Background
She was born in 1347, the last of the twenty-six children of a family of wool dyers called Benincasa.
She was born in 1347, the last of the twenty-six children of a family of wool dyers called Benincasa.
After an unusual childhood during which she experienced visions, Catherine became a Dominican tertiary at the age of sixteen. This gave her a half-religious and half-lay status, and for the remainder of her short, mystical, and penitential life she saw her spiritual vocation to be active work for the reformation of the Church and the promotion of peace in divided Italy. Her extraordinary charm and unusual strength of mind attracted to her a following of many men and women of birth, intelligence, and importance, including Blessed Raymond of Capua, her biographer, who was to become master-general of the Dominicans.
Her devotion to the papacy was absolute, and it was in the course of trying to establish peace among warring Italian factions that she succeeded in her most daring venture--persuading the seventh of the Avignon popes, Gregory XI (whom she familiarly called her "sweet Babbo"), to return to Rome. But a year later, in 1378, the Great Schism started with the election of Urban VI, Gregory's successor, and brokenhearted, Catherine strove until the end of her life to defend the Urbanite cause against the antipope, Clement VII.
Even more remarkable than her life as a lone and illiterate woman were her reported mystical experiences, which included her spiritual espousals, her "spiritual death," and the stigmata that, at her own request, remained invisible.
Nearly four hundred of her letters to potentates, prelates, and lesser folk have survived; she dictated all of them, as she could not write. However, her greatest composition was the Dialogue, or "Book of the Divine Doctrine," formulated as a conversation between God and herself in a state of ecstasy. She holds a high place in Italian literature.
Always frail and ailing, she devoted her last years in Rome, with greater intensity than ever before, to prayer and penance.