Siena dyer gives St. Catherine a room and calls off the match

SIENA, Tuscany, 1362 AD — Giacomo Benincasa, a cloth-dyer in the Fontebranda quarter of Siena, has given his fifteen-year-old daughter a room of her own and ordered the rest of the family to stop trying to marry her off. The room is a cell under the three floors he rents from the woolworkers’ guild as a warehouse for dyeing cloth and a home for his family: five metres long, three wide, one window. She got it by outlasting them.

Saint Catherine is the next-to-youngest of his children, and the family had settled on a marriage for her that would strengthen their standing in Siena. She would not have it: she had vowed her virginity to Christ at seven years old. What the family needed from her was her consent: the Church holds that consent makes a marriage, and that no one can give it in another’s place. So they set about forcing it out of her in the house.

The house stands on the left-hand side of the Strada dell’Oca. The street climbs steeply from the fountain of Fontebranda, and the fountain supplies this whole quarter with water. The street above the house looks down on the meadows where Giacomo and his workmen wash the wool and lay it out to bleach. Inside, fires burn day and night to heat the dyes. On the hill opposite stands the Dominican church of San Domenico.

St. Catherine was born in that house on March 25, 1347 AD. Lapa Benincasa bore her husband twenty-five children, and thirteen of them grew up. The married sons brought their wives into the house instead of moving out, so that children, grandchildren and the hired men are all in it together.

St. Catherine’s married sister Bonaventura died in childbed in August, and from then Giacomo and Lapa pressed the marriage to fill the place she had left in the family. They asked Fra Tommaso della Fonte, a Dominican friar who had been brought up in their own house, to talk their daughter round. He heard her out and took her side instead. “Cut off your hair, entirely; perhaps they will then let you enjoy tranquility,” he told her. She took a pair of scissors and cut it all off, then covered her head with a coif.

Her mother pulled the coif away and saw what had been done, and her shriek brought the rest of the family in. The family then dismissed the kitchen-maid and put St. Catherine to the servant’s work, so that no hour of the day would be her own. They ordered her to share a room instead of keeping one of her own, and she chose her unmarried brother Stephen’s, because he was out all day. Even there she had to pray with the door open, because her parents had forbidden her to shut it. She waited on them all, imagining her father in the place of Christ and her mother in the place of the Blessed Virgin. Her brothers watched her refuse and told each other they had lost.

Her father gave way first. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, Giacomo went into Stephen’s room while Stephen was out and found his daughter kneeling in a corner, with a snow-white dove resting on her head. The dove flew off as her father came near, and when he asked her about the bird she said she had seen none. That night she dreamed of the founders of the religious orders, and of St. Dominic among them offering her the habit of the Sisters of Penance.

The next day she called her father, her mother and her brothers together and told them she was promised already. “During a long time you have resolved that I should marry, and have endeavored to force me to do so,” she said. Her father answered her first, and then turned to her mother and brothers. “God preserve us, dearest child, from longer opposing the resolution with which he inspires you,” he said to her, and to them: “From this day forward let none be so bold as to molest my daughter’s freedom.” Her mother wept. From that hour St. Catherine had her liberty.

She asked for a room of her own, any room, however small or awkward. What they gave her was a cell below the rooms where the family slept, with one small window on the narrow street and a few brick steps leading up to it. She rested her head on those steps when she slept. She put in a few boards for a bed with nothing over them, and slept on them in her clothes. She kept a lamp burning day and night in front of the images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints painted on the wall.

From the day she moved in she ate no meat and nothing sweet or savoury, and she gave up wine as well and drank only water. Then she shut the door.

The house is a shrine now. The commune of Siena bought it in 1466 AD, five years after her canonization, at the urging of the people of Fontebranda. Over the door, the words Sponsa Christi Katherina Domus (House of Catherine, the Spouse of Christ) are lettered in gold. The cell is down a staircase from the entrance, shut behind an iron grille. Behind the grille is what is left of the brick steps she rested her head on.