Easter: April 29th
Memorial of St. Catherine of Siena, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
Other Commemorations: St. Hugh of Cluny, Abbot (RM) ; Other Titles: St. Catharine of Siena
MASS READINGS
April 29, 2024 (Readings on USCCB website)
PROPERS [Show]
COLLECT PRAYER
Memorial of St. Catherine of Siena: O God, who set Saint Catherine of Siena on fire with divine love in her contemplation of the Lord's Passion and her service or your Church, grant, through her intercession, that your people, participating in the mystery of Christ, may ever exult in the revelation of his glory. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
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Today is the Memorial of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). She was born Catherine Benincasa in Siena at a date that remains uncertain, was favored with visions from the age of seven. Becoming a tertiary of the Dominican Order, she acquired great influence by her life of prayer and extraordinary mortifications as well as by the spread of her spiritual writings. Her continual appeals for civil peace and reform of the Church make her one of the leading figures of the fourteenth century. Worn out by her mortifications and negotiations she died in Rome on April 29, 1380.
The Roman Martyrology also commemorates St. Hugh of Cluny (1024-1109), a prince related to the sovereign house of the dukes of Burgundy. He was an adviser to nine popes.
Meditation for Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter:
The perfect gift
1. In the Epistle, St. James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, speaks to us. He addresses himself first to the Jewish Christians, then to all the rest of us.
2. "Let no man, when he is tempted, say that he is tempted by God. For God is not a tempter of evils, and He tempteth no man. But every man is tempted by his own concupiscence, being drawn away and allured" (Jas. 1:13 f.). Only that which is good can come from God. Whatever God can give and does give is always a perfect gift. Thus, "of His own will He hath begotten us [the baptized] by the word of truth, that we might be some beginning of His creatures" (Epistle). This is the good gift, the perfect gift, which God gives us: the gift of rebirth by water and the Holy Spirit. We are first and above all the predestined, the consecrated children of God. Today we thank God for this perfect gift of His love and mercy. In humility we ask why God gives this perfect gift to us in preference to millions of others who were more deserving of it than we were. Why does he not tire of continually giving this precious gift to me, who am so unworthy? He renews this gift continually in the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist, and in many other channels of grace. It is His love that prompts Him to do this.
"Let every man be swift to hear, but slow to speak, and slow anger. For the anger of man worketh not the justice of God. For the anger of man worth not the justice of God. Wherefore, casting away all uncleanness and abundance of naughtiness, with meekness receive the ingrafted word, which is able to save your souls." "Be slow to speak and slow to anger"; be not easily aroused and easily vexed; become not easily embittered or irritated. What is pleasing to God cannot be produced in anger. This good gift of God produces in each soul a love of silence and seclusion, so that the soul rests in God. It produces in the soul a meekness and a supernatural calm and peace which are far removed from all animosity and evil. It excludes and overcomes all impatience and irritation. This meekness springs from the fire of love, from self-conquest, from the peace that envelops the soul that is possessed and enlightened by Christ.
In such a soul the sensitiveness of the easily irritated, impatient man, with his degraded and unspiritual inclinations, is replaced by Christian meekness, which gives strength and mastery over one's evil tendencies, and victory over self-love and that sensitiveness so characteristic of the worldly man. Such heroic meekness is born of God; but anger, impatience, and sensitiveness are not born of God, nor of grace, nor are they the fruit of regeneration. Anger is a weakness which attempts to hide behind violent words or deeds, which are unworthy of one who is reborn through Christ. "Blessed are the meek" (Matt. 5:4).
3. With the liturgy of the fourth Sunday after Easter we recognize the "perfect gift," which comes down to us from the Father of light, to be the Holy Ghost, whose coming we await. Through His Word, God has made us His children. Through His Word, that is, through Christ, He gives us the Holy Ghost. On our part we must prepare our souls for His coming through prayer, through the practice of silence and through an ardent longing for him.
When we bring our gifts to the altar at the Offertory of the Mass, we repeat with grateful hearts the words of the Offertory prayer: "Shout with joy to God all the earth, sing ye a psalm to His name; come and hear, and I will tell you, all ye that fear God, what great things the Lord hath done for my soul, alleluia." Among the great things the Lord hath done for my soul is the regeneration of that soul. Then, too, He has bestowed on me the sonship of God, making me share the spirit of Christ; He has given me membership in His Church, and has sent to me the Holy Ghost.
—Benedict Bauer, O.S.B, from The Light of the World, Vol II
St. Catherine of Siena
Catherine was a problem, there was no denying it. There was little her parents could do with this youngest of their twenty-five children. She refused to marry and she would not enter a convent. To make matters worse, she insisted on joining the Dominican tertiaries, an organization strictly for married women and widows. She would live like a hermit in a cell, she said, but chose her own cell in her father's home, which sheltered his twenty-four other children, their husbands and wives, and eleven grandchildren.
Catherine continues to be a problem. She is an enigma, a true puzzle, to those who study her life. Few women have had a more amazing career than this young dyer's daughter, who made her way from the bare little room in her parents' home to the palace of the popes at Avignon, who braved revolutionary crowds, wrote letters to cardinals and kings, and all through her life preserved her uninterrupted union with God in times perhaps as unsettled as our own. How Saint Catherine, who has been called by some the "greatest woman in Christendom," who influenced the pope to return to Rome from the "Babylonian Captivity," could have chosen to live exactly as she did is a puzzle to us.
But this was God's will. In a convent she might well have become a saint, but not the kind of saint God wanted her to be. The kind of life she was to lead, her extraordinary influence over popes, kings, sovereign cities, and crowds of disciples, was incompatible with the peace of the cloister. "I have placed you in the midst of your brothers," Christ told her, "so that you can do for them what you cannot do for Me."
What Catherine was, in fact, was a politician. If she had not been a politician, she would have been an entirely different sort of person. The way she bullied two popes would have been inconceivable in our day. Even more astonishing is the fact that the popes listened. They actually paid heed to these not always polite letters from a woman, a woman without learning or position.
God began early to prepare Catherine for her task. She was born in Siena, on March 25, 1347, the daughter of Giacomo Beninicasa and his wife Lapa. Christ first appeared to her when she was only six years old. At seven she took a vow of virginity; at twelve she cut off her shimmering hair to avoid the marriage planned by her parents, and at fifteen e became the first unmarried woman to enter the tertiaries, the Third Order of Saint Dominic. She always got her way. Yet it was not truly Catherine's way; it was God's way for Catherine.
Since her first vision at the age of six, Catherine had belonged completely to God. At first, this was to mean only the happiness of mystical prayer, and visions of Christ and His saints. Later, it was to mean giving herself to Him through the severest suffering. These sufferings took the form of terrible periods of desolation when it seemed to her that God had abandoned her altogether. "Oh Lord, where wert Thou when my soul was in such torment?" she asked our Lord, as He appeared to her after an arduous period of trial. "I was in your heart, fortifying you by My grace"; and He then assured Catherine that from that time He would show Himself to her more often.
It was on Shrove Tuesday, 1366, when all of Siena was celebrating the carnival, that Catherine was espoused to Christ. While she was praying in her room, Christ and our Blessed Lady appeared to her. Taking Catherine's hand, our Lady held it up to her Son, who placed on it a ring that was visible to Catherine but never to other people. It was at this time that Christ told Catherine she was to be of good courage for she was not armed with indomitable faith. Later, Catherine received an invisible stigmata, which became visible after her death, and through which she accepted the physical agonies of the crucifixion.
This spiritual betrothal brought Catherine's years of preparation to an end. She was now ready to go out into the world and carry Christ to others. After becoming a tertiary, Catherine went with the other women to tend the sick (especially choosing those afflicted with the most repulsive diseases), to serve the poor, and to labor for the conversion of sinners. Though always suffering terrible physical pain, living for long intervals with practically no food except the Blessed Sacrament, she was full of practical wisdom and the greatest spiritual insight. Disciples began to gather about her.
She began now to be a problem not only to her family, but to her bishop. Michael de la Bedoyere says of her, "One feels nowadays a person like Catherine, neither nun nor lay-woman, the object of extravagant devotion on the part of local friars, the 'Mamma' of a completely unsupervised group of men and women of all ages, and a self-constituted theologian and spiritual director of all and sundry, clearly the cause of much gossip and criticism, would have caused many sleepless nights to her bishop, and even anxiety to the police."
Nonetheless, the general chapter of Dominicans of Florence gave Catherine its approval and appointed Father Raymond of Capua as her confessor. So numerous were the cases of conscience with which she dealt that three Dominicans were specially charged with hearing the confessions of those who were induced by her to amend their lives.
During the summer of 1370, she experienced a series of visions and heard a divine command to enter the public life of the world. Catherine began correspondence with the princes and republics of Italy, was consulted by papal legates about the affairs of the Church, and set herself to heal the wounds of her native land, which was ravaged by civil war and factions. Above all, she implored the pope, Gregory XI, to leave Avignon. Although she was not able to avert the tumult of civil war, she made such a profound impression on the pope that, in spite of the opposition of the French king and almost the entire Sacred College, he left Avignon and returned to Rome on January 17, 1377. Because of her work in bringing the pope back to the See of Peter, Saint Catherine has been named a patron of Rome.
After helping to bring about peace between the Republic of Florence and the new pope, she returned to Siena, where she passed a few months of comparative quiet dictating her Dialogue, the book of her meditations and revelations.
In the meantime, the Great Schism broke out. In November of 1378, Catherine repaired to Rome, where she supported the cause of the true pope. But this schism could not be solved by politics. Sacrifice was required.
Catherine besought Christ to let her bear the punishment for the sins of the world and to receive the sacrifice of her body for the unity and renovation of the Church. This petition was answered by a vision in which the Bark of Peter was laid upon her shoulders, crushing her with its weight.
After a prolonged and mysterious agony, during which she was paralyzed from the waist downward, Catherine died on April 29, 1380. Through suffering, she had stepped across the threshold into eternal joy. But then, for Catherine, heaven had always been right at the threshold. It was she who had said, "All the way to heaven is heaven because He said, 'I am the Way.'"
—The Lives of the Saints for every day of the year, Vol. 1: January-April
Patronage: against bodily ills; against fire; against illness; against miscarriages; against sexual temptation; against sickness; against temptations; fire prevention; firefighters; nurses; nursing services; people ridiculed for their piety; sick people; Theta Phi Alpha sorority; Europe (declared by Pope John Paul II); Italy; diocese of Allentown, Pennsylvania; diocese of Gamboma, Congo; diocese of Macau, China; Siena, Italy; Varazze, Italy
Symbols and Representation: Cross; heart; lily; ring; stigmata; crown of thorns
Highlights and Things to Do:
- Read St. Catherine's Dialogue.
- Listen to the interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mirus in the Catholic Culture podcasts. He mentions the influence of a biography of St. Catherine.
- Learn more about St. Catherine:
- Catholic Encyclopedia
- Catholic Ireland Part 1 and Part 2
- Saint Stories for All Ages
- Anastpaul
- CatholicSaints.info has many links to e-books and her writings.
- Find quotes from St. Catherine of Siena at the Catholic Reader.
- See her statue in St. Peter's Basilica Colonnade.
- Read 8 Things to Know and Share About St. Catherine of Siena at the National Catholic Register.
- Learn more about the Order of Preachers or Dominicans founded by St. Dominic.
- See Catholic Cuisine for some clever food ideas for this saint.
St. Hugh of Cluny
St. Hugh was a prince related to the sovereign house of the dukes of Burgundy, and had his education under the tuition of his pious Mother, and under the care of Hugh, Bishop of Auxerre, his great-uncle. From his infancy he was exceedingly given to prayer and meditation, and his life was remarkably innocent and holy.
One day, hearing an account of the wonderful sanctity of the monks of Cluny, under St. Odilo, he was so moved that he set out that moment, and going thither, humbly begged the monastic habit. After a rigid novitiate, he made his profession in 1039, being sixteen years old.
His extraordinary virtue, especially his admirable humility, obedience, charity, sweetness, prudence, and zeal, gained him the respect of the whole community; and upon the death of St. Odilo, in 1049, though only twenty-five years old, he succeeded to the government of that great abbey, which he held sixty-two years.
He received to the religious profession Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, and died on the twenty-ninth of April, in 1109, aged eighty-five.
He was canonized twelve years after his death by Pope Calixtus II.
—Excerpted from Lives of the Saints, by Alban Butler, Benziger Bros. ed. 1894
Patronage: against fever
Highlights and Things to Do:
- Read more about St. Hugh:
