fearless Catherine of Sienna

TO preserve the unity of the Church has from the beginning been the heartfelt desire of all its finest minds and spirits. In the 14th century the whole of Europe was racked by the wars that marked the emergence of the great national states of today, and the only authority capable of defining state boundaries, and so bringing peace, was that of the Papacy.
Most of the countries concerned were ruled by Catholic kings who relied on the Church to provide them with learned counsellors and clerical staff for the conduct of both internal and foreign affairs, but the impartiality of the Popes became suspect because, for most of the century, they lived, not in Rome, but in Avignon, a small city-state in the south of France, nominally independent, but in practice subservient to the French.
Italians, especially the people of Rome, considered this a great scandal, and the scholar-poet Petrarch spoke for them in a letter to Pope Innocent VI: "While you lie sleeping under your gilded roof by the banks of the Rhone, the Lateran lies in ruins. When will you come?" There was no response, but in 1347, a girl was born in the city-state of Sienna, between Florence and Rome, who was destined to succeed where Petrarch had failed. Her mother, Lapa, the wife of a prosperous dyer, Giacomo Benincasa, had already borne him 23 children when she gave birth to twin girls. One died within days, but the other, Catherine, grew up to be a woman of extraordinary physical energy allied to great charm and intelligence.
Unlike her brothers and sisters, some of whom were already married, she had the undivided attention of her mother, an extrovert who played a vigorous part in the turbulent politics of Sienna. Catherine was attracted by the Dominicans, whose great church stood near their home. She became a tertiary of the order, living in the town, gathering round her a company of lay people who brought about a great revival of religion in the surrounding countryside.
The first Avignon Pope to realise that the Papacy was losing its power and possessions in central Italy was Gregory XI, a cultured, but rather timid Frenchman. "Down with the foreigner" became a popular slogan in Italy, and, when war broke out between Florence and the Papal States, the Papal Nuncio wrote asking Catherine to visit Florence, to ascertain on what terms its rulers would make peace.
Having done so, she travelled to Avignon and had reached agreement, when a Florentine delegation arrived and repudiated her. But something much more important had happened, Gregory had become one of Catherine's greatest admirers.
Gregory died in March 1378 and the Cardinals elected a Neapolitan to succeed him, Urban VI, a virtuous but very impatient man, who had first met Catherine in Avignon and thought so highly of her political insight and courage that he made her his closest adviser.
The French cardinals, who had surreptitiously left Rome, held an uncanonical conclave at which they elected Clement VII. Catherine was appalled by this disloyalty and wrote to Urban: "I have learned that those devils in human form have chosen not a Vicar of Christ, but an antiChrist. Holy Father, go without fear into battle, go with the armour of Divine love to cover you."
In a letter written about 1376 to Nicolo Soderini of Florence, Catherine had declared: "What is sweeter than peace? It was that last will and testament which Jesus Christ left to his disciples. So great is my grief at war which will destroy so many of you, body and soul, that I would readily, if it were possible, give my life a thousand times to stop it."
Stephen and Elizabeth Usherwood