O God, who set Saint Catherine of Siena on fire with divine love in her contemplation of the Lord’s Passion and her service of your Church, grant, through her intercession, that your people, participating in the mystery of Christ, may ever exult in the revelation of his glory.
The Collect touches upon several characteristics of the virgin doctor’s spirituality: her meditation on the sufferings of Christ, her ardent love for God, and her service to the Church.
She wrote much: 382 letters, prayers, and a treatise entitled the Dialogue of Divine Providence.
In her letter reflecting on the Lord’s Passion, she wrote: “Remember Christ crucified..make your aim the crucified Christ; hide in the wounds of the Crucified Christ and drown in the blood of the Crucified Christ.”
Her life was filled with extraordinary mystical phenomena such as visions and revelations, raptures, mystical marriage, and the stigmata, and also great works of charity: nursing the sick and comforting prisoners in jail. She received the holy stigmata on her hands, feet and heart. Originally, her stigmata were visible, but in humility she prayed that they not be seen by others, and her prayer was answered. However, at her death, the stigmata reappeared. Catherine, also lived many years, eating nothing, save the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Catherine also had the gift of tears, as the Lord wept at the death of Lazarus, those with the gift of tears weep in union with the sorrowful Christ for souls.
St. Catherine’s body is also totally incorrupt, and is preserved in the beautiful gothic basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. I visited her a few times in that amazing basilica. I also had the honor of attending Mass on, this, her feast day, in the small chapel behind the sacristy of the basilica. During her life, the Pope, instead of residing in Rome, resided in Avignon, France. Rightly, St. Catherine prayed for the return of the Pope, she wrote him letters pleading with Him to return to the Holy See. She would attend Mass make a daily pilgrimage from that small chapel to St. Peter Basilica in the Vatican. Catherine lived to see Pope Gregory XI move the See of Peter back to Rome, in 1377.
This great saint died in Rome in 1380. Even though she barely reached the age of thirty-three her accomplishments place her among the great women of the Middle Ages. She was proclaimed a saint by Pope Pius II in 1461. In 1970, Pope Paul VI declared St. Catherine a Doctor of the Church.
As a universal doctor, Catherine teaches all of us to fervent seek God and to serve Him with our whole hearts. Listen to her words from this morning’s office of reading’s: “You are a mystery as deep as the sea;” she says, “the more I search, the more I find, and the more I find, the more I search for you. But I can never be satisfied; what I receive will ever leave me desiring more. When you fill my soul, I have an even greater hunger, and I grow more famished for your light.”
May each of us like Saint Catherine be set aflame with divine love, be united to the Lord in his sufferings, and be devoted to the building up and serving his Holy Church for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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