Chapter XVII: Catherine and the Mothers

Tuesday, December 18, 2012
One week til Christmas!

Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset
Chapter XVII

Catherine, on her way home, is delayed in Genoa.  There is a great deal of sickness amongst the rest of her train.  It is unclear if other matters keep her here, but I find it interesting that the moment one follower is healed another falls ill.  Most of her secretaries languish at some point, and Undset talks about the very public life the saint now has.

A healthy section of the chapter is also the complaining not only of Catherine's mother Lapa that she is not yet home but the mother's of her younger followers, particularly Stefano Maconi.  Catherine writes them with the common theme of patience and an exhortation to love their children's souls more than their body and physical proximity.

I feel like this is a subject sitcom mothers are constantly facing in our day - I think of True Blood's Maxine who would vastly prefer that her son Hoyt fail and fall back into a childish state of dependence on her than stand up and be his own man and move out.  Maxine, of course, is the thoroughly upsetting, gross version of this (although she is to be pitied in turn for how her hate swallows her).  But it's a very human thing - to want those we love near us even more than we want them to be great.

It is a very hard thing to love someone's soul more than their body - more than their worldly manifestation.  To want salvation and love of God and spiritual blessedness or even just good works and for them to do great works in this world more than we love their company, their presence, their proximity, the active shows of their love of us.

Undset even mentions the idea of serving God but also tending to those in the world whom you love.

But at the end of the chapter we learn why Catherine and the boys with her could not have given in to their mothers.  Gregory XI needed her again.  His cardinals and natural circumstances had conspired to convince him to return to Avignon, but he knew that little Catherine Benincasa was in town.  So he dressed in the robes of a simple priest and snuck out to see her, put the fate of the Church in her hands, and kept heading to Rome.

Saying such a thing to Lapa - if she even knew that was the reason God did not yet call her to continue her journey home - would have sounded ridiculous.  Following the Spirit in these circumstances requires either God to arrange an elaborate conspiracy or for a saint to be willing to follow the Spirit's urgings against the protests of common sense, practical matters, and even calls of the heart.  This is a ferociously hard thing to do.

Catherine's iron will shows it self to me above all in things like this.  I have no doubt that God told her to stay where she was despite her longing to return home, her letters from her mother, her weariness with her fame and the politics in Genoa, etc. ad nauseam.  But she stayed, with probably little explanation.  That takes a greater will than facing down a pope.