Unlike many of the nuns of her time, Catherine of Siena did not come from a noble family. Her father was a wool-dyer by trade. She was born into a large family of twenty-four children, including her own twin Giovanna, who passed away not long after birth.
At the age of twelve, her parents were already arranging a marriage for her, which she staunchly refused. Catherine refused to cooperate and became a Third Order Dominican at the age of fifteen. In this vocation, she took care of the sick and poor.
Ever since at a young age, she was given to divine visions. According to the biography written by her confessor Raymond of Capua, her vision occurred when she was five or six years old. She and her brother were on their way home from visiting a relative when she received a vision of Christ seated in glory with the Apostles Peter, Paul, and John the Evangelist.
When she was sixteen, her sister Bonaventura died in childbirth and her parents pressured her into marrying her sister's widower. In protest, she fasted and cut off her long hair. Despite the pressure to marry, Catherine served her family with humility, treating her father in the image of Christ, her mother as the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her brothers as the Apostles. Eventually, her parents consented to allowing her to live an unmarried life. She averted the traditional course of both marriage and joining a convent, living as a chaste laywoman for her whole life.
She fasted for long periods of time and continued to tend to the sick. One day, while attending a woman with cancerous breast sores, Catherine was disgusted. In an attempt to overcome this, she gathered the pus in a ladle and drank it. That night, she was visited by Jesus who invited her to drink the blood gushing out of his pierced side. It was with this visitation that her stomach "no longer had need of food and no longer could digest." (In this regard, please do not follow her example.)
At the age of twenty-one, Catherine experienced a vision in which she was wedded to Jesus Christ in which she was given a wedding ring made of Christ's foreskin rather than jewels and gold. She wrote in a letter (to encourage a nun who seems to have been undergoing a prolonged period of spiritual trial and torment: "Bathe in the blood of Christ crucified. See that you don't look for or want anything but the crucified, as a true bride ransomed by the blood of Christ crucified – for that is my wish. You see very well that you are a bride and that he has espoused you – you and everyone else – and not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his own flesh."
Her works of charity became so renowned that she became a correspondent of Pope Gregory XI and Pope Urban VI. Through letters she dictated to scribes, she begged for peace in France where her letters reached a wide audience of nobles and kings. She worked counseled Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome during the Avignon Papacy and to reform the Papal States. In 1376, she was sent to Avignon as an ambassador of the Republic of Florence. Unfortunately, she wasn't successful and was disowned by Florentine authorities, though she did sent a torching letter back. She was, however, at least somewhat influential in the return of the papacy to Rome from Avignon.
In 1377, she founded a women's monastery and later that same year began dictating her famous work "Dialogue." At the order of Pope Gregory XI, she traveled to Florence to work for peace. Following his death, riots broke out and led to her near assassination in June 1378. In November of that year, Pope Urban VI summoned her to Rome to help convince nobles and bishops of his legitimacy at the outbreak of the Western Schism.
For many years, she practiced rigorous fasting that alarmed even the religious sisters and clergy of her day. She lived on the Eucharist alone. Her confessor Bl. Raymond of Capua instructed her to eat properly, but she could not, describing her inability to eat as an illness. Eventually, she lost use of her legs. On April 21, Catherine experienced a stroke that left her paralyzed from the waist down. She died eight days later with her last words, supposedly, being, "Father, into Your hands I commend my soul and my spirit."
Patronage: against bodily ills, against fire, against illness, against miscarriage, against sexual temptation; fire prevention, fire fighters, nursing homes, people ridiculed for their piety, sick people; Europe (proclaimed on October 1, 1999 by Pope St. John Paul II), Italy (proclaimed on June 1, 1939 by Pope Pius XII); Rome, Italy; Siena, Italy
