John Hawkwood.  She also wrote The Dialogue of Divine Providence, a conversation between a risen soul and God.


Career in Brief 
Making God a character in your literature was an audacious thing for anyone to do in the fourteenth century, let alone a woman author doing it.  But if you've already been called in and cleared on heresy charges, and if you've been a Florentine ambassador to the Pope and tried to negotiate an end to the Schism, and if you've lived in Rome at the insistence of the Pope so you can help him keep the nobles in line, I guess you're safe. 


Getting A-head in Siena 

Thumbs up for Catherine. 

After Catherine died, the hometown crowd wanted some relics, but the body was in Rome and the Vatican boys played rough.  Team Siena knew they'd never get the whole body across the bridge and down the Via Aurelia, so they just snatched the head.  And a thumb.  They were stopped at the gate by guards who searched their stuff, but the bag seemed to only hold rose petals.  They went on down the road and by the time they got to Siena, the head and thumb were back in the bag.  They are displayed there today, but the rest of the body (minus a foot) is still in Rome.  Venice got a foot -- no knowing how, but there it is.  I guess if you're the patron of Italy, you should probably have one foot in Venice and another in Rome.


Oh, and the miracles
It is a testament to all that she accomplished that things like receiving communion from Jesus himself, surviving on nothing but communion wafers, and having five wounds of stigmata are an afterthought rather than the bulk of this post.  But yeah, there's all the miracles too.