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, 2026 (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 Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Easter:
The Good Shepherd
1. "I am the good shepherd." In the homily for the third nocturnal of the divine office for this Sunday, St. Gregory tells us that "The good shepherd laid down His life for His sheep that He might change His body and blood into our Sacrament, and that He might satisfy with the nourishment of His own flesh, the sheep which He had redeemed" (Homily of the third nocturn).
2. Just why did Christ wish to remain on earth under the appearance of bread and wine? Certainly He did wish to nourish our souls with the grace received in this sacrament. But He also had other reasons. By means of the Eucharist Christ found a means of transcribing all time and all space. Through the mystery of the Eucharist He provided a means whereby He could go on living and working among men just as He had done during His earthly career. Through this sacrament Christ continues and repeats all the acts of His private and public life. Just as He was once born in a little stable outside the sleeping hamlet of Bethlehem, so He is reborn each day on His altars throughout the world. Christmas is repeated each day in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Perhaps one might say that the second important event in the life of Christ was His manifestation of Himself to the world in the visit of the Magi. We are told that these Holy Wise Men from the East came seeking the new born King whose star they had seen, and that they found Him in the manger where He had been laid by the virginal hands of His Blessed Mother. Filled with joy they entered the stable and offered Him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. This event is repeated now too, a thousand times a day, for the wise men of the world still come in search of Him, and they find Him where He has been laid by the hands of a virginal Priesthood, in the tabernacles of our altars. The gifts that they bring Him are the same: the gold of their love, the incense of their prayer, and the myrrh of their repentant hearts.
Perhaps nowhere does Christ so clearly demonstrate that He wishes to continue His role as the Good Shepherd as in His life in the Blessed Sacrament. One of the Evangelists says of Him, "He went about doing good." This would still be an excellent summary of what Christ does in the Eucharist. Just as He once mingled with the crowds in Jerusalem, Caesarea, and the cities and towns of Palestine, so today he goes about searching out the halt, the lame, the sick, the sorrowing and the dying in the great cities and the small hamlets of the world.
There is not a day of the year, nor an hour of the day when He is not being carried in the arms of His priests to visit the sick, the sorrowing and the dying. Sometimes at the favorite shrines of His Blessed Mother, such as Lourdes, Fatima, Sainte Anne de Beaupré, He still works the same physical miracles which He once worked in Palestine. But more often, daily even, He works spiritual miracles through His sacraments, restoring spiritual sight to those who have been blinded by the sophistries of the world, the power of spiritual hearing to those who have long been deaf to the voice of their uneasy consciences, and the power of contrite speech to sinners so that they can fall on their knees before His representatives and say, "Father, I have sinned before heaven and thee." Many a Magdalen still comes stumbling to His feet, disheveled and disillusioned, and is sent away with the same kind admonition, "Go now, and sin no more."
3. Principally, of course, the Eucharist is a representation and a repetition of His sacrificial death on the cross. The victim of this sacrifice is the same, and the principal Priest is the same. It is Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, offering Himself again to His Heavenly Father. But we are assured in the Canon of the Mass that this sacrifice is offered "calling to mind the blessed Passion of the same Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, and also His Resurrection from hell, and also His glorious Ascension into heaven."
For almost two thousand years now, men have been trying to bury Christ in a tomb of stone. But Christ will not stay buried, for through the mystery of the Eucharist He has found a means of rising from the dead. We may well imagine the chagrin, the surprise, perhaps even the despair of the Scribes and Pharisees when they learned that Christ had actually risen from the dead. When they were seeking a charge on which He could be put to death, the High Priest had told them, "If we let Him alone so, all will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away our place and our nation" (John 11:48). They feared Christ would cause them to lose the petty marble palaces in which they were living; they feared He would cut off the tribute of gold and silver they were collecting from the poor; they feared that He would arouse the Romans and endanger their limited national sovereignty. And now they knew the truth. The only palace in which Christ had ever wanted to dwell was the palace of the human soul; and the only kingdom He had ever wanted to rule was the kingdom of the human heart; and the only tribute He had ever sought was the tribute of human love. Pontius Pilate and the Scribes and the Pharisees are gone now, and sometime soon, all those who are still trying to drive Christ from the world He created, and to bury Him in a tomb, will all be gone. But Christ will be here fulfilling through the Eucharist that promise He made so long ago, "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" (Matt. 28:20).
—Benedict Baur, OSB, The Light of the World, Vol. 2.
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 Catholic Culture's Way of the Fathers Podcasts on St. Catherine of Siena by Dr. James Papandrea:
- 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:
