Catherine looked out of the window for a moment—not out of curiosity, but out of pity. Then she retired and sought help in prayer. With the whole of her soul’s burning desire she begged her Bridegroom to help these two poor wretches. “You saved the robber who hung on the cross beside You, even though he was justly condemned for his crimes; save these two miserable men who were created in Your image and redeemed by Your precious blood—or will You permit that they shall first suffer these cruel tortures before they die and then go to eternal agony in hell?” This, says Raimondo, is how Catherine prayed for mercy to Him whose will it is to be implored for help so that He may show His mercy. Catherine was allowed to follow in spirit the two condemned men on their terrible last journey.
The kneeling woman saw the waggons dragged through the streets to the place of execution outside the Porta della Giustitia. In the air round the two robbers devils swarmed like a cloud of mosquitoes, buzzing round the men and urging them to yet more violent hatred and yet wilder despair. But Catherine’s soul also floated round the criminals; with all the ardour and tenderness of her soul she tried to move the two lost souls to repentance and trust in the eternal mercy of Jesus Christ. The unclean spirits which were gloating over their certain prey now turned in fury to Catherine—they threatened her with all kinds of horrors if she tried to take from them what was theirs by right; they said they would torture her until she lost her reason. Catherine only replied, “Everything which God wills I will too, and I will not fail Him because you threaten. . . . ”
The carts drove up to the gate, and under the shadowy arch stood Christ, crowned with thorns and bleeding from the scourging. Catherine saw Him, and the two robbers saw Him too. Full of sorrow He looked into the eyes and hearts of the sinners, and suddenly their defiance broke. They called for a priest; they wanted to confess. And the crowd which had followed the carts and gloated over the tortures of the two hated bandits abruptly changed over to shouts of joy when they saw that the condemned men were weeping from pure and honest repentance as they confessed their sins. Such sudden conversions were not unusual in those days, and even the most vindictive enemies of a man condemned to death could suddenly change and thank God that a soul had been saved. The ghastly procession continued on its way, but now the two men on the waggons sang hymns (how long could it be since they had last hummed those half-forgotten tunes?) and when the torturers seared their flesh with the glowing tongs they shouted that this was only what they deserved, or that they had merited even worse tortures. This change of attitude in their victims so moved the torturers that they laid down their instruments, and when they came to the place of execution the two criminals met death as calmly and happily as though they were going to a banquet.
The priest who had followed the condemned men told Fra Tommaso della Fonte of this extraordinary conversion, and Alessia informed him that at the very moment when the robbers died Catherine ceased to pray and awoke from her ecstasy. The Blessed Raimondo wrote later that he considered this the greatest of all the miracles she had worked, for, as St. Augustine and St. Gregory say, it is a greater miracle to convert such criminals than to restore them to life after they have been executed. (St. Eystein says the same in his book Passio et Miraculi Sancti Olavi, in the story of an obdurate sinner who was converted during the procession on St. Olav’s day.) It is a line of thought common to all the biographers of the saints in the Middle Ages.
The fact that she caused the conversion of these two hardened sinners is, and always will be, a miracle, even though to-day, with our knowledge of unusual—some will say abnormal—psychic phenomena, it is to a certain extent understandable that Catherine, by concentrating the whole power and intensity of her soul on them, could convey what she was thinking and what she saw to the two criminals; in other words, the manner in which she carried out her miracle is partially explicable.
For her contemporaries this ability of Catherine’s to affect people in their absence, so that they saw what she wished them to see and did what she advised them, was the most extraordinary of the many strange gifts of this young woman. Niccolo Saracini, another sinful old man, saw her one night in a dream. He told his wife that he was going to visit Catherine—just to see if she looked as she had done in his dream: he was, of course, not interested in what the child might say to him! He left Catherine to go and confess, and, like his cousin Francesco, he became an honest and pious old church-goer.
The Tolomei were one of the great families who had given Siena a number of famous citizens and several holy men. They had always been leaders of the Guelph party, which supported the Popes against the German emperors. But young Jacopo Tolomei was feared far and wide for his brutality and his many cruel actions. Before he was twenty he had succeeded in murdering two men. His two beautiful young sisters were the vainest women in the whole of Siena, and thought of nothing but having a good time: if they were still virgins it was because they were afraid of scandal in their own circle of friends, not because they cared about purity. Their mother, Madonna Rabe, went to Catherine and begged her to pray for these children—the wild son and the frivolous daughters. Once again Catherine stormed the gates of heaven with prayers, this time for the Tolomei.
The first meeting between Catherine and the two young girls ended with their throwing all their powders and paints down the lavatory. They cut off their lovely golden hair and asked to be clothed in the robes of the Mantellate. Jacopo was not in Siena when this happened, but when his younger brother Matteo brought him the news, he went almost out of his mind with rage. He thought, too, that Matteo’s attitude was suspicious. “Take care”, said Matteo, “when you come to Siena. She might even convert you.” “Never!” swore Jacopo. “I’d sooner cut the throats of the whole bloody lot of sisters, monks and priests.”
Monna Rabe was terrified of her son’s rage, but Catherine, who seemed to understand the situation from A to Z, sent Fra Tommaso to Jacopo. “You shall talk to Jacopo for me, and I will talk to Our Lord about Jacopo.”
Fra Tommaso took Fra Bartolommeo with him, and in Jacopo’s fortress outside Siena the two Dominicans met the young bandit. He was foaming with rage, but after a while it seemed to Jacopo that his heart was changed. “I feel that I must do all that Catherine wills.” The beautiful sisters of whom he had been so proud—it was right that they should now serve God in the coarse dress of the Sisters of Penitence—and now he too longed to confess and become the friend of Jesus Christ.
Jacopo Tolomei lived to be a very old man, a changed man, an upright citizen and neighbour and a good husband and father. Finally he entered the third order of St. Dominic. His young brother Matteo became a Dominican friar, and the two sisters lived and died as pious Sisters of Penitence.
Nanni di Ser Vanni was another of Siena’s notorious evildoers. Crafty and utterly depraved as he was there was none who dared to say a word against him, for although it had never been possible to prove any of Nanni’s crimes—perhaps because no one dared to try to prove them—it was extraordinary how many of his enemies had been assassinated. Catherine very much wanted to meet Nanni and talk to him, for she hoped that with God’s help she might make an end to all these enmities and violent deaths. But Nanni was as afraid of the girl “as the snake is of the snake-charmer”. However, it appears that Nanni was not a priest-hater on principle—he was not afraid that any priest could make him change his ways; he lived exactly as it suited him. But one day he promised William Flete, a young English Augustinian monk, who lived in the monastery of Lecceto in the woods outside Siena, that he would go and visit Catherine—not because he thought of taking her advice, of course. . . .
Catherine was not at home when he came to her house—she was out on some errand of mercy. Fra Raimondo of Capua, who had now become her spiritual director, had also come to visit her. The friar received the man of the world, and they began to talk to each other. But suddenly Nanni shouted in terror, “O, Almighty God, what sort of power is this—I want to leave, but I can’t take a step. I have
never known anything like it; some unknown power has triumphed over me.” And when Catherine entered, he threw himself at her feet and sobbed: “Everything I have and everything I am I lay in your hands. Whatever you command me to do I will obey you, for only you, sweet virgin, can help my miserable soul.”
Catherine spoke to him tenderly. She told him that she had spoken of him to her Lord and Master. Then she sent him to a confessor. Nanni was a changed man—but a short time afterwards he was taken prisoner by the podesta’s men, and it was said in the town that he would be condemned to death.
Raimondo was deeply unhappy when he heard of this, and said to Catherine: “As long as Nanni served this world, everything seemed to go well for him. And now that he has turned to God it seems as though heaven and earth are against him. I am afraid he will break down with despair, for his faith is still weak. Pray that he may be led out of this danger.”
But Catherine understood a man like Nanni better than this. “Do you not see how God has forgiven him and saved him from eternal torment? Instead he allows him to suffer temporal punishment for his sins. As long as he loved the world, the world loved him, and now that he is changed the world will hate and persecute him. Do not be afraid, He who has saved Nanni from hell, will also lead him out of this danger.”
Surely enough Nanni was set free a day or two later, but he lost the greater part of his earthly possessions, Catherine only rejoiced the more over this, for she considered it a liberation from many temptations.
Nanni, however, still owned several fortresses in the surroundings of Siena, and he gave Catherine the deeds of one of them. She accepted the fortress with the intention of turning it into a convent for contemplative nuns of the second order of St. Dominic. It was a great joy for Catherine to be able to found this convent, but it was several years before she could get the consent of the government to turn a fortress into a nunnery, and she also had to obtain the Pope’s ratification of her foundation. This she obtained in a bull from Pope Gregory XI, but it is uncertain whether the convent was completely ready before she died.
New sons and daughters continually joined the family of “the seraphic mother Caterina”. The flock of Caterinati grew from month to month. Fra Raimondo and Fra Tommaso Caffarini found innumerable stories of her power over the souls of men when they collected material for their works. A host of witnesses appeared, eager to record what they knew of her wonderful life, of her charm, of her holy gaiety: everyone who knew anything about her burned to tell of the “Beata Popolana”—the blessed child of the people, as the Sienese loved to call the dyer’s daughter from Via dei Tintori.
X
TIMES WERE HARD for the ordinary man in Italy. Towns and villages lived under the constant threat of being attacked and ravaged by the armies of the neighbouring republics or by some condottiere at the head of his mercenaries, either in the pay of some despot or temporarily unemployed and on the look-out for plunder. The vanquished became the victims of orgies of senseless blood-lust, torture, massacre and looting. In the wake of the soldiers followed plague and starvation. Men and boys who had grown up in this anarchy took to the woods or the mountains and became outlaws—murderers who neither gave nor expected mercy. It must not be forgotten that it was over wretched roads infested by such outlaws and soldiers of the enemy that Catherine and her followers made their journeys—as all travellers had to at that time.
The roots of these horrors were as many and as apparently ineradicable as those of a malignant weed—as the roots of all human miseries usually are. But one of the worst and the most deeply growing roots was the self-chosen exile of the Popes in Avignon.
The Popes of the Middle Ages had by no means always lived in Rome. The restless and self-willed people of Rome, and the Roman nobility, were all too ready to consider the Vicar of Christ, who was also their bishop, as their own property: rioting and anarchy broke out when they were displeased with the Pope’s conduct, rioting and anarchy broke out during the papal elections, when armed mobs of Romans tried to force the cardinals to choose their candidate. The candidate put up by the Romans was often their favourite simply because he was one of the “Romani di Roma”—a native of Rome. German emperors had invaded Italy to force the Popes to acquiesce to their claim that spiritual power should be subordinate to temporal power; they had forced Popes to flee to Naples or Lyons, while a rival Pope supported by German lances took up his residence in the Lateran Palace. For several decades the Popes had preferred to live in Viterbo, but Anagni, Rieti, Perugia and other Italian towns had also served as residences for those Popes who wished to escape the eternal unrest and uncertainty of Rome.
But when Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was chosen in 1303 as Pope under the name of Clement V, he refused to leave his native France to live in Italy. Avignon, on the banks of the Rhone, did not belong to France, but was in the province of Venaissin, which belonged to the kings of Aragon until Pope Urban V bought it from Queen Joanna of Naples. But morally the Popes in Avignon had been the prisoners of the French ever since Bertrand de Got submitted to the influence of Philippe le Bel. King Philippe le Bel was a man without a trace of moral restraint; when he helped de Got to become Pope he was already guilty of both murder and sacrilege. One of the blackest chapters in the history of the Church of Christ is the story of how the weak and avaricious Clement V allowed himself to be persuaded to help the king when he dissolved the Order of the Templars in order to acquire the immense riches of the order for himself, and also because he feared the political influence of the Templars. Contrary to the principle which the Church had upheld for hundreds of years, according to which, though secular justice used torture as a legitimate means of obtaining evidence, in the eyes of the Church oaths and confessions obtained through torture were invalid, Clement V accepted the confessions of heresy and homosexuality which the French king’s torturers had forced out of several of the knights of the order—some of them old men, now in their second childhood, who had belonged to the order since they were young boys. When the Church betrayed this long-standing principle it created a precedent which was later to become an excellent weapon in the hands of its bitterest enemies. For the people it meant that their strongest bulwark against the steadily growing brutality of temporal power was gradually undermined, until the Renaissance and Reformation gave the temporal lords almost absolute power in Europe, and the victims of their injustice became defenceless against organised cruelty to an extent only realised in our own time in the totalitarian states.
At his death Pope Clement V left a fortune of one million florins. His will shows how he had lent two Christian kings, those of France and England, money to make war against each other and ruin their own miserable countries.
His successor was also a Frenchman, Jacques d’Euse, who took the name of John XXII. He also lived in Avignon and continued the building activities of his predecessor, which made the papal city on the Rhone one of the most strongly fortified and mightiest cities in Europe. But the Franciscan order rebelled against the worldly and corrupt court of the Popes of Avignon, where simony and avarice spread shamelessly. The Franciscans coined the expression “the Popes’ Babylonian captivity”. The Pope replied with bulls of excommunication against the “Fraticelli, Beguines and brothers of Holy Poverty”. For years the antagonism between the Popes of Avignon and the radical wing of the Franciscan order consumed the Church like an internal disease. The Popes condemned the Franciscans as heretics, and the Franciscans replied with bitter antagonism which often led them into heresies and into forming alliances with princes and despots who cared nothing whatever for the good or ill of the Church. Meantime Dante accused the Pope of having married the papacy to France, saying that the Pope was no more than the King of France’s chaplain. Petrarch also raised his voice in accusation against Avignon, the Babylon of the Apocalypse. It was all useless. A series of Frenchmen became Popes and in their turn created new French cardinals—often relations and friends of the reigning Pope. Some of these were upright and
pious priests, but only a very small minority.
For the Church in France, too, the dependence of the Pope on French temporal power had unfortunate results. While the ceaseless wars with England ruined the country, both spiritually and materially, the people lost their love and trust in the Church of Christ since its power to lead souls into the right way and to heal the wounds of the exhausted people had been so sadly weakened. The morals of the clergy, both the higher and the lower, had in many places sunk so deep that the hearts of the faithful were filled with horror and grief. In many parts there was a terrible ignorance of religion; practically no religious teaching was given, men and women knew almost nothing of the faith which they officially professed. What they still retained of Christian tradition had become overgrown with a mass of superstitions—some dating back to pagan days, and some of recent origin.
The consequences of these unfortunate circumstances were felt throughout Christendom, though their influence diminished in relation to the distance from the source of the evil. But no place suffered from the absence of the Vicar of Christ from the old capital of the Church so much as Rome itself. The Papal States had now spread far over the Romagna to the borders of Milan, leaving the Tuscan republics like islands surrounded by the papal territories, and the Popes, who were also temporal lords, delegated their authority, both temporal and spiritual, to legates. Many of these were Frenchmen, without a trace of understanding or sympathy for the Italians; the two so-called “Latin sister nations” had as little love and understanding of each other at that time as they have to-day. The spokesmen for the Italian city-states, and the members of the old ducal families who governed their small states as hereditary rulers and vassals of the Holy See in a number of small fortified towns, had equally little success when disagreements occurred and they tried to come to an understanding with the papal legates from Avignon.