Last Wednesday, April 29, 2020, was the feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of our parish church who is also the patron saint of the City of Rome and the co-patron saint—along with St. Francis of Assisi—of Italy. Here’s a little historical information on her, summarized from a 2020 article by Steve Weidenkopf, lecturer of Church History at the Christendom College Graduate School of Theology, and by Bishop Robert Baron’s book, Praying with the Pivotal Players:

• Born in 1347 to a humble wool-dyer, Catherine became one the most influential persons of fourteenth-century Christendom;
• After she became a Dominican tertiary at the age of nineteen she embarked on a life of intense spiritual practices. Her reputation for great holiness spread quickly, and she found herself answering letters from some of Europe’s most powerful people, seeking her advice on matters spiritual as well as political and even military (she was a supporter of the Crusading movement);
• A Doctor of the Church, of which there are thirty-six men and women who have been granted that honor as of 2020 and who hail from all ages of the Church’s history. Of these, four on the list are women (Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux (France), Hildegard of Bingen (southwestern Germany). It said that the people of Siena saw in her such holiness that when she en-tered the town’s piazza the crowds would part and bow to her;
• But the topic which most concerned her was the return of the papacy from Avignon, France, where popes had lived since 1309. Cath-erine took up the mantle of encouraging the pope to return home to Rome after the death of St. Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373), who first exhorted the papal return in 1350 and spent twenty years trying to convince popes to move back to the Eternal City;
• The humble yet powerful mystic from Siena died in 1380, was canonized in 1461 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970.”