Catholic Thought discussion

Reading Schedule

There are 335 pages in the Ignatius Press edition. So at about 50-60 pages per week, that should take us about six weeks. Trying to adjust to the nearest chapter leads me to this schedule.

Sept 27 to Oct 3: Chapters 1 thru 4 (45 pages)
Oct 4 thru Oct 10: Chapters 5 thru 8 (64 pages)
Oct 11 thru Oct 17: Chapters 9 thru 13 (60 pages)
Oct 18 thru Oct 24: Chapters 14 thru 18 (52 pages)
Oct 25 thru Oct 31: Chapters 19 thru 23 (59 pages)
Nov 1 thru Nov 7: Chapters 24 thru 29 (48 pages)

Just a reminder, discussions for a particular week’s read start after the week is over.

I am thrilled we are reading this book. This book had a very strong influence to my religious development. I’ve always wanted to share it with others. I hope you’ll join us. I'll have an introduction shortly.

Thrilled for you, Manny.

Thank you Manny. I might a little behind because I will have to wait till the first of the month to purchase said book. But I cannot wait to read it.

Nikita wrote: "Thank you Manny. I might a little behind because I will have to wait till the first of the month to purchase said book. But I cannot wait to read it."

No problem Nikita. You'll catch up quickly.

Introduction to St. Catherine of Siena

Bishop Baron in the first group of his Pivotal Players series had only six men and women who he considered important enough to be considered pivotal to Catholicism, and included in those six was St. Catherine of Siena, the only woman I may add. Why did he include St. Catherine with Saints Thomas Aquinas and St. Frances of Assisi? Well, you probably have to watch his video of her life and teachings to hear his answer, but I think by reading this book you will come to a similar conclusion: St. Catherine of Siena incorporates into her being every element of sainthood possible. She lived a life of uncompromising holiness. You may be surprised to learn she was not a consecrated religious, but a Third Order Dominican. Prayer was the foundation of her life, which then led to an active ministry of taking care of the sick and the poor. She was a mystic who had who supernatural experiences on an almost daily basis but was involved in the issues and politics of her day. Though uneducated, she learned Catholic theology so well she was correcting theologians, and she went on to write—at some point she learned to read and write either mystically or through perseverance—one of the great Catholic theological classics, her Dialogue. I marvel at her writings—mostly her letters—for her intense prose and wonderful imagery. She was a natural poet. She was a little woman from a non-aristocratic family who became so influential she was offering advice to kings and queens, and her greatest accomplishment was in persuading Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome after almost a century in Avignon.

I once put together for my Lay Dominican chapter an outline of her life. I’ll share it with you here. I broke it down to four parts: her biography, her mysticism, her ministry, and her writings and theology. And then for good measure I ended it with a number of her quotes. Perhaps this will be useful as you read her biography.

1) Biography

a) Born March 25, 1347 with a twin sister (Giovanna) as the 23rd and 24th children of Jacopo di Benincasa and Lapa di Puccio Piagenti.
b) She has a vision of Christ at the age of six and at seven vows to virginity.
c) At the age of fifteen she cuts off her hair to prevent being married.
d) At the age of sixteen she joins the Dominican Sisters of Penance, otherwise known as the Mantellate.
e) From the age of seventeen to twenty she is confined to a small room, ostensibly as punishment for not willing to marry. This is her “cell” in which she performed many performed many austerities and penances. This is when she started her extreme fasting.
f) Throughout her life she went around performing many acts of mercy but especially from the age of twenty, when she symbolically comes out of her cell, through age twenty-eight when the most recent plague ends. It is the activities in this period that led her to be the patron saint of nurses.
g) At the age of 29 at the behest of the Florentines she travels to the Pope in Avignon to resolve a dispute between the Papacy and Florence. There she urges the Pope to return the Papacy back to Rome.
h) Her fasting led her not keep any food down; she lived for a number of years entirely on the Eucharist.
i) At the age of 33 dies in Rome on April 29, 1380. She is buried in Rome (Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva) except for her head and thumb which were sent to Siena and reside at the Basilica of San Domenico.
j) She was canonized in 1461 and made a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

2) Mysticism

a) Vision of Christ in papal garb at the while walking in Siena (age 6).
b) Mystical marriage with Christ (age 20?).
c) Vision and conversation with Christ who forces her to come out of her cell (age 20).
d) Mystical exchange of hearts with Christ (age 23).
e) Mystical death (age 23).
f) Receives the Invisible Stigmata (age 28).
g) Soul separation from her body (age 32).
h) Whenever at Mass the experience would be so intense that she would faint and go into a trance.
i) Whenever in that trance state, she would babble off her conversations with Christ. Her followers would jot down whatever they could gather from her mumblings. It is in this state that we get her prayers and her theological book called The Dialogue.

3) Ministry

a) Corporal works of mercy as part of the Montellate, especially taking care of the sick and dying.
b) Tirelessly helped in care of those inflamed with the Black Death plague of the mid fourteenth century.
c) She attracted a band of followers which she called her spiritual family who went around and helped and fulfilled her acts of mercy. The group included religious and secular, poor and rich, peasantry and nobility. It was through her personality, gregarious and upbeat, that so many people listened and followed her.
d) Through her letters and preaching, she led many people to return and enrich their faith.
e) She intervened to resolve disputes between various Italian City States, including the Papal State.
f) She was instrumental in convincing Pope Gregory XI. She even had the chutzpa to tell the Pope to “be a man” when he was wavering in fear.
g) She tried to resolve The Great Schism that broke out after Pope Gregory XI’s death, where ultimately three different Popes claimed the papal title. She was unsuccessful and perhaps contributed to her loss of strength and subsequent death.


4) Writings and Theology

a) It should be noted that she was uneducated and either through miracle or through self-teaching, learned to read and write. I don’t know for sure if she physically wrote down things herself. From what we know she had scribes that wrote her words down.
b) She wrote elaborate prayers of which 26 survive, many of which seem like poems.
c) She wrote hundreds of letters to all strata of people, the Pope, religious, secular, soldiers, rulers, and aristocracy, both men and women, either imploring them to do some good action or preaching some theological point. 380 letters survive.
d) She dictated The Dialogue, a series of conversations she had in a trance with God the Father which consolidated her theological ideas. Among these ideas is the notion of the Christ Bridge—Christ crucified as a bridge between earth and heaven.
e) Her writing is filled with intense imagery, almost like that of a poet.

Famous Quotes:

"You know...that to join two things together there must be nothing between them or there cannot be a perfect fusion. Now realize that this is how God wants our soul to be, without any selfish love of ourselves or of others in between, just as God loves us without anything in between." Letter T164

"The human heart is always drawn by love." Dialogue 26

"In your nature, eternal Godhead, I shall come to know my nature. And what is my nature, boundless Love? It is fire, because you are nothing but a fire of love. And you have given humankind a share in this nature for by the fire of love you created us." Prayer 12

"It is the nature of love to love as much as we feel we are loved and to love whatever the one we love loves." Letter T299

You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea. The more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you." Dialogue 167.

"You are a fire always burning but never consuming; you are a fire consuming in your heat all the soul's selfish love; you are a fire lifting all chill and giving light." Dialogue 167.

"This [painful thing] happens to me with the permission of God, according to His providence, as in all things that befall me, all tribulation that He sends me He wills only one single thing: my sanctification." Spiritual Document (William of Flete's account of a meeting with St. Catherine at which she briefly summarized her doctrine).

"O God eternal, Oh boundless Love! Your creatures have been wholly kneaded into you and you into us--through creation, through the will's strength, through the fire with which you created us, and through the natural life you gave us." Prayer 14

"Love follows knowledge." Dialogue 1

Thanks so much for this, Manny. I've always been both fascinated and a little put off by Catherine of Siena. Fascinated by her mysticism and ministry, but a little wary because, through my modern eyes, I see a woman who suffered from and eventually died from anorexia.

You'll know more than I do if it's true that, near the end of her life, she explained she wanted to eat but no longer was able to. I know we can't judge people of the past by a modern lens. Her illness may be part of the reason she was able to grow so close to God. But it troubles me, as does her extreme asceticism.

Yet ... I've always been drawn to learn more about her. I even prayed before the reliquary of her head at the basilica in Siena and visited her family's house there. (My husband and I finally "honeymooned" on our 10th anniversary and went to Italy.) That visit was decades ago, but I remember feeling the holiness in that basilica and being drawn to the saint. That visit occurred, by the way, during my period of lapsed Catholicism.

When I started to look more into St. Catherine's life, I was startled by the depths of her asceticism and extreme fasting. And also equally stunned by her ability to counsel religious leaders (and that those leaders listened to her!), by how much she helped others throughout her life, and by the writings she left behind.

So... The simple fact that she perplexes me so much indicates I need to study her more. My book arrives tomorrow. I'll be a little behind on the reading but will catch up. I think the conversation here will go a long way toward helping me gain a deeper and less superficial understanding of St. Catherine.

Gerri wrote: "You'll know more than I do if it's true that, near the end of her life, she explained she wanted to eat but no longer was able to. I know we can't judge people of the past by a modern lens. Her illness may be part of the reason she was able to grow so close to God. But it troubles me, as does her extreme asceticism.."

Yes, we can get into that when it comes up in the book. Yes, her fasts were so severe that she could no longer hold food down. She regretted this late in life and did not advocate it. I hope you'll join us in the read. My goodness! You were in Siena and saw her head. My last trip to Italy was in 2001 and well before I became a devotee of St. Catherine. So I had no reason to go to Siena. But I will if I ever get another chance.

Thank you Manny for making the schedule!

I'm new here and I hope I would be able to keep up with you guys! I'm looking forward to reading Catherine of Siena. I appreciate her so much for convincing the Pope to go back to Rome. Imagine, a lay person and a woman, persuading the head of the Church. Respect.

I know, Florence, that impressed me so much, too! Manny, I got my book today so will try to keep up with the reading. Looking forward to the book and the discussions.

Florence and Gerri - Fantastic!

To get a feel for her writing, let me give you a sample, this from one of her letters. It’s in my personal notes and unfortunately I didn’t write down which letter this came from. this little passage outlines one of her most profound theological ideas, Christ crucified as a ladder to holiness, a ladder to God. She would go on to develop this further in her great work, The Dialogue.

And if you ask, “What is the way?” I will tell you it is the way Christ chose, the way of disgrace, suffering, torment, and scourging. “And how?” Through genuine humility and blazing charity, an indescribable love by which we renounce all worldly riches and ambition. And from humility we progress to obedience, as I have said. Upon such obedience follows peace, since obedience frees us from all suffering and gives us every joy—for the selfish will, the source of suffering, has been done away with.

To make it possible to climb to this perfection, Christ actually made for us a staircase of his body.

If you look at his feet, you see that they are nailed fast to the cross to form the first stair. This is because we have first to rid ourselves of all selfish will. For just as the feet carry the body, desire carries the soul. Reflect that we can never have any virtue at all if we don’t climb this first stair. Once you have climbed it, you arrive at deep and genuine humility.

Climb the next stair without delay and you come to the open side of God’s Son. There you find the fiery abyss of divine charity. At this second stair, his open side, you find a storehouse filled with fragrant spices. There you find the God-Man. There your soul is so sated and drunk that you lose all self-consciousness, just like a drunkard intoxicated with wine; you see nothing but his blood, shed with such blazing love.

Then, aflame with desire, you get up and climb to the next stair, his mouth. There you find rest in quiet calm; there you taste the peace of obedience. A person who is really completely drunk, good and full, falls asleep, and in that sleep feels neither pleasure nor pain. So too the spouse of Christ, sated with love, falls asleep in the peace of her Bridegroom. Her feelings too are asleep so that, even if all sorts of troubles befall her, they don’t disturb her at all. If she is materially well off she feels no disproportionate pleasure, because she has already stripped herself of all that is at the first stair. This, then, is where she finds herself conformed with Christ crucified, united with him.

Now mind you, this is a woman with no formal education. Notice how vivid the imagery and how the imagery develops into abstract ideas. So much there in just a handful of words.

If anyone has access to formed.org, this book is available through that site. I am listening to the audiobook through formed.org.

I have access to formed.org through my Parish.