Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)
Catherine Benincasa, the last of the 25 children of Ser Jacopo and Monna Lapa, was born in Siena on 25 March 1347. While she was six years old, she had a spiritual experience that marked her life in a decisive way: in the sky directly above the church of the Dominican fathers, Jesus appeared to her, seated on a beautiful throne. From that day onwards, she spent much time in solitude, dedicating herself to prayer and practising penance. Her family, particularly her mother, tried to dissuade her from her intention of consecrating herself to the Lord, and kept her busy with heavy domestic work.But she had another crucial vision in this period, in which she saw St Dominic inviting her to enter his Order, clothing her with the habit of the Sisters of Penance.
Overcoming various difficulties, at sixteen years of age Catherine finally put on the habit of the Mantellate, leisured women, mostly widows, who followed the spirituality of St Dominic and assisted the Dominican fathers mainly through their services to the needy.
During this time, she continued to cultivate her passion for penance and contemplation; she had frequent visions and meetings with her Spouse, with whom she celebrated a mystical marriage on 2 March 1367.
From this moment, after 20 years of pure contemplation, intense social and political activity began for her. Catherine began to walk the city streets, went into prisons and the most dangerous districts, dedicating herself to care for the suffering, to people forgotten in hospitals, especially lepers, bringing medicines, and consoling those at the point of death.
The numerous letters sent by her to people of all social categories to counsel, comfort, reprove and encourage them were a major and intense activity.
Catherine felt strongly challenged by the political situation of her time, characterised by:
• widespread corruption inside and outside the Church, which was engaged in wars, and connived with temporal power; so preoccupied with its own interests that the Pope transferred the papal see to Avignon, in France.
• fragmentation of power among a huge number of princes in continual fratricidal conflict over obtaining power and possessing money.
With sorrow, Catherine discovered that the society in which she lived “did not know and love the Truth”. So she left Siena and undertook a series of journeys as a mediator of peace between the Pope and various cities - Pisa, Lucca, Florence-which were in continual conflict with the Papal State. She also went to Avignon, and, after much labour, succeeded in persuading the Pope to return to his See in Rome.
Catherine’s passion for God and for the salvation of her brothers and sisters found an echo in the hearts of many people who were the origin of the so-called “Beautiful Brigade”. These were men and women, politicians and artists, nobles and commoners, laity, priests and religious who considered her as their “Mother”, some serving as her secretaries and following her in her missions of peace.
Having poured into the “Dialogue” her deep knowledge of the divine Mystery revealed in Jesus, and consumed by her total self-giving to the Divine Mercy, Catherine died in Rome on 29 April 1380, without seeing the Church, divided by the great Western Schism, reconciled, but offering her life for that Church she had so loved and for which she had sacrificed so much.
Saint Dominic of Guzman (1170-1221)
At the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the13th, Western Europe was struck by notable changes at a political, social and ecclesial level:
• feudalism was in crisis and losing its vigour: small states came into existenceand supportedthe rights of individuals against the power of the nobles;
• a relative peace facilitated the development of commerce. New cities came into being and quickly asserted their independence;
• peace encouraged a population explosion; people left the countryside, which was no longer the centre of life.The new town-dwellers organised themselves into corporations with their own laws, while the monasteries, formerly centres of rural evangelisation, lost their influence. At this time, great cathedrals were being built;
• the Church itself was passing through a strong crisis: there was the interior scandal of the wealth of the hierarchy and inadequate formation of priests; exteriorly, heretical movements seemed to have great success, and caused confusion among the people.
Dominic was part of this historical picture. He was born in 1171 at Caleruega in Old Castile, and his parents were Felix di Guzman andJane of Aza.
Towards the age of seven he was entrusted to a priest uncle for his education and spiritualformation. At the age of fifteen he went to the university of Palencia, and in this period, during a famine, he experienced at first hand the suffering of the people, becoming aware that to study or preach the Word of God meant incarnating it. With characteristic ardour, he sold all his books: "I cannot continue to study on dead skins when the poor, my brothers and sisters, are dying of hunger”.
In 1198 we find him,now a young priest, among the Canons Regular of the cathedral of Osma, where, in silence and prayer, he dedicated himself to contemplation and study in order to know the true face of God revealed in the Scriptures, and, above all, in Jesus crucified. In this period, he also experienced the strength and value of community.
His life now seemed to be definitively traced out. But in 1204, chosen by his bishop, Diego, as companion for a delicate diplomatic mission in Denmark, he abandoned Spain and its securities for an adventure that was life-changing both for himself and for others. He was 33 years old, and would never return to his homeland.
Two particularly powerful meetings were the “crucible” in which the Lord forged for Dominic the heart of a “preacher”.
• At Toulouse, he had his first direct contact with catharist and albigensian heresy: he spent the whole night in discussion with his inn-keeper, a catharist heretic, and led him to conversion.This is how Dominic discovered that he was called to preach to the heretics, to “give flesh” to the face of a compassionate and merciful God and Father who desires the salvation of all.
• At Montpellier, through a meeting with a group of catholic missionaries strongly opposed by the heretics because of their wealth, Dominic felt, like the God revealed in Jesus -“the servant without glory or honour”, that the Gospel could not be proclaimed on the basis of power and might: “Come down from your horses and go out two by two, in voluntary poverty …”.
The meeting with the Word and with those starved of bread and of truth would henceforth be for Dominic places of constant contemplation and complete self-giving, and make him into a “living Preaching”.
In 1215 Bishop Foulkes of Toulouse appointed him preacher to his diocese. During this time, friends gathered around him to share his zeal for preaching, for the salvation of the brothers and sisters; this first communityreceived official approval for the “Holy Preaching” from Pope Honorius III in December, 1216.
The work of the new preachers was sustained by the prayers of the nuns of Prouilhe, the monastery founded by Dominic for young converted catharist women.
Convinced that “grain goes bad if it not scattered everywhere,” in 1217 Dominic sent his sons to the university cities of Europe, to Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Cologne.
Between 1220 and 1221, Dominic established the ground plan for his Order: the brethren would be entirely “dedicated to the preaching of the Word”, committed to contemplation of the Word and to study, and distinguished by the search for Truth incarnated in an ever more universal fraternity.
Consumed by his apostolic passion, Dominic died at Bologna on 6 August, 1221. On 3 July 1234, Pope Gregory IV proclaimed him a SAINT.
Catherine-Gérine Fabre (1811-1887)
Mother Gérine’s era was characterised by deep social and political changes:
*violent conflict between current revolutionaries and royalists
*rapid industrial transformation and powerful streams of migration from the countryside to the cities
*exploitation of manual labourers and children in work
*very limited attention to education and health
and by a radical change of mentality: the search for individual profit and greater autonomy at the religious level.
Our Foundress was born on 22 April 1811 in a poor village in central France, and baptised with the name of Françoise-Catherine.
She belonged to a modest family, the second of seven children. To find work, her father frequently moved around, and she soon had to leave school to help her mother care for her younger brothers and sisters. While she was still a teenager, she and her sisters began to take part in the activities of the Dominican lay movement; she entered the local fraternity of Chaudes-Aigues, and made profession taking the name of Marguerite Gérine.
During her long walks to Chaudes-Aigues, she often halted at a small sanctuary dedicated to Our Lady to contemplate the “Pietà”. It was before this representation of Mary supporting in her arms the dead and disfigured body of Jesus, that Gérine’s heart opened to compassion, and her desire intensified to make the poor the place where she would give her life to the Lord.
In 1842 she went to Toulouse, where she founded a new community of Dominican Tertiaries, women who lived together in the service of the sick and in prayer, in the light of the spirituality of St Dominic. Despite the difficulties encountered at all beginnings, the communities multiplied rapidly.
Confirmed in her Dominican vocation by P. Lacordaire, re-establisher of the Dominican Order in France, Gérine made St Dominic’s experience as a Founder the fundamental inspiration for her communities and their apostolic service.
In 1852, established in Albi, she laid the foundations of the Congregation of Dominican Sisters of St Catherine of Siena, and became its Superior General for life in 1865. In the space of a few years, new communities of sisters were established in Italy and in Latin America.
Gérine, an intense lover of St Catherine of Siena, chose the saint of Siena as “Mother and Mistress” of her Congregation, so that her daughters could learn from her to be true Dominicans at the heart of the world.
On 3 September 1879, historical and religious reasons constrained Mother Gérine to relinquish her charge as leader of the Congregation, and she presented her resignation to the Archbishop of Albi; the communities of Italy decided to form themselves into a religious Family distinct from that of France.
For eight long years, the Foundress lived, in her own flesh and with total abandonment to the Lord, the mystery of the Cross. She died in solitude at Carcassonne on 31 December 1887.
It was precisely this suffering and this solitude that formed the “liberated space” that would enable the God of Mercy to “provide” and to “sow” his Life in abundance.
TERESA SOLARI (1822 - 1908)
The servant of God Domenica Caterina of the Holy Spirit (Mother Teresa Solari) is very dear to our Congregation, which began the process for her beatification. She founded the Dominican Sisters of the Little House of Divine Providence, who have been with us since 1990.
Teresa Solari was born at Nè, in the neighbourhood of Chiavari, Italy, in the year 1822 or 1823. She was left motherless at a very early age; and experienced at first hand the hard task of earning her bread.
Following a recovery in hospital, she came to know the young Antonietta Cervetto, and when they left hospital they put into action the project of charity to which they felt strongly God’s will was inspiring them: as Dominican religious to receive and educate orphaned and needy girls.
Teresa dedicated forty years of her life to the exhausting task of questing for food for those she had taken into her care: the people of Genoa became co-operators in her charity, and Heaven itself often intervened directly with extraordinary answers to trustful prayers.
Very special spiritual graces and physical and moral trials alternated in her life, making this humble, illiterate creature an extraordinary participant in the mystery of divine Love, and compassionate towards her neighbour.
At her death on 7 May 1908, the Municipality, as a sign of gratitude for her prodigious charity, donated a burial place for her in the Staglieno cemetery. From that time on, her tomb has been the goal of incessant pilgrimage for those who pray to her, above all, for the solution of family problems. Innumerable ex-votos testify that she has come with solicitude to meet the needs of families.
The Cause for Mother Teresa Solari’s beatification and canonisation is at present lodged with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints at Rome, where the process for recognition of her heroic virtue is in progress, also that for the recognition of the miracle attributed to the Servant of God in favour of the boy Stefano Tchamou Tetsopguim.