St. Catherine of Siena (2026)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

Born in Siena in 1347, Catherine Benincasa, as a young girl, joined the Dominican Third Order, and was outstanding for her spirit of prayer and penance. Impelled by a great love for God, for the Church, and for the Roman Pontiff, she worked tirelessly for the peace and unity of the Church in the difficult years of the Avignon captivity. She spent much time at the papal court trying to persuade Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome because that was the place from which Christ’s Vicar on earth ought to rule the Church.

She said, “If I die, let it be known that I die of passion for the Church.” She said this a few days before her death, which took place on the 29th of April, 1380. She wrote very many letters, of which about 400 have survived, along with some prayers and elevations and just one book, The Dialogue, which contains her own account of her intimate conversations with Our Lord.

She was canonized by Pius II, and her veneration spread rapidly throughout the whole of Europe. St. Teresa of Avila said that after God, the person she felt most indebted to for her spiritual progress was St. Catherine of Siena. Pius IX declared her the second patron saint of Italy, together with St. Francis of Assisi. In 1970, Pope Paul VI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church.

In a homily in 1980, Pope St. John Paul said, although she did not have the benefit of a very formal education—she learned to read and write as an adult and was only 33 years old when she died—St. Catherine of Siena led an extraordinarily full and fruitful life, as if she was in a great hurry to reach the eternal tabernacle of the Blessed Trinity. She is a wonderful example to us of love for the Church and for the Roman Pontiff, whom she described as the “sweet Christ on earth.”

She is also a wonderful example of forthrightness and courage in making herself heard by the people of her time. We can ask her today in our prayer to help us precisely in that endeavor, in doing what’s called the apostolate of public opinion, spreading good ideas, spreading doctrine. It should be a passion of every Christian.

At the time that she was living, it was a particularly troublesome time in the Church. The Popes lived in Avignon in the south of France. Rome, as the center of Christianity, had been allowed to fall into decay. Our Lord made St. Catherine see that it was necessary for the Popes to return to Rome in order to inaugurate the long-awaited and very urgent reform of Church life.

To this end, she prayed tirelessly, practiced penance, and wrote unceasingly to the Pope, to Cardinals, and to the various princes of Christendom. She always professed an unswerving obedience and love for the Roman Pontiff, of whom she wrote, “Anyone who refuses to obey the Christ on earth, who is in the place of the Christ in Heaven, does not participate in the fruit of the blood of the Son of God.”

St. Paul VI wrote, she continuously sent urgent appeals to cardinals, bishops, and priests for the reform of the Church and Christian living, and didn’t shrink from taking them to task seriously, although always with great humility and respect for their dignity because they are ministers of the blood of Christ.

It was principally to the Church’s pastors that she addressed herself again and again, realizing that the spiritual health of the flock depended to a great extent on their own conversion and exemplary behavior. Today, as we celebrate her feast, we could ask St. Catherine to enable us to rejoice with the joys of our mother the Church and to suffer with her sorrows.

We can ask ourselves how hard we pray each day for her pastors, and how generously we offer mortifications and hours of work and bear patiently life’s difficulties, all the sacrifices of which help the Holy Father to carry the tremendous responsibility that God has placed on his shoulders. We can pray for her intercession that the “sweet Christ on earth” may never be short of trustworthy helpers.

In The Furrow, we’re told: “I thought the comment on loyalty you had written to me was very appropriate to all those moments in history which the devil makes it his business to repeat: ‘I carry with me every day in my heart, in my mind, on my lips, an aspiration: Rome.’” That word “Rome” can help our daily presence of God and serve as an expression of our unity with the Roman Pontiff and our prayer with him. It can also help us to increase our love for the Church.

St. Catherine had an admirably feminine temperament, at the same time displaying an unusual drive and energy. A feature somehow distinguishing those women who are capable of undergoing great sacrifices and of taking their place beside the Cross of Christ. She refused to tolerate any faintheartedness in the service of God. She was utterly convinced that when the salvation of souls was at stake, being unduly tolerant or understanding with mediocrity was totally unacceptable, because it is, in effect, a concession to laziness or cowardice.

“Enough of this soft soap,” she cried out. “All it does is cause the members of Christ’s spouse to stink.”

She was always fundamentally optimistic. She would not allow herself to become downhearted if, in spite of having done all she could, things did not work out as she had hoped. Throughout her life, she had a profoundly serious and gentle manner. Her followers always remembered her radiant expression and her open gaze. Spotlessly neat and well-groomed in her person, she was fond of flowers and loved to sing as she moved about.

When an important person of the time went at a friend’s insistence to interview her, he expected to meet a woman with downcast eyes and a diffident manner, and was greatly surprised to find himself in the presence of a young lady who greeted him warmly with a welcoming smile as if he had been a brother returning from a long journey.

Eventually, the Pope did return to Rome in 1377, but died a year later. His successor’s election marked the beginning of what is known in history as the Great Western Schism, an upheaval that caused tremendous division and suffering in the Church. St. Catherine spoke and wrote to cardinals and kings, to princes and bishops, but all in vain. Utterly worn out and in great sorrow, she offered herself to God as a victim for the Church.

One day in January 1380, as she was praying at St. Peter’s tomb, she experienced something that other saints have also shared. She felt upon her shoulders the immense weight of the Church. Her agony lasted just a few months. On the 29th of April, around midday, God called her to his glory.

On her deathbed, she directed to God this moving prayer. She said, “O eternal God, receive the sacrifice of my life on behalf of the mystical body of the holy Church. I have nothing else to give except what you have given me.”

A few days earlier, she had told her confessor, “I assure you that if I die, the sole cause of my death is the zeal and love for the Church which burns me up and consumes me.”

We can pray to her today for this incandescent love for our mother the Church, which is an inseparable concomitant of being close to Christ. Our own times, too, are days of trial and sorrow for Christ’s mystical body. We have to ask Our Lord with an unceasing clamor, said St. Josemaría, to shorten them, to look mercifully on his Church, and to grant once again his supernatural light to the souls of her shepherds and of all the faithful.

We can offer the thousand little incidents of each day for the welfare of Christ’s mystical body. God will surely bless us for it, and Our Lady, Mother of the Church, will pour out his grace generously upon us.

St. Catherine’s example teaches us to speak forthrightly and courageously whenever matters affecting the Church, the Roman Pontiff, or the good of souls are at stake. We will often have the serious obligation to defend the truth. In this, we can learn a lot from St. Catherine. She never gave way in the fundamentals because she placed all her trust in God.

In the letter of St. John, we read that “this is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you: that God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). This is where the first Christians and the saints of all times got their strength. What they proclaimed was not some doctrine of their own creation, but rather the message of Christ, handed on from each generation to the next.

The power of this truth transcends the changing fashions and attitudes of mankind’s history. We have to learn to speak about the things of God more and more naturally and straightforwardly, but at the same time with all the conviction that Christ has placed in our hearts.

The Roman Pontiffs have often denounced the systematic attempts by certain sectors of the media to misrepresent the truth by passing over in silence the sufferings of Catholics for the faith or their noble endeavors for good. Faced with this situation, each one of us in his or her place in society has to act as a mouthpiece for the truth.

Some popes have described the playing down of the contribution of Catholics to the literary, scientific, religious, or social life of nations as a conspiracy of silence. Often, the very fact that something is Catholic is enough to ensure that it never gets mentioned in the media.

We all have an important part to play in the apostolate of public opinion. At times, our personal sphere of influence may extend no further than the neighbors or friends we visit or who call on us, or we may be in a position to clarify some doctrinal issue by writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper, or by making a telephone call to a radio program where audience reaction on some controversial topic has been invited.

We may also have the opportunity to reply constructively to the questions of a survey or to recommend a good book to someone. We have to overcome any temptation to discouragement, thinking perhaps that we can do very little, because just as the current of a great river is fed by a network of tiny streams which in their turn have been formed drop by drop, our opportunity to contribute to the river of truth should never be omitted. That was how the first Christians started spreading the Gospel.

In The Forge, St. Josemaría says, “To think of Christ’s death means to be invited to face up to our everyday tasks with complete sincerity and to take the faith that we profess seriously. It has to be an opportunity to go deeper into the depths of God’s love so as to be able to show that love to men with our words and with our deeds.”

In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul has a strong phrase where he says we have to be unconditionally pro-life. We can ask Our Lord for the grace to see the consequences of that in our daily life: in our conversations with people, in the efforts we make to spread the truth about abortion, the truth about the sacredness of every human life, so that we turn society around. We have to bring about a great revolution in this area. A lot of this is tied up also to the truth about conjugal love.

Fulton Sheen used to say that this world is tearing up the photographs of the family, of marriage, of purity, modesty, chastity, virginity, but he said the Church is keeping the negatives. In each successive generation she reveals those negatives to different generations of people: the truth about conjugal love, the truth about marriage, about the family, about purity, modesty, chastity, virginity, all of which have to do with human love. We have to spread this truth in all sorts of ways, in season and out of season.

Also in The Forge, we’re told: “Make sure that your lips are the lips of a Christian, for that is what you are and should be at all times. Speak those compelling, supernatural words which will move and encourage and will show your committed attitude to life.”

I know somebody here in Kenya who was very limited physically, suffering from multiple sclerosis, but used to listen to the radio, and one time heard a program that was very pro-family. The program gave a certain telephone number that you would call if you wanted to react to the things that were being said in the program.

He took up the phone and called the program and said, “Well, I just want to say I was very impressed with your TV program. It was wonderful to hear those ideas, so pro-family.” Very short, brief phone call.

The following day, the compere of the show called back to thank him for calling into the program. Sometimes we think the whole world is calling into those programs, but it may often be that nobody is ever calling. He said, “I had a bit of a battle with my producer to give this pro-family orientation to this program, and it was an uphill struggle. But your call has meant an awful lot to me in terms of support, and also in helping me to win over my producer.”

Sometimes we don’t know the impact of the little things we do: the email that we may send to a newspaper, or the phone call we may make to a radio or TV program. We can ask St. Catherine of Siena that she might open up new horizons to us, of influence. Every Christian is called to have an influence. Hopefully, that influence can increase with the passage of time.

Possibly like that man that I’m mentioning, in our later years, we may not be so active, we may not be able to do many physical things, but sometimes our capacity to influence can be much greater to spread around good ideas. We can ask St. Catherine today to open up avenues of influence for us, to have our antennae out to see where we can influence more. We can ask her for the gift of writing or of speaking, or ask her for that grace to spend a few minutes each day writing a few ideas or a few words in response to an article in the newspaper. We’re here to create a river of truth.

They say you learn to swim by swimming. We might never have ever written a letter to a newspaper; we might never have phoned a TV program or a radio program. But we can learn to do these things. We can develop talents with the passage of time.

It’s also good to see if we’re reading good newspapers. If we find that the newspaper that we’re reading is very alien to Christian virtues, well maybe we should read a different newspaper, or maybe forget about any newspaper, and just get our news on social media. The same thing with articles or novels. Read good material. Read material that increases your vocabulary. Very often, St. Josemaría would write down a phrase or a word that he’d come across in an article and share it with people in a get-together. He was always attentive to seek out those phrases or words because he said, “These are the vehicles that we use to communicate the truth.”

As followers of Christ, we have to become expert communicators. There’s a Roman writer of the fourth century who said that clarity of expression lights up the beauty of the world. We can ask St. Catherine that we might grow in our clarity of expression, to find those words, those phrases. Other people have said that we become what we read. We should be careful with what we read. We may have little time to read, and so we should make sure that what we read is good, and use all our reading for apostolic purposes. Have this in mind when choosing to read: Is what I’m reading going to help me in the living out of my Christian vocation today?

We may not be good writers at the present moment, but it’s a talent we can acquire so as to have a greater influence with time.

In The Forge, St. Josemaría says, “Faithful in little things. My son, your job is not just to save souls, but to bring them to holiness day after day, giving to each moment, even to apparently ordinary moments, the dynamic echo of eternity.”

This can also lead us to see as part of that apostolate of public opinion the importance of doing apostolate with journalists, or people who by their profession have a capacity to influence. We can develop friendships with these people, channel good ideas to them. We might be very hidden and silent individuals, but we could have friends or acquaintances around us who may be in a very strong position to influence. We may have their ear because they see that we speak sense, or what we say is true and good.

Another way of being involved in the apostolate of public opinion could be to involve ourselves in citizens’ watch groups, vigilating media, or other pro-family groups, pro-life groups. A good question to ask ourselves is: what national and international organizations do I belong to? Am I in a position to increase that sphere of influence? Society very much needs that apostolate.

Establishing personal contact with journalists, photographers, filmmakers—these can be very interesting areas of apostolate. This apostolate comes to be more important all the time because of the importance of the media in a world which is more globalized all the time.

Some people need to be more prepared than others in this area, but we all need to be aware and have some form of preparation. We need to be able to explain certain key ideas. Sometimes we need to have slogans ready. Instead of people talking about “safe sex,” maybe we should talk about “smart sex”: having no sexual partner before you get married, and after you get married having only one partner. That’s smart sex.

There are also concrete ways to transmit our love for the Church. In one of his early encyclicals, The Mission of the Redeemer, John Paul II said, “The first Areopagus of the modern age is the world of communications.” The Areopagus in Athens was the sort of central place of culture, of business, of finance, of exchange of ideas, of interaction. He says the first Areopagus of the modern age is the world of communication, which is unifying humanity and turning it into what is known as a global village.

The means of social communication have become so important as to be for many the chief means of information and education, of guidance and inspiration in their behavior as individuals, families, and within society at large.

One great idea to try and have, as we see from this quotation, is to read the encyclicals of the Popes in recent years. The Catholic Church has an awful lot to say about modern society, and is continually commenting in order to Christianize. There are some great words and phrases there, and great ideas, all of which help us to put Christ in the middle of society, to place values there.

In The Forge, St. Josemaría says, the following comment, which caused me great sorrow, will also make you reflect: “I see very clearly why there is a lack of resistance, and why what resistance there is to iniquitous laws is so ineffective, for above, below, and in the middle, there are many people, so very many, who just follow the crowd.”

This is why, as Christians, we’re called to be leaders, to blaze a trail, to have an influence. Also, we shouldn’t have a sort of siege mentality in thinking that the media are against us. We should rather have the idea that we are the media. We are the ones who have to influence the course of culture and of society, of thinking and of ideas.

At a very early stage, St. Josemaría saw the growing importance of media, the importance of spreading doctrine, of having the light of Christ in public opinion, of having a dominant passion to spread that doctrine. There are immense apostolic opportunities.

He liked to say that in matters of education and marriage, we have to go all the way because those areas are so key for the health of society.

Again in The Forge, he says: “I insist: ask God to grant us, his children, the ‘gift of tongues,’ the gift of making ourselves understood by all. You can find the reason why I want this ‘gift of tongues’ in the pages of the Gospel, which abound in parables, in examples which materialize the doctrine and illustrate spiritual truths, without debasing or degrading the word of God. Everyone, both the learned and the less learned, finds it easier to reflect on and understand God’s message through these human images.”

I was at a conference in Singapore many years ago, of Catholic medical guilds of Asia, where the speaker—possibly at that time the top Catholic obstetrician in the world, Professor Robert Walley of MaterCare International—held up two documents. He said, “Here are two documents about two organizations in the world, talking about the same thing but saying completely different things. On the one hand,” he said, “we have the United Nations document on women, and on the other hand, we have the Catholic Church’s statement which is all about mothers, Evangelium Vitae.”

The United Nations, he says, talks about women, women, women. The Catholic Church talks about mothers, mothers, mothers. He asked all the doctors present there for the 21st century to try and do something for mothers because the maternal mortality rate in the developing world is way behind the maternal mortality rate in the developed world. It’s one of the scandals of modern medicine.

We have to try and promote that idea: more awareness of mothers. We have to try and answer the social discredit of chastity, to remind people there is no such thing as a safe abortion because somebody always dies in an abortion.

The apostolate of public opinion has many forms and expressions. When we hear a good idea, or somebody is doing something good, it can be good to think, “Well, how can I get that message out? How can I spread it around?” Because we’ve a message that has to reach every last person in society. Every opportunity is important. We’re involved in the evangelization of culture.

When the angel announced to the shepherds, they said, “We bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people” (Luke 2:10). Very beautiful words. We could ask St. Catherine of Siena that she might help us be more effective in bringing those good tidings of great joy to all the people.

Catherine, may you help us to share something of your love for the Church and for the Roman Pontiff, along with a holy desire to make the doctrine of Jesus Christ known everywhere, imaginatively and lovingly, always trying to see the positive side of things, and not missing a single opportunity.

Let me ask Our Lady, in St. Catherine’s own words: “To you I have recourse, O Mary, offering you my supplication for the sweet spouse of Christ and for his Vicar on earth, may he always have the light to rule the Holy Church prudently and with discernment.”

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

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