Introduction

[Manuel]

St. Catharine of Sienna was to the fourteenth century, what St. Bernard was to the twelfth; that is, the light and support of the Church. At the moment in which the bark of St. Peter is most strongly agitated by the tempest, God gives it for pilot a poor young girl. Catherine sets foot in France, to lead the Sovereign Pontiff Gregory XI from Avignon to the tomb of the Apostles, the real centre of Christianity. She addresses herself to cardinals, princes, and kings; she negotiates peace between the nations and the Holy See, brings back to God a multitude of souls, and communicates by her teaching and examples a new vigour to those great Religious Orders which are the living, vibrating pulse of the Church.

[John]

I am still waiting for Amazon to send me my book. I will catch up when I get it.

[Jill]

lovely quote at the end of the Intro, ostensibly from the Pope at the time: "none ever approached her without going away better."

No one need aspire to anything better!

[Jill]

I don't see how anyone who venerates her so thoroughly can possibly be a good confessor; the role of a confessor must include correcting over-scrupulosity and harsh judgments of other people. As others have said, his adulation also weakens the credibility of his biography. Catherine doesn't seem like a real person. She has no internal struggles, just unfair persecutions from outsiders. A saint with whom one can't identify is of limited value as a role model.

[Mariangel]

But if the confessor saw those miracles happen, it is not surprising that he is so partial. I liked that at the beginning, when he had heard of Catherine but didn't know her, he wanted to make sure it was not exaggerations from other people, or her imagination.

He does contradict himself in saying at the start that her parents were so good, and then telling how they treated her as a servant when she refused to marry.

[John]

Jill wrote: "I don't see how anyone who venerates her so thoroughly can possibly be a good confessor; the role of a confessor must include correcting over-scrupulosity and harsh judgments of other people. As ot..."

As far as I could make out, the biography is written several years after her death. Given the flood of miracles associated with her at the time of her death, I guess it isn't that surprising that his view of her would be strongly influenced by feeling.

JPII confessed daily. I suspect that the closer one is to God and the holier one is, the greater one feels the remaining gap, however small.

But I did note thet conflict between Raymond's reference to her at one point as sinless (?!) and through the rest the description of her intense confessions and penances. Whether or not she was scrupulous, she was certainly not sinless, by definition.

[Fonch]

Tomorrow i am going to start this reading i regrethving delayed the reading of this book. Yours sincerely Fonch.