If I were to give a dinner party for
the most interesting people of all time, of course, Martin and Katy Luther
would be at the head of the table, and on their right hand would be Ezekiel,
Genghis Khan, Darwin, Handel, van Gogh and Dostoevsky. On their left would be
DaVinci, Moses, Zinzindorf and the Magdalene chatting with Steve Martin and St.
John; and to the evangelist’s right, at the other head of the table, he would
be in rapt conversation with Catherine of Sienna, next to her husband Jesus.
I would be the water boy, and
therefore, Catherine’s favorite.
Why is she at my table?
Born in 1347, the 24th
child of Jacopo and Lapa Benincasa’s 25 children, Catherine was by all accounts
an extraordinary child. At seven, she claimed she was engaged to Jesus, and
spent the next 15 years spurning attempts by her parents to become married by
a) refusing to eat and b) cutting off all her hair, a trick she learned from
her sister who died while giving birth.[1]
Finally, her father “who loved her tenderly and who also feared God more than
the others,” [2]
relented and let her become a tertiary of the Dominicans within his own home.
At 21, she was mystically married to Christ, and eventually received the
stigmata (though it was visible only to her.)[3]
There are lots of saints/mystics/nuns
who spurned attempts at marriage and became brides of Christ and while very few
received the blessing of the stigmata, that’s not why she’s at my table.
Catherine, along with Francis of
Assisi, is one of the patron saints of Italy, and up until two years ago, she
was one of only two women that the Catholic Church named as Doctors of the
Church. Hardly a cloistered nun, she actively engaged in the politics – church
and otherwise – of her day. Based on a four hour vision she received from
Christ, she counseled newly-elected Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy from
Avignon to Rome.[4] In
order to do that, she started a popular tour of Italy to make sure it was safe
and sound for the pope, whom she called “Babbo” (or “sweet father”).[5] Gregory eventually did return to Rome, seven
years after Catherine’s vision, but she felt he was not showing sufficient
leadership to clean up the mess made by the French cardinals, and called him to
the carpet for that. After his death, the papacy split into two – one in France,
one in Rome.[6]
Not many women can call the pope “Sugar
Daddy” and tell him to man-up, [7] not to mention single-handedly change the
course of Christian history through her visions; nevertheless, that is still
not why she’s at my table.
Why she is at the table of the Most
Interesting People of All Time, next to Jesus, is that she became Jesus’ wife. In her actions, words and deeds, Catherine of
Siena transforms the images of mother and wife into a model of female
empowerment through those most traditional images, even though she died a
virgin and her nuptials were divine.
Along with Julian of Norwich and Frances de Sales, Catherine
employs the image of motherhood to great effect when speaking of the union with
God. Frances de Sales speaks of the union of God and his creatures as a mother
feeds her child:
Consider,
then, a beautiful little child to whom the seated mother offers her breast. It
throws itself forcibly into her arms and gathers up and entwines all its little
body on that beloved bosom and breast….[O]ur Lord shows the most loving breast
of his divine love to a devout soul, draws it wholly to himself, gathers it in,
and as it were, enfolds all its powers within the bosom of his more than
motherly comfort.[8]
Julian pictured Jesus as the Mother of us all, particularly
when we partake of the Sacrament:
“The mother
can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed
us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed
sacrament, which is the precious food of true life…The mother can lay her child
tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his
blessed breast through his open side, and show us there a part of the Godhead and
of the joys of heaven, with inner certainty, of endless bliss.[9]
Catherine takes it one step further than de Sales’ metaphor
of nursing mother, and Norwich’s sacramental union by saying that Christ is the
sacrament itself. In Catherine’s vision, God is speaking:
Such a soul
receives the fruit of spiritual calm, an emotional union with my (God’s) gentle
nature in which she tastes milk, just as an infant when quieted rests on its
mother’s breast, takes her nipple, and drinks her milk through her flesh. This
is how the soul who has reached this final stage rests on the breast of my
divine charity and takes into the mouth of her holy desire the flesh of Christ
crucified.[10]
Catherine’s relationship with food and the communion wafer
actually caused a scandal. At a certain point in her life, she subsisted solely
on communion. Her biographer Raymond of Capua, wrote in great detail about
Catherine’s refusal to take any food, and that if she did, her body suffered
enormously: “[W]hat she had taken in had to come out by the same way as it had
gone in, otherwise it caused her acute pains and swellings over most of her
body.” [11]
To reduce the scandal, she ate with her family once a day, but had to spit out
all that chewed; even so, as she drank water, some of the bits of food that she
wasn’t able to spit out came out through vomiting.[12]
The only food she took in was through Holy Communion, and, apart from Ascension
Day, in which she ate bread, oil and vegetables, she continued to abstain from
food. Gail Corrington claims that Catherine’s ascetic fasting was a forerunner
to anorexia, seeing the connection between “control of one bodily appetite
(eating) by fasting, and control of another bodily appetite (sex) through
abstinence.”[13] Were she alive today, Catherine would
certainly be diagnosed with an eating disorder, and anyone who feels about
marriage the way Catherine did[14]
is obviously sexually repressed.
But I think
there’s more to it than that.
During our Face
to Face meeting last month, Prof. Kriz had us place ourselves on a continuum of
belief where mystics were concerned: if we rejected mystics as a whole, we were
to stand by the West Wall; if we accepted mystics as a whole, we were to stand
by the East Wall. It would be very easy to stand by the West Wall and say that
a woman who does not want to marry is a closeted lesbian, to say that a woman
who kowtows to no pope has delusions of grandeur, to say that a woman who
devises elaborate reasons not to eat is anorexic, to say that a woman who sees
herself as a bride of Christ is sexually repressed.
I stand by
the East Wall where Catherine is concerned. This woman not only thought of
herself as the bride of Christ, she lived her life with the absolute confidence
of Mrs. Jesus. You need to get married to continue the family line, her family
said. I’m already betrothed, thank you. You need to live in a convent; no,
actually I’m fine right here at home. You need to be cloistered; no, I need to
work with the poor in the world. The church and the pope are hopelessly
corrupt; no, my husband showed me that bringing the holy church back to Rome is
his will, and to that end, I will serve as a prophet and diplomat to effect the
future of my husband’s church.
It is not
Catherine’s abstinence that inspires me, not her quirks or her visions that
inspire me, it is her steadfast devotion to Jesus that blows me away, her utter
inability to see anything else – food, men, family, power – as important as her
love for Mother Jesus.
And that’s
why she would be at my table.
That, and
because she caught the head of her martyred friend before it hit the ground.[15]
Because that’s totally badass.
[1] Harvey
D. Egan, An Anthology of Christian
Mysticism, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1996, pp. 355.
[2]
Mary-Ann Stouck, A Short Reader of
Medieval Saints, University of Toronto Press, 2009, p. 164.
[3]
Egan, 355.
[4]
Justo Gonzalez, The Story of
Christianity, Vol. 1, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation,
Harper One, New York, 2010, p. 399.
[5]
Gonzalez, 400.
[6]
Gonzalez, 402-04
[7]
“Alas, alas, sweetest ‘Babbo’ mine, pardon my presumption in what I have said
to you and am saying: I am constrained by the sweetest primal truth to say it.
His will, father, is this, and thus demands of you. It demands that you execute
justice on the abundance of many iniquities committed by those who are fed and
pastured in the garden of holy Church….Since he has given you authority and you
have assumed it, you should use your virtue and power: and if you are not
willing to use it, it would be better for you to resign what you have assumed.”
[8]
Egan, 470-71
[9]
Egan, 396-97
[10]
Egan 362
[11]
Stoutz, 169
[12]
ibid
[13] Corrington, Gail, “Anorexia, Asceticism, and
Autonomy: Self-Control as Liberation and Transcendence,” in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion,
Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 1986), p.51.
[14]
“For a long time you have been talking amongst yourselves and planning to marry
me off to some mortal, corruptible man…I have a rich and powerful husband
(Christ) who will never let me die of hunger, and I am certain that he will
never let me go without any of the things I need.” Stoutz, p. 163-64
[15]
“He knelt down very meekly; I placed his neck [on the block] and bent down and
reminded him of the blood of the Lamb. His mouth said nothing but ‘Gesu!’ and
‘Caterina!’ and as he said this, I received his head into my hands, saying, “I
will!” with my eyes fixed on divine Goodness.” Egan, 365.