Today, of course, is her feastday.
From a couple of years ago, a column in Aleteia that is basically an excerpt from the book Praying with the Pivotal Players and the sections on Catherine:
Blood. Some of us are wary of the sight of it or even repulsed, but in Catherine’s landscape, there is no turning away. The biological truth that blood is life and the transcendent truth that the blood of Christ is eternal life are deeply embedded in her spirituality. We see these truths in the Dialogue, in passages like the one above, and even in her correspondence.
For in her letters, Catherine usually begins by immediately setting the context of the message that is about to come: Catherine, servant and slave of the servants
of Jesus Christ, write to you in his precious blood….
The salutation is followed by a brief statement of her purpose, which, by virtue of Catherine’s initial positioning of her words in the context of the life-giving blood of Jesus, bear special weight and authority: in his precious blood… desiring to see you a true servant….desiring to see you obedient daughters…desiring to see you burning and consumed in his blazing love…desiring to see you clothed in true and perfect humility….
In both the Dialogue and her letters, Catherine takes this fundamental truth about salvation – that it comes to us through the death, that is, the blood of Christ – and works with it in vivid, startling ways. She meets the challenges of describing the agonies and ecstasies of the spiritual life with rich, even wild metaphors, and the redemptive blood of Christ plays its part here. For as she describes this life of a disciple, we meet Christ’s friends, followers, sheep, lovers as those drunk on his blood, inebriated. They are washed in the blood and they even drown in it:
In 2016, Siena was a part of our three weeks in Italy. It did not end up being the thoughtful pilgrimage day I had for years envisioned. We did not stay overnight there, but stopped for an afternoon on the way from our days in Sorano to Florence. And then it rained. Because of that, and because of restrictions on photography in many of the Catherine-related sites, my photos are limited…but here are some of them.
Oh, and of course, Catherine is also in the Loyola Kids Book of Saints.
