2. Of St. Catherine of Siena.

The virgin of Christ Catherine, an Italian by nation and born in the city of Siena, loved God fervently, and served Him zealously from her earliest years. When she was yet a little child, and had been taught the Hail Mary, she was accustomed to salute the Mother of the Lord at each of the steps by which she entered her father’s house. She was devoted to prayer and most familiar with God.

Our Lord also interiorly invited and attracted her to adopt a supernatural austerity of life. For she chastised with the utmost severity her tender virginal 298body. She sometimes remained without food from Ash Wednesday to the Ascension, satisfied with the reception of the Holy Eucharist alone. For several years she took nothing for the refreshment of her body but a little juice of herbs; and she became seriously and dangerously ill if she was constrained to take anything else. She seldom slept more than two hours, lying on a very hard bed, which she had made for herself of planks of wood.

The Lord however taught her that true holiness consists not in these arduous works of penance and bodily exercises, but in the mortification of self-will and of evil dispositions; and that he would greatly err, who should measure perfection rather by great severity of life than by true humility and love.

Although her manner of life was singular, it is not to be reproved, since she adopted and pursued it by the impulse and by the will and special assistance of the Holy Ghost. Thus we see by what different paths the elect of God are outwardly led. For St. Bridget refreshed her body discreetly and moderately with food and sleep, as nature required. So we think did the most holy virgins Mechtildis and Gertrude; and we do not read of them that they embraced any unusual austerity of life, for they were often prevented by weakness from keeping their rule in its severity. But St. Catherine led a life of unheard-of abstinence and austerity, and she is in this respect rather to be admired, than lightly imitated.

She ever approached with the utmost alacrity the Sacrament of the Altar (which she received almost 299daily), as if she had been invited to heavenly nuptials. She overcame divers temptations of the malignant spirits with the shield of patience and the helmet of faith. She suffered frequently from pains in her head, and almost continually from a severe pain in her side.

She abounded with such plenitude of grace and was so firmly united to God, that her mind seemed to be almost incessantly occupied in divine contemplation. She was very often taken out of her bodily senses and fell into extasy by the operation of God, and then her whole body became stiff. In these extasies she often perceived things so sublime, that, returning to her senses, she could in no way find words fitly to explain what she understood by divine enlightenment. Wherefore she repeated again and again, these words only: “I have seen the hidden things of God.”

Thirsting for the salvation of souls, she gave precepts of salvation to men in the various places to which she travelled, and by the grace of God worked many miracles. She died in the thirty-third year of her life, and was received into heaven.¹⁰¹⁰   A.D. 1380.