For three years St. Catherine of Siena has spoken only in confession

SIENA, 1365 AD — For three years St. Catherine of Siena has spoken only in confession, and left her father’s house only to go to church. Her confessor, Fra Tommaso della Fonte, set it down in the notes he keeps of her life.

She is one of the twenty-five children of Giacomo Benincasa, a dyer of the Fontebranda quarter, and she wears the black mantle and white habit of the Dominican Sisters of Penance. They clothed her at fifteen. The Sisters are not nuns. They take no monastic vows and keep no cloister; each lives under a rule in her own house. The enclosure St. Catherine keeps is her own, in a room under a working dye-house where a good many of her parents’ children are still living. Her family had wanted a marriage that would strengthen the Benincasa in the city, but she had vowed her virginity to God at seven.

St. Catherine called her father, her mother and her brothers together and told them she was already vowed and would take no husband. Giacomo Benincasa gave his daughter his blessing, and told the rest of them to stop opposing her. The room she was given was a little cell under the house, five metres long and three wide, lit by one small window with a few brick steps up to it. Her bed was a few planks, with a log of wood for a pillow.

From the day she took the cell she ate no meat and nothing sweet or savoury. At fifteen she gave up wine and drank only water. She wore a hair-shirt, but could not stand the dirt of it, and changed it for a steel chain fastened tight enough round her waist to break the skin. She cut her sleep to half an hour in two days and two nights, and told her confessor that of all the penances this one cost her most.

Monna Lapa Benincasa fought the penances as she had fought the vocation. She asked her daughter to give up the plank bed and sleep beside her. St. Catherine came to her mother’s room and prayed the night through, and then hid two boards under the sheet on her own side of the bed. When Monna Lapa found the boards she gave up. “Daughter, I see well it boots not to strive with you any longer, I do but lose my labour,” Monna Lapa told her. “Wherefore, in God’s name, go your way and take your rest in your own chamber at what time and in what manner you may think best.”

Her family could hear what happened in the cell. Three times a day St. Catherine scourged herself with a discipline of iron chains set with points, an hour and a half at a time, for her own sins, for other souls and for the dead. One day her mother passed the door, heard the blows, went in, and cried out so loudly that the neighbours came running into the house.

The silence began when the Sisters clothed her at San Domenico. No one had asked it of her; she imposed it on herself, with the rule that took her out only for church. The rule is not quite absolute. Two other Dominicans, Fra Tommaso Caffarini and Fra Bartolomeo Dominici, come to the house from time to time with her confessor. By Fra Bartolomeo’s account, without her confessor’s permission she speaks to no man except her father and her brothers.

She has no choir of her own, but she can hear one. San Domenico stands on the hill above the dye-house, and its bell reaches her room, calling the friars to choir at each of the hours. She arranges her nights by it. She watches while the friars sleep, and when the second toll rings for midnight matins she prays: “Lord, until now my brethren have slept and I have watched for them in Thy presence, praying Thee to guard them from the wiles of the enemy; now that they are rising to offer Thee their praises, suffer me to take a little repose.” Then she lies down.

Inside the cell, Christ was her teacher. She was afraid at the start that the devil was deceiving her, so she was given signs for telling a true vision from a false one. Demons assaulted her in the cell all the same. She came back from church one day to an attack so violent that she lay face down on the floor and stayed there praying a long time. After several days of these assaults she remembered that she had asked God for the gift of fortitude. Then Christ appeared to her as he was on the Cross, when he opened heaven with his blood.

Years afterwards St. Catherine told Blessed Raymond of Capua, the confessor of her later years, where everything she knew had come from: “Be sure, father, that naught that I know concerning the ways of salvation was taught by mere man; it was my Lord and Master, the cherished Spouse of my soul, our Lord Jesus Christ, who revealed it to me by his inspirations and by his apparitions. He spoke to me, as I now speak to you.” She left the mantle the Sisters of Penance had given her to Fra Tommaso della Fonte, her first confessor. On her deathbed she said she could not remember having failed even once in obedience.