St. Catherine tells Pope Urban VI "incarnate demons" elected his rival

SIENA, October 5, 1378 AD — Saint Catherine of Siena wrote to Pope Urban VI from Siena on October 5, 1378 AD, as word reached the city that the cardinals who had left Rome had set up an antipope against him. She told Pope Urban that the men who had done it were demons in human form, and that he was the true Vicar of Christ. Then she asked more of him than courage.

St. Catherine was thirty-one, a dyer’s daughter and one of the Mantellate, the Dominican tertiaries who wear the habit but live in their own homes. In April 1378 AD the cardinals elected Pope Urban, and he soon turned haughty, suspicious and at times hot-tempered with the men who had chosen him. St. Catherine wrote to the Pope about his temper in one of her letters: “Mitigate a little, for the love of Christ crucified, those sudden impulses which nature forces on you.”

Now the cardinals said fear of the Roman crowd had forced their vote. They called it no election, and they chose a Pope of their own. Two men claimed the Chair of St. Peter, and each needed the kings and rulers of Europe to recognise him. St. Catherine held no office and commanded no one. What she had was the trust of a Pope who had known her at Avignon.

In June 1376 AD St. Catherine had gone to Avignon as the envoy of Florence. Pope Gregory XI was so impressed by her that he brought the papacy back to Rome the following January, against the wishes of the French king and nearly all his cardinals. The future Pope Urban, then Archbishop of Acerenza, saw her there. Her confessor, Blessed Raymond of Capua, wrote that the archbishop “had there formed a high idea of her wisdom and virtue.”

By the end of the summer the French cardinals had left Rome and gathered at Fondi, under the protection of Queen Joanna of Naples and a company of Gascon soldiers. On September 18 Pope Urban named twenty-six new cardinals, all but two of them Italians. Two days later, at Fondi, thirteen of the old cardinals chose Cardinal Robert of Geneva, who took the name Clement VII. Nineteen months earlier, at Cesena, Cardinal Robert had ordered the Church’s mercenary companies to kill the townspeople, and at least four thousand of them died.

St. Catherine had been home in Siena since the summer, dictating her book, the Dialogue, to her secretaries. When the news reached her, she wrote to Pope Urban at once. She began: “I, Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His precious blood.” She wanted to see him, she wrote, “robed in the strong garment of most ardent charity, in order that the blows that are hurled at you by the wicked men of the world, lovers of themselves, may not be able to harm you.” “I hear,” she wrote, “that those incarnate demons have elected an anti-Christ, whom they have exalted against you, the Christ on earth, for I confess, and deny not, that you are the Vicar of Christ.”

Pope Urban held the keys of the cellar of Holy Church, St. Catherine went on, “where the blood of the spotless Lamb is kept.” She told him: “without any fear, throw yourself among these thorns in the strong garment of charity.” Nothing great is done without suffering, she reminded him. If his life was asked of him, she wrote, “it must be given willingly.”

Then she told Pope Urban what to do. She wanted him to look after his safety, but not to hold back from the work or fear in any way for his life. She told him whom to keep near him: Fornitevi di buoni e virtuosi pastori (provide yourself with good and virtuous shepherds), she wrote. He was to keep the servants of God at his side, and to rest his hope and faith on no human help. She offered what she had: she and those with her, she wrote, were ready to obey His Holiness “and to endure until death.”