This was Catherine’s explanation of the uncanny ability she had to see to the very bottom of the souls of others. Her children of the spirit were overcome with astonishment and awe each time their beloved mother—they soon came to call her by various pet names, “mamma” and “mammina”—seemed to be able to read their thoughts, and even the subconscious or secret movements of their minds. She always knew, as though by a sixth sense, what they had done or said at any given time while they had been away from her. She would say to them with a smile that they had read a certain book, or she would look at them with her large eyes full of affectionate anxiety and remind them that the last time they confessed they had left something unsaid, either because they had forgotten it or because they were ashamed to mention it. As by a miracle they would recover from some illness, or escape from some danger, and learn afterwards that their “mother” had seen that they needed help and had prayed to her Saviour with all the strength in her soul to save her beloved child from peril. Once she was reprimanded by her confessor—it was at that time Raimondo—because she let those who came to visit her kiss her hand. Catherine replied, in some astonishment, that she had not noticed it—the guest had such a beautiful soul that she had forgotten everything while she contemplated it. The sins of good people appeared to her as a stain on their beauty, but when she met people who lived in mortal sin, she became aware of a smell so awful that she needed all her self-control not to show how unwell she felt in their company. On occasions even her self-control failed—as once in Avignon when a beautiful and noble lady, the niece of one of the cardinals, came to see her. Catherine fled from her because she could not bear the smell of corruption which came from her: it appeared later that she had broken her marriage vows and had been a priest’s mistress for years.
But when it was a question of some disgusting sickness of the body, Catherine never allowed herself to shirk any service of love because she experienced physical nausea. Ever since she was a child she had taught herself to remember that however strong and beautiful a human body may be as long as it blossoms with youth and beauty, it is fated to rot one day and become a thing so loathsome that it must be hidden as soon as possible in the earth. She was full of solicitude, too, for the physical well-being of her friends and her enemies, for the sick whom she nursed and for the pious men and women who asked her advice, and whom she guided with the forethought of a mother and with extraordinarily sound knowledge of human nature. She advised them against all kinds of exaggerated physical self-discipline which might weaken their health; she told them to eat, drink and sleep moderately, but sufficiently to keep strong in body and soul, so that they could carry out God’s work in the way demanded of them by their position in the world. Though Christ had chosen her to follow Him in the way of suffering, and strengthened her with gifts and graces above what He gave to other Christians, she was the last to imagine that every person who loved God and tried to serve Him in the way which would lead them to heaven, was not just as precious to Him as she was. Perhaps even more precious, for if they let themselves be led by Him, they could achieve perfection, and she, in her own eyes, was so terribly imperfect. . . .
There was another Mantellata called Andrea, who suffered from cancer of the breast. The growth spread and ate into her flesh until almost her whole breast became one poisonous sore which smelled so abominable that people who came to visit her openly held their noses—a rather uncharitable way, one must agree, of approaching a sick person one has come to console. Catherine thought so too, and when she heard that there was practically no one who would visit Andrea or even enter the room where she lay, she offered to nurse her sister as long as she was ill, that is to say until her death. Catherine felt that God had given her this work, and to begin with Andrea was deeply grateful for her help.
So the young woman looked after the old widow and was like a faithful and affectionate daughter to her. The smell from the cancerous wound became worse and worse until it was almost intolerable. But Catherine never showed any sign of disgust, but breathed normally with open nostrils when she uncovered the rotting flesh. She washed and dried the sore, applied salves and put on clean bandages, gave the patient food, and helped her with all the necessities of life. Andrea appeared to be full of admiration for this girl who sacrificed herself with such fortitude for a miserable old woman, and who never seemed tired or depressed or repelled by the loathsomeness of the disease.
But even though Catherine’s will never wavered, since she was firmly convinced that she was doing her Saviour’s will, at times she came near to being overcome by her own senses. One morning when she took off the bandages and had to breathe in the awful smell, her whole stomach suddenly seemed to turn; she knew she was going to be sick. She was seized with a holy rage against her own body: “So you are disgusted with this sister who is saved by the blood of Christ—could not you too one day be the victim of a similar horrible illness, or even worse?” In a storm of feeling she bent her head over the revolting breast and touched the sore with her lips and nostrils until she mastered her nausea, while Andrea screamed: “Oh no, no, dear child, don’t, don’t, you mustn’t poison yourself with this horrible decay——”
Catherine felt that she had won a great triumph over the old enemy of mankind who tempts us to stumble and waver on the way of the cross. But now Andrea’s affection began to cool. Either the old woman thought that such exaggerated affection could not possibly be sincere, or Catherine’s serene and happy nature got on her nerves—she knew that she must be an object of repulsion to normal people. Her secret ill-will soon turned to hatred. But she knew too that if Catherine ceased to attend her she would get no one else to nurse her, so she tried to hide her hatred. All kinds of hideous thoughts came to her, and the devil had a willing listener when he suggested to Andrea that when Catherine left her she almost certainly made up for this unpleasant work by seeking pleasure in shameful ways. Somehow or other these ugly thoughts soon spread from the room where the sick woman lay. And as people are what they are, and women have always been the same, Andrea began to receive visitors again. Soon the scandalmongers of the town were busy blackening Catherine’s good name, and some of the other sisters of the order braved the poisonous smell which surrounded the bed of the cancer patient to find out what the poor thing knew about Catherine Benincasa. Catherine knew exactly what was going on, but “like a pillar of strength” she fastened her eyes on her crucified Bridegroom and continued to serve the widow unflinchingly.
But one day Catherine was called to a meeting with the prioress and the sisters. They piled insults on the girl and asked her straight out how she could let herself be seduced and throw away her virginity. Quietly and humbly Catherine answered: “In truth, my ladies and my sisters, by the grace of Jesus Christ I am a maiden.” In reply to every lie and accusation she only repeated the same words: “In truth, I am a maiden. In truth, I am a maiden.”
But deep within herself Catherine was terribly unhappy. The feeling of offence natural for an honest girl brought up by honest parents in a home where frivolous talk and unchaste behaviour had never been tolerated, was in Catherine mixed with horror for the feeling of outrage caused among Christian souls when they saw so many priests and members of the monastic orders living in sin. She knew enough now about such scandals to be terribly grieved over the attack on the Church of Christ which was being made by the Church’s own servants. She prayed to her Beloved with bitter tears: “O, You who chose a virgin to be Your mother, You know how precious a good name is for all maidens. Help me, my Lord, my God, so that the serpent may not drag me from the work which I have undertaken out of love for You.” Again she was granted a vision: the Saviour of the world appeared before her with a crown of jewels in His right hand, and in His left a crown of thorns. “Daughter, you must receive these two crowns, one after the other. Will you wear the crown of thorns while you live here on earth and have the crown of precious stones in eternity, or will you have the crown of precious stones here on earth—but
then you must wear the crown of thorns hereafter? Choose which you will have.” Catherine reached eagerly for the crown of thorns—she took it and pressed it onto her head so violently that the thorns pricked deep into her flesh. There was no visible mark from them, but afterwards Catherine could always feel the thorns about her head.
But then Lapa heard the rumours which Andrea had started, to humiliate Catherine. Lapa did not doubt her daughter’s purity for a moment; but she was seized with a wild fury against Andrea, and some of her rage descended on Catherine: “What did I say? How many times have I said that you should leave the stinking old woman to her own devices? Now you can see the reward of your Christian charity!” Lapa screamed and shed floods of tears and told Catherine clearly and decisively, “If you don’t stop nursing her, if I hear that you have so much as been near where she lives, I will never call you my daughter again.”
Catherine fell on her knees beside her mother. “Mother, dear, sweet mother, do you not know that the ingratitude of mankind has never prevented God from pouring His mercy out on all sinners every day? Did Our Lord on the cross stop working to save the world because mankind had heaped shame and torture on Him? You know that if I stop going to Andrea no one else will nurse her and she will lie there and die, completely deserted. . . . Shall you and I be guilty of her death? The devil has seduced her, but God may still send her light so that she may understand that she has made a mistake.” It ended with Lapa giving in and even blessing her daughter.
After a while Andrea really did begin to be sorry for what she had done—perhaps she was afraid that Catherine would leave her, and now more than ever she needed someone to pity her. Catherine came and went, just as friendly and concerned for her patient as ever. One day as she came in at the door Andrea saw that the girl was followed by a strange and wonderful light—it was as though she had been transformed into an angel. The old widow broke down completely; she sobbed and begged Catherine’s forgiveness—“If only you will never fail me.”
Quietly and patiently Catherine consoled her; she had never thought anything bad about her, and she knew that it was the devil who had put these bad thoughts into Andrea’s head: “As far as you are concerned, dear mother, I ought to be grateful to you for watching so jealously over my virtue.”
The sick woman now assured the guests who came to her that Catherine was an angel, a saint, and she told them of the mysterious light which she had seen with her own eyes and found so indescribably consoling. Catherine defended herself just as strongly against this new temptation, the temptation of letting Andrea proclaim her as something extraordinary and holy. She went about her work in the sickroom as quietly and competently as before. But it became more and more difficult to endure the smell of the decaying body. No flight of the soul towards other heights could prevent her physical senses from revolting at times, and she had to fight with all her might to avoid being sick. One day when she had washed the sores she knew that it was impossible for her to continue with this work any longer. Filled with anger against her own miserable flesh, she seized the bowl, which was full of the water she had washed the sores with, and pus from the sores: “By the Life of the Almighty, by the beloved Bridegroom of my soul, you shall receive in your stomach what you feel such fear of.” She turned from the bed and drank the contents of the bowl. Later she confessed to Raimondo that once she had mastered her revulsion the horrible drink had seemed delicious. And from that time she never felt any reluctance about looking after Andrea.
The next night her beloved Jesus appeared to her. He uncovered the five wounds He had received on the cross: “My beloved, for My sake you have fought many a fight, and with My help you have always triumphed. But yesterday you won your greatest victory when you drank the terrible drink for love’s sake, and trampled your own flesh under foot. Now I shall let you drink of a drink which is not often offered to human kind.” He laid His right hand on the maiden’s neck and bowed her face into His divine side: “Drink, daughter, drink My blood, and you shall taste a sweetness which will fill your whole soul; it shall even penetrate your body, which you have despised for My sake.” And Catherine laid her lips to the very Source of life and was allowed to drink her fill—and was left both satisfied and changed.
People of our own time may consider the story of Catherine and Andrea more horrible than edifying, and feel that her ecstatic contemplation of the blood of Christ—a motive which recurs continually in her visions and her letters and her teaching—discloses an unhealthy love for the least attractive feature of Christianity. In our own lifetime we have learned to know the smell of rotting corpses on battlefields and in bombed towns; we know of the stinking sores and boils of prisoners from concentration camps, where dead and dying were made to lie on beds as wretched as the one Catherine had chosen for herself. We have poured out oceans of blood and tears, both of the guilty and the guiltless, while we hoped against hope that this blood and these tears could help to save a world reeling under the weight of its miseries. And how little have we achieved of the great things we dreamed! Yet we ascribe it to the confused ideas of the time she lived in and her own dark vision of Christianity, when Catherine intoxicated herself with the blood of Christ—that blood which would put an end to human bloodshed, if only we could agree to receive it as the redemption from our bloodthirsty passions, our insatiable lust for imagined gain for ourselves projected onto other nations or classes. Indeed, many Catholics think in this way. The strong-willed, brave and strangely optimistic girl who handled the powerful men of her time so masterfully, who had such an unusual understanding of the characters of the men and women among whom she lived, who really succeeded in making peace between many of her unruly townsmen, who in fact on one or two occasions prevented war, and on many put an end to bloody feuds—she would answer us as she answered her contemporaries in her letters and conversations and in the Dialogue: that the blood of Christ was the only source of her own courage and strength and wisdom, of her amazing and indomitable joy of living. She would say to us, Drink of it with the lips of your souls, as the saints in their visions seemed to drink it with their lips of flesh; assuage your thirst in the love which streams from God’s holy Heart—then there will be an end to the vain shedding of man’s blood by the hand of man. In her visions Catherine saw God’s fire fall from heaven, like a rain of blazing light and burning warmth: can we really understand anything of her experience, we who have seen the fire of hate falling from the clouds, who fear in our hearts for the day when an even more destructive fire, invented by an even more bitter hatred and more violent passions, shall rain down over us and our children? For us, Catherine would have only the same message which she brought to her contemporaries, she would know only of the same remedy for our misery—the blood of Christ, the fire of God’s love, which burns up self-love and self-will, and lets the soul appear, beautiful and full of grace, as it was meant to be when God created us.
VII
“THE LAWS WHICH THE SIENESE make in October are not valid in November”, Dante had said with scorn about Catherine’s birthplace—and with good reason. It is true that the poet from Florence was used to fights between different parties and continual changes of government, with the victors avenging themselves on the vanquished and arbitrarily banishing men whose loyalty towards their regime they doubted. But it seemed even more out of the question to create law and order, even for the shortest period, in Ghibelline Siena, the old enemy and rival of Guelphic Florence. The two dominating parties, the Gentiluomini—the nobles’ party—and the Popolani—the citizens’ party—were split into differing groups and cliques which constantly gave themselves up to their worst enemies because they were unable to agree. The citizens, the New Rich of the Italian city states, had made it their aim to break the power of the old feudal nobility, and throughout the latter centuries of the Middle Ages they worked for this end ceaselessly and remorselessly. It is true that the growing power of the aristocracy in the neighbouring countries and the gradual transformation of the t
echnique of war which was beginning to do away with all that served the community in the feudal system, justified these attempts of the citizens. Its leading men were just as rich and just as cultured as most of the nobility, and after a while they asserted themselves as the most important element in the government of their own city state. It may be called a democratic movement—of a kind. But the situation developed as it always does; when a new class of the community has once got the power in its hands it uses and abuses this power in more or less the same way as its predecessors. “Unity makes strength, strength makes pride, pride goes before a fall”, is a proverb which was just as true then as it is now or at any other time.
But when once in a while some group seemed to have the reins of government well in hand, then feuds between families and family groups, enmity between violent and wilful men, fighting in the streets and inns, filled the gutters of Siena with blood. There was war between the great families of Salimbeni and Tolomei; the Maconi family were on bad terms with the Tolomei; the Saracini and Piccolomini, Malavolti and Patrizzi had all inherited bloody feuds which they kept alive. Only a very outstanding man could assert himself as an individual; otherwise both the nobility and the citizens sought protection of their interests and their personal safety—as far as one could talk about personal safety—in their families or their guilds, and stood or fell with the group to which they belonged. Wise and just laws are not much help if no ruling power exists which is strong and stable enough to see that these laws are respected. The higher the waves of anarchy rose the more white-hot became people’s passions—hate, fear, love for their own families or class. The murder of a relative, an attack upon a brother of the guild, had to be avenged, even if the duty of revenge became the inheritance of a child still in the cradle.