Catherine of Siena: Sister, Daughter, Mother, and Saint

If the Catholic Church had only investigated the virtue and diplomatic skills of Saint Catherine Benincasa of Siena (1347-1380), there would have been ample evidence to canonize her. After all, besides living a virtuous life, Catherine advised popes and bishops, served as a successful peacemaker between feuding cities, and helped resolve bitter family fights.

The Church could also have focused solely on the mystical phenomena Catherine experienced, such as ecstasies in prayer, invisible stigmata, prophecy, visions, and inedia (abstinence from all nourishment beyond the limits of nature). Or her understanding of Catholic theology and her gifts as a spiritual director could have been demonstrated through her mystical writings and letters to people of all stations in life. All of these aspects of Catherine’s life story are commonly known. But one of Catherine’s unsung signs of holiness is the way she lived her life as an extraordinary member of an ordinary family.

We know quite a bit about Catherine’s personal life because her spiritual director wrote a detailed biography after her death. Blessed Raymond delle Vigne of Capua (1330-1399) was a Dominican priest, and he included eyewitness testimony, including his own, in his book about the woman he considered to be a saint.

As Blessed Raymond explains, Catherine was born in Siena, Italy, and was her mother’s twenty-fourth child, followed only by a sister who died very young. Sources sometimes differ over the total number of Benincasa children. This unusually large family may have included an adopted sibling or other children who died before Catherine’s arrival. But however many siblings, in-laws, and cousins crowded around the Benincasa dinner table, Catherine was the baby.

As in every family, some members are more temperamentally compatible than others, and a few of Catherine’s siblings are mentioned in this biography. Considering some of Catherine’s startling actions—such as her visions and her personal care of lepers—at least some of her brothers and sisters probably considered their spiritually precocious sister an embarrassment and perhaps even unstable. But unlike the rest of us sinners, Catherine apparently never held any childhood grudges against her siblings and never failed to ask their forgiveness for any of her childish mistakes.

When teenaged Catherine cut off her hair to make herself unmarriageable, her mother fired the household help and ordered Catherine to become the unpaid servant for the entire household. Catherine meekly accepted her punishment and served the whole family through endless domestic chores. Most of her brothers and sisters must have thought it was a funny joke, and perhaps they even made bets with one another about how long it would take for Catherine to give in to their mother’s demands and get married.

But Catherine found an imaginative and holy solution to keep from becoming resentful or depressed about her difficult situation. She asked herself how she would serve Jesus Christ, the Blessed Mother, and the apostles if they needed dinner or if their clothes needed mending or if their beds needed to be made. By God’s grace, she treated them all as if the Savior of the World was watching. Because, of course, He was.

Catherine’s father, Giacamo, had become a prosperous merchant in the wool-dyeing business, and he was known for his piety and charity toward the poor, characteristics which Catherine clearly inherited. After twenty-some children, he knew better than to interfere in his wife’s method of disciplining a teenage daughter, so he said nothing about Catherine becoming the household servant. But one day he discovered Catherine in a bedroom, kneeling in prayer. (Catherine had to hide in a bedroom to pray because her mother was trying to keep her from praying so much.) Giacomo saw a dove hovering over Catherine’s head, a dove which flew out the window when his daughter stopped praying.

That same day, Catherine shared with the family that she had taken a private vow of virginity and wanted to be a bride of Christ, and Him alone. Thinking about the dove and about his daughter’s cheerful obedience to months of menial labor (what kind of teenager acts like that, anyway?), he agreed to her plan to renounce marriage. He also freed her from her chores and let her return to being just a member of the family again.

Catherine’s mother, Lapa, had a different temperament. Although she was a simple soul and lived an upright life, she was as strong-willed as her daughter. Sometime later, Giacomo died, and Lapa became deathly ill. However, Lapa refused to believe it was time for her to die and begged her holy daughter to ask the Lord to spare her life. Catherine obediently prayed for her mother, but she also told Lapa that our Lord was calling her home and that she should prepare for death. According to Catherine, the Lord told her that if Lapa lived, she would later regret it.

Lapa continued to refuse to go to confession, became even sicker, and, according to multiple witnesses, died. But those same witnesses then heard Catherine, who had been promised by the Lord that none of the members of her household would go to Hell, tearfully remind God: “Lord, these are not the promises you made me.”¹ Within minutes, Lapa came back from the dead. Lapa eventually lived a long life, but Catherine’s prediction came true. Lapa outlived many of her children and knew poverty and pain during her final years until her death at the age of eighty-nine.

When Catherine was eighteen years old, she was accepted into a group of Dominican tertiaries. Like the other tertiaries, she wore a habit and participated in their communal activities, but she lived at home. Meanwhile, Catherine’s fame increased in Siena and elsewhere.

Some people were so fascinated and inspired by Catherine’s words, example, and overflowing kindness that they wanted to follow her everywhere in her travels and live with her in Siena. Catherine eventually lived in a home with them and called this group her “family”. They called her “Mamma”, even though she was younger than many of them. All the members of this informal family, including priests like Blessed Raymond, considered her their spiritual mother.

These ordinary people from various states of life weren’t attracted solely by her extraordinary visions or her visits to the pope. Catherine loved every man, woman, and child with the heart of Christ, and that love for the Lord was so deeply personal that He seemed to be right there with her. Some of that immense charity spilled over into their lives too.

One of the most famous quotes attributed to Catherine was written in a letter to a layman named Stefano Maconi. Stefano was living a good Catholic life but was not working too hard at it. “If you are what you ought to be,” Catherine wrote to him in a letter designed to stir him to action, “you will set fire to all Italy.”² After her death, that spark finally became a flame, and Stefano became a Carthusian monk and eventually general of the entire order.

Catherine’s secret to living like a saint in an ordinary family is not much of a secret. It involves heroic but simple acts such as forgiving our brothers and sisters and humbly asking for their forgiveness when we have offended them. It involves being cheerfully obedient to our family responsibilities, even when our loved ones misunderstand us. It involves the courage of being willing to (charitably) tell our friends and relatives what they need to know, whether they like it or not.

While God calls few people to holiness as international peacemakers or mystical prophets, He calls every Christian to holiness through the way we treat our family and friends. And in this way, we can all look to the example of Saint Catherine of Siena to become the saints God wants us to be.

Endnotes: