SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA 

DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH

On 4 October 1970, St. Catherine of Siena was declared by Pope Paul VI "Doctor of the Church". Currently, in the Latin Church, there are 36 saints recognized as "doctors" of which 4 are women. The title of "doctor of the Church" is conferred on those who have been canonically recognized by the Church as "saints" and who, through their holiness of life and their doctrine, have contributed to the knowledge and deepening of Revelation.

St. Catherine, in an era, the second half of the 1300s, a historical period of profound changes and a profound crisis at the civil, political, social, and religious level, lives her being a Christian woman to the full. Catherine's experience of God is contained in an encounter, the one she will do from an early age with Jesus who manifests himself in the basilica of St. Dominic. The Pontiff Christ, who will forever fill her life with wonder and beauty, therefore has a particular face for Catherine: that of the Son of God made a bridge between heaven and earth in the flesh of his humanity. This intuition, the core of her vocation, leads her to welcome and live fully, through the chrism of St. Dominic, the grace of the Word.

Catherine, in assiduous and punctual listening to the Word, lives, with all of herself, the experience of a God who reveals himself not so much as a doctrine to be practiced, but as a person to love in a personal relationship capable of involving all of the existence. The Christian God meets man, every man, in the flesh of the Son for no other reason than love. Catherine's God is a God who speaks and who tells his story and his desire for salvation for every man. He is a God who is passionate about the destiny of man, who, tossed about by the waves of sin, can get to lose the image of God, that resemblance to his creator that makes him capable in him of being a bearer and communicator of life. It is a question of a God so in love with his creature that, in order to lead her back to communion with himself, he is capable of giving her the Blood, the life of his own Son.

The Word heard and lived is therefore for Catherine that "existential place" in which to experience communion with God. For Catherine, it is thus a question of knowing and deepening in a personal relationship the mystery of God who, revealing him, reveals man to himself and, loving him to the point of giving himself, allows him to discover and live the call to correspond to his gift of grace and love.

The memory of the gift of salvation, which the Father gives to every man in the person of the Son, leads Catherine to the cell of self-knowledge, the place where God's love is revealed and where the man with the "light of faith ", Dynamic adherence to him of all his being, discovers, cultivates and puts into practice the plan to correspond to God's will. This will never be an abstract and ideal search, but intelligent access into history, events, and experiences to understand how and where to give flesh to the Word, a gift of clemency and mercy that God wants to give to the whole world.

Catherine, far from complaining about the evils of her time, in the passionate search for the face of God, in the concreteness of the events and of the people who shared her historical existence, also discovers that the Word is alive in the community of brothers. The Church that houses the "blood bodega” is the place where grace is given to every man so that he can in turn become the lover of every man saved and renewed in Love. The community of brothers is the place that makes one's own experience of salvation "real" through the exercise of fraternal charity: only mutual love is capable of continually recreating those same sentiments of Christ who, despite being God, in loving obedience to Father, he gave us the gift of his life. The Church, the spouse of Christ, thus gives Catherine the truth of the encounter with God and shows her in the daily practice of the virtues how to live this experience to the full: through the continuous "birth" of the grace received which, in turn, becomes life in the events of history so that man, every man, can return to God.

Catherine is therefore not the only a herald of the Gospel but also an educator of the experience of God. In fact, if God in his Son gives himself freely to every man, this does not take away the freedom to respond to his initiative. The knowledge of love, with which he concretely meets us and with which he clothes us, calls each one to generate himself to the life of grace and, in the gift of the Spirit, to recognize his own vocation as children called to live, to love mercy. in gratuitousness perennially loving the Father. Only this existence like that of Mary becomes an "obedient" relationship capable of listening and communicating to every man the profound meaning of the Word that becomes flesh and its gift of grace.

The holiness of Catherine, a doctor of the Church, is that of a Christian woman who for love of God did not place conditions on God in her life. It is therefore not so much a question of admiring her extraordinary experiences or boasting of the greatness of her doctrine, as much as rather return to the essentiality of the Gospel to live in the current historical context, each in his own vocation, the fullness of being true Christians certain that "each saint is a mission, planned by the Father to reflect and embody, at a specific moment in history, a certain aspect of the Gospel" (Gaudium et Spes 19).

Sr. Amelia Grilli (Rome)