#christopher check

Our president, Christopher Check writes:

Catherine of Siena--A Marvel of Wisdom

Some fifteen years ago, a gathering of the who’s who of Catholic feminism issued the Madeleva Manifesto: A Message of Hope and Courage to Women in the Church. The signatories to the Manifesto included Charlie Curran’s defender Monika Hellwig and women’s ordination advocate, Joan Chittister. Not by accident, they issued their declaration on April 29, the feast of Catherine of Siena.

It’s not so difficult to understand why feminists wish to claim the patronage of Saint Catherine. After all, a version of her life might go something like this: At seven years of age a girl determines never to marry. At age 12, she is pressured by her parents to submit to an arranged marriage, she defiantly cuts off her hair and neglects her appearance. Later, the young woman develops quite a following in her town. Men and women alike seek her counsel. Soon she is bringing influence to bear in political circles unknown to women. She arbitrates family feuds. She brokers peace within and between the city-states of Tuscany. Bankers, generals, princes, dukes, kings, and queens, as well as scholars and abbots seek her counsel. Her admonitions inspire the pope to restore the papacy to Rome. She writes one of the greatest works of medieval literature. She accomplishes all of this in 33 years. When, six centuries later, she is at last declared a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church she is only the second woman at the time to receive the honor. A real glass-ceiling breaker, Catherine made it big in a man’s world.

Missing in this account are the young Tuscan maid’s motives, considerably different from those that inform feminism. Here’s a sample of Joan Chittister’s thought:

I celebrate myself, the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self—our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, “That’s good.”

In marked contrast, Saint Catherine never understood herself as a pioneer for women’s rights, much less a model for narcissistic self-fulfillment. On the contrary, she put into practice the truth her Holy Bridegroom revealed to her early in her mystical life: “I am that which is; you are that which is not.”

“I must decrease, that He may increase,” declared John the Baptist, and we can say that John the Baptist’s modus operandi was also Saint Catherine’s: empty the soul of self to make room for the grace of the Savior. Insofar as we can do this, Our Lord can work remarkable, magnificent, and indeed miraculous things through us, just as he did through the diminutive dyers’ daughter six and a half centuries ago.

Catherine was born on the Feast of the Annunciation in 1347. Catherine and her twin, Giovanna, who died at birth, were numbers 23 and 24 to Giacomo and Lapa Benincasa, father and mother of an established Sienese family. Within 13 months of her birth the Black Plague laid waste to Tuscany. The population of Florence fell from some 120,000 to 30,000. Contemporary accounts describe men and women feeling in one moment the swelling of infection and in the next moment dropping dead, only to be thrown, without ceremony into one of the many shallow mass graves that surrounded the city.

Catherine was spared, but only to come of age in a world beset by other afflictions: plagues political and spiritual. Holy Mother Church had lost much of the moral authority she had gained in the ages of Pope Saint Gregory VII and the popes of the crusading era. Insofar as he ruled at all, the Successor of Peter ruled not from the Eternal City, but from the opulence and luxury of distant Avignon, where the papacy suffered its—as the Italians would have it—Babylonian Captivity.

The effect of the Avignon papacy on the city where Peter and Paul gave their lives for Jesus Christ was devastating. Brigandage was the rule rather than the exception, prompting Bridget of Sweden to lament, “Oh Rome your walls are broken down, your gates are left unguarded. Your vessels are sold and your altars are desolate. The living sacrifice and morning incense are consumed in the outer courts and therefore the sweetest odor of sanctity no longer rises from the Holy of Holies.”

The whole of Christendom suffered with the papacy so weakened. The King of Hungary waged war with both Venice and the Holy Roman Emperor. England began her series of unjust depredations on France that came to be known as the Hundred Years War. Indeed, the battle of Crecy, where English infantry bested the flower of French Cavalry, took place one year after Catherine’s birth. During the intermittent truces of that terrible conflict, unemployed bands of English mercenaries rode south to Italy and found employment offering their brutality for hire to the highest bidder among the warring Tuscan republics. Bernabo Visconti, Duke of Milan, squared off against the Pope, whose French legates ruled their Italian provinces like occupying foreigners rather than princes of the Church. Florence, Lucca, Pisa, and Siena fought each other, even as they shifted alliances on the world stage. And within the Tuscan republics themselves, internal strife setting commoner against noble and papal loyalists against rebels, made city life hazardous according to ever-changing political winds. Florence’s battle between Guelphs and Gibbellines is the most famous of these internecine wars, but Catherine’s Siena suffered internal strife every bit as severe as plot, conspiracy, and revenge killing meant that government changed hands with such frequency that those in power one day would find themselves in the shambles the next. “The laws that the Sienese make in October are not valid in November,” wrote Dante.

Things had hardly improved a generation later.

And yet, in the midst of this chaos and without separating itself from the world, the Benincasa household was an oasis of joyful family life, industry for the glory and honor of God, and sanctity. It was in this domestic Church that Catherine came of age.

Believers in the miracles that attach to the childhood of Catarina Benicasa would be ridiculed as credulous by our own age, but there is enough testimony of a miraculous adult life to suggest a childhood marked by wonders. Visions of our Lord and his saints reinforced the girl’s piety made manifest in the severest of self-imposed privations: fasting, flagellation, and denial of sleep. At an early age she vowed to give herself entirely to our Lord. When at last she declared her intentions to her family her brothers threatened her and her mother wailed aloud. It was not merely a matter of obedience. The most reliable force against the political unrest of Siena was the relationships among extended families joined by marriages. Giacomo, however intervened declaring that Catherine had chosen a better Spouse than they could ever hope to find.

Catherine’s mystical marriage to Our Lord, attended by our Lady and St. John the Evangelist and sealed by a ring of pearls visible only to her, came on the night her fellow Sienese were in the throes of pre-Lenten revelry. Her mission clear, the little dyer’s daughter devoted her life to works of mercy. In time she received the mantel of the Dominican tertiaries and took up service of the wretched in the Siena’s hospital, Santa Maria della Scala. Catherine’s patients were those no other would take: aged courtesans and “superannuated prostitutes,” as Sigrid Undset describes them, who took perverse delight in scolding their saintly nurse and spreading vicious rumors about her. Catherine served them all the more, cleaning their fetid sores and bringing them back to God through her example of humility.

Catherine’s evident sanctity attracted countless souls seeking counsel. She turned philanderers away from their sins and converted hardened criminals on the way to the scaffold. She attracted the attention of theologians seeking to expose a hoax. A weeklong examination before Florence’s Dominicans found a devout young girl given abundant graces by God and with a remarkable command of both Catholic doctrine and Tuscan politics. There she met her biographer and spiritual director, Blessed Raymond of Capua, and was also assigned several priests who served as confessors to her growing flock, the Caterinati. And there, in Florence, she found herself drawn into the political disputes of 14th Century Christendom.

The political details of this age are bewildering. What Christians must take from the story is the consistent theme of Catherine’s political correspondence. We have today nearly 400 of Catherine’s letters, an archive of priceless value to medieval historians. The uneducated girl could not write, yet early in her public life she acquired a band of secretaries. All of them would testify that the saint could dictate three letters at once on different topics and not lose the thread of any of the letters. On one occasion all three of her secretaries, having themselves lost the thread of their respective letters, copied the same sentence. They all paused to look at Catherine. For whom was the sentence intended? “For all of you,” she answered, “and you will see when we complete the letters how our Lord has ordered the words of each toward his perfect plan.”

To all of the nobility and politicians to whom Catherine wrote, she stressed: a good ruler must first be a good person. “Politics are never anything but the product of a person’s religious life,” she wrote. “Break the chains of sin; cleanse yourself by confession. Only then will you be real rulers. For who can really be master if he is not master of himself, if reason does not rule his passions?”

Catherine’s greatest political success was also a spiritual triumph—convincing Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome. Because she commanded the actions of the pope, it is doubtless this action which most excites the feminists. Alas, they entirely miss the point. At no time ever in her correspondence with Gregory, which is indeed direct, does she question his authority. On the contrary she tells him “Esto vir!” You are the man. Use your authority.

Catherine’s great spiritual contribution, beyond that of her daily example, is her Dialogue, dictated during a series of ecstasies over the summer of 1378 before her departure for Rome. Catherine called her Dialogue “the book in which I found some recreation.” When Pope Paul VI declared Catherine a doctor of the Church in 1970, he described her theology as reflective of “the Angelic Doctor in a surprising degree.” The theme of the Dialogue is the soul’s journey to salvation through ever deeper union with the sufferings of Christ, from which flows all of his mercy. “She exalted” Paul VI says, “the redeeming power of the adorable blood of the Son of God, shed on the wood of the cross in expanding love, for the salvation of all generations of mankind.”

After dictating her Dialogue, Catherine left for Rome. The year was 1378. Her Caterinati followed her to the eternal city and lived life much as they had in Siena before she had begun her political adventures. They cared for the poor and destitute, begged for their own needs, copied the saint’s letters, and listened to her counsel.

So severe had been her fasts, by 1380, Catherine could take no food or water at all. Each morning she struggled to walk to Mass at St. Peter’s and remained there all day in prayer at the tomb of the first pope for whose successors she had fought so hard. In her final eight days she was struck with a paralysis from the waist down. When Catherine, at the age of 33, was at last united with her Bridegroom, thousands and thousands of mourners came, and miracle after miracle was attributed to her intercession.

Canonized within a century by her fellow Sienese, Pope Pius II, St. Catherine’s body lies, appropriately, under the main altar in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. We can say with confidence that it is nothing short of providential that the site of an ancient temple to the goddess of wisdom is now transformed in Christ as the resting place of one of his wisest saints.

Valentinus

Leave it to the bizarre imagination of retail America (merchants and consumers alike) to turn the celebration of the moment when an angel of almighty God handed the palm of martyrdom to a third-century Roman priest into an opportunity to boost the bottom lines of candy manufacturers and lingerie vendors. It’s a pretty easy guess with what kind of judgment Valentinus would react.

Let’s bring the commemoration back into focus.

According to the 1962 Missal, St. Valentine was martyred under the emperor Aurelian in A.D. 270. The source for the claim, I assume, is the Roman Martyrology compiled under Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572-1585), better known, perhaps, for the calendar that bears his name. Gregory was working from documents a millennium older, but all that we now associate with Valentine’s Day derives from Chaucer’s reference to the mating of birds on February 14, medieval texts such as the Golden Legend, or even later custom.

I love legend. It often brings into relief an understanding of the reality of human experience that can be missed in pure historical fact. So, if Valentine secretly witnessed the rite of Christian matrimony and lost his head for his efforts, then he joins other heroic witnesses from John the Baptist to Thomas More who lost their heads for defending the sanctity of marriage. In our day we very much need to invoke these saints, whether when faced with the vitriol of militant sodomites or that of baptized Catholics (family and friends) who can’t understand why we won’t attend their weddings outside the Church.

Nonetheless, although all of the facts of St. Valentine's life are known but to God, the claim that he died under Aurelian can be doubted. Aurelian was not a persecutor of Christians. Indeed, he was a great general and a man of extraordinary political will. His reign was the beginning of the end of the Third Century Crisis, which saw some 20 to 25 emperors, nearly all of whom were assassinated. Diocletian, who reigned ten years after Aurelian (and did persecute Christians, although not at first), put the finishing touches on Aurelian’s restoration with his establishment of the Tetrarchy (rule of four), an arrangement without which Constantine never would have come to power and the Church never would have flowered. (Diocletian was one of those rare honorable politicians who, in the tradition of Cincinnatus, surrendered his power to retire to his farm.)

When you visit Rome today, the wall you see is the Aurelian Wall, a project of this great emperor’s reign and not of that of Marcus Aurelius, an emperor of more than a century before. Marcus Aurelius was, however, another great man of pagan antiquity. His reign, in spite of the stoicism for which he is famous, moved forward the relationship between Christian and pagan Rome. The Martyrs of Lyon were the exception rather than the rule during this period, and even his rotten son Commodus, of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator fame, had Christians in his household.

I’m straying.

The martyrdom of Valentine more likely took place under Claudius II, also called Claudius the Goth, one of the few emperors of the period who died not by assassination but by natural causes (if smallpox can be assigned to that category). The traditional site of the martyrdom is outside the city walls on the Flaminian Way, the road (of Milvian Bridge fame) that runs from Rome to the once seaport town of Ravenna. The Porta del Popolo where this road enters the city walls (and near which my friends from Catholic Studies at the University of Saint Thomas have their Rome campus) was once called the Porta Valentini.

St. Valentine’s skull is displayed in the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin near Rome’s Forum Boarium. This beautiful paleo-Christian church is best known for the likeness of a man’s face (a Roman sewer cover, perhaps) that now graces its portico called the Boca della Verita. Wives, goes the medieval tradition, would bring their husbands there to test their fidelity by sticking their hands in the mouth of the face. Unfaithful husbands' hands were bitten off. Now the Boca is use to test probity in general, but it is something in God’s providence that the same church that holds the skull of an early defender of marriage is also the site of a medieval tradition of testing marital fidelity.

The American Apologetics Giant You've Never Heard Of

Among the ports of call on this summer’s Catholic Answers Cruise and Pilgrimage (June 3-10, Montreal to Boston) is Prince Edward Island, best known to Americans—those who still read books—as the setting of the Anne of Green Gables novels and the birthplace of the author, Lucy Maude Montgomery. Prince Edward Island is also the birthplace of one of the greatest bishops in the history of the Church in America, Francis Clement Kelley (1870), founder of the Catholic Church Extension Society and second Bishop of Oklahoma. From the first he excelled at writing and would go on to publish 17 books, then became a Catholic priest.

Ordained a priest for the diocese of Detroit, Michigan, Fr. Kelley’s first assignment set the spark to the tinder that fired his life’s work. The Lapeer, Michigan parish “spoke of a cold calculating indifference to God.” The culprit was the previous pastor, removed for apostasy. The 22-year-old Fr. Kelley rallied his disillusioned parishioners with sermons rich in doctrine and delivered with clarity and wit. Under Kelley a brick-and-mortar building project began in earnest but stalled while the young priest donned his country’s uniform in 1898.

“No one could have had a stronger conviction that the war with Spain was not only unjust but unnecessary,” Kelly later wrote, but as an Army chaplain he was able bring the sacraments to soldiers mired in the tropical heat, bad sanitation, snakes, mosquitoes, and fever of Tampa and Huntsville.

Writer and apologist

Returning to Michigan, Fr. Kelley joined the Lyceum circuit, and his honoraria funded the construction of his parish. His audiences ranged from “small boys throwing peanut shells” to “old ladies who looked with disapproval at the first Catholic priest they had ever seen while wondering how he concealed his horns so cleverly.” Fr. Kelley came face to face with middle America gathered in meeting halls, red schoolhouses, vacant shops, and tents. He witnessed the miserable living and working conditions endured by Catholic priests “among the scattered people and the churchless places” of the American West and South. He resolved to found a home mission society to bring the Faith to the many regions of America overrun with poverty, prejudice, and ignorance.

A column for Ecclesiastical Review of Philadelphia launched the Catholic Extension Society. Reprinted as a pamphlet, Kelley’s “Little Shanty Story” described the ramshackle rectory of a Catholic pastor in Ellsworth, Kansas. The pamphlet captured the hearts of Catholics across the Republic and in poured donations. One captured heart was that of Archbishop of Chicago, James Quigley. And within a year Kelley’s bishop gave him the Exeat to transfer to Chicago where the Catholic Church Extension Society was formed shortly before.

Kelley excelled as a fundraiser, but his public candor about the lack of missionary spirit in the American seminaries and his scathing criticism of the American hierarchy’s neglect of Catholic rural America made him East Coast enemies, including the papal delegate, Archbishop Diomede Falconio. Quigley stuck by Kelley and arranged meetings for him in Rome to obtain Vatican approval for the Society. To Kelley, Pope Pius X was, “a saint who saw no obstacle to holiness in the possession of a fund of humor” but it was the pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val who was “the first great and powerful Roman friend of the Extension Society.” He instructed Kelley, “in the science of untying hard diplomatic knots,” lessons the priest would apply throughout his life. Del Val secured a Papal Brief of Approval for the Extension, largely silencing Kelley’s critics.

Apologetics was central to the work of the Extension Society, and when a chapel car rolled into town, one especially popular feature was (then as now) the question box. Before a priest of the Extension would deliver a lecture or offer Mass, he would field questions about the Catholic Faith, often from Protestants or Mormons. Some questions derived from innocent ignorance: one woman thought that Jesus Christ had brought the Bible down from heaven, whole and entire. Other questions were the result of the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-Catholic propaganda: “Is it true that a priest has to murder four people before he can be ordained?” “Do priest really have hooves like cows instead of feet?” A priest visiting a town in Oregon took off his shoes and socks to settle the matter.

Father Kelley’s rolling chapels restored the sacraments to countless fallen-away Catholics all over rural America. Extension Society priests offered each of the sacraments and the Mass throughout the West, Midwest, and the South. In the many towns where the rail cars planted the seed of the Faith, chapels and churches sprang up, supported by Extension Society dollars and constructed by the faithful who had returned home.

Kelley helped finance the work of the Extension with his Extension Magazine, which at its peak boasted half-a-million subscribers. A Catholic version the Saturday Evening Post, the quarterly spread the word about the Society’s work, thereby attracting donations. Extension Magazine also included articles in apologetics, poetry, and short stories, including scores of mystery stories penned by Kelley himself.

Books to politics

So popular was Extension Magazine that when America entered the First World War, Kelley received the offer of a substantial bribe in exchange for an editorial endorsing Woodrow Wilson’s interventionism. Kelley declined, passing up “his one and only chance to become rich” and penned instead, The Pigs of Serbia, a scathing rebuke of the war and its promoters on both sides of the Atlantic.

American meddling in the affairs of Europe was not the only U.S. foreign policy that provoked Fr. Kelley’s anger. “The Mexican Question”, mishandled by administrations from Taft’s to Coolidge’s, became, a focus of Kelley’s life, and perhaps the one for which he is best known today. The resulting book, Blood Drenched Altars, is his only work still in print. The volume argues that Mexico under Spain was a glorious Catholic country, culturally superior to the United States well into the 19th Century: “They dotted the land,” wrote Kelley, “with architectural triumphs which to this day have not been equaled in the Americas.”

Father Kelley’s fight for the soul of Mexico took him to the corridors of American power, striking up dramatic conversations with William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, and a meeting with Wilson himself about American’s unwillingness to get involved in the atrocities in Mexico.

The diplomat, and bishop

After the First World War, Fr. Kelley took his crusade for the Church in Mexico to Versailles where he proposed a “liberty of conscience” requirement for any nation desiring membership in the League of Nations. Kelley’s amendment was a matter of practical politics, and a wise one, not a theological proposition. Yet, as he later observed, at the modern world’s official gathering of liberalism, a chief tenet of liberalism, religious freedom, was given no quarter, scuttled by Clemenceau and Wilson.

The time in Paris did bear fruit. Kelley used his skills in practical diplomacy to help achieve a just resolution of the “Roman Question.” The Vatican had lost her lands and sovereignty to the Italian revolution. Kelley proposed a territorial concession, access to the sea, and recognition of sovereignty. Ten years later, the substance of Kelley’s plan was approved by Mussolini, and the sovereignty of the Holy See was restored and secured.

In June 1924, a man who had been a sailor, soldier, scholar, orator, mission priest, political adept, international diplomat, and published author with a prose style praised by H.L. Mencken, was ordained the second bishop of Oklahoma. The mission priest was now a mission bishop, establishing the Faith on the plains, and bringing a new diocese to maturity.

Francis Kelley’s life shows how dogged determination, a devout prayer life, and a profound humility can together achieve great things for God. “The thing was God’s, not mine. If he wanted a fool or a child to do it, that was his business. He had his way of picking over poor material and working it over to suit his purposes. I was quite sure that I was poor material. But why worry? The skeleton of a failure often marks the beginning of a right trail.” Bishop Francis Kelley was far from a failure, but he did understand what St. Teresa of Calcutta would later observe: “We are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.”