A year after learning to write, St. Catherine finishes her Dialogue

SIENA, October 1378 AD — Saint Catherine of Siena finished her book this month. In the chapel beside a hermit’s cell outside Siena, at thirty-one, she dictated the last pages of the Dialogue to her secretaries. She was a dyer’s daughter who wore the habit of St. Dominic, she had never been to school, and for most of her life she could barely read or write. She finished it in the first weeks of a split in the Church, with two men claiming to be Pope.

On September 20 the cardinals who had withdrawn from Rome declared that Pope Urban VI’s election had been forced on them by fear. They chose Cardinal Robert of Geneva, who took the name Clement VII. St. Catherine held Pope Urban VI to be the Vicar of Christ, and wrote to tell him so as soon as the news reached Siena.

In the autumn of 1377 AD St. Catherine was at Rocca d’Orcia, a castle of the Salimbeni family, trying to end their feuds. There, by her own account, she learned to write. In a long letter to her confessor, Blessed Raymond of Capua, she said she had written it “with my own hand in the Island of Rocca, in the midst of sighs and so many tears, that I could not see out of my eyes.” She went on: “He gave me the faculty of being able to write, so that on returning from my ecstasy I might relieve my heart a little, and so prevent its bursting”. Her biographer Edmund Gardner reads that letter as almost a first sketch of the Dialogue, because it contains the vision that became the starting point of the book.

Florence had been at war with the Pope, and since May 1376 AD a papal interdict had stopped the Mass in Florence and the country around it. In late July 1378 AD the peace St. Catherine had worked for between Florence and the Pope was signed. The next day the Pope allowed the priests of Florentine territory to say Mass freely again. St. Catherine came home to Siena that summer, glad the peace was made, and for a few months little was asked of her. She spent those months on the book.

Between July and October she often went out to the chapel beside the cell of Fra Santi, a hermit from Teramo, taking one of her secretaries and one of the women who followed her. Blessed Raymond wrote that she had asked her secretaries “attentively to observe everything when, according to her custom, she was rapt out of her corporeal senses, and carefully to write down whatever she then dictated”. Blessed Stefano Maconi and two other secretaries did most of the writing, and a fourth sometimes joined them.

The book is a conversation. Pope St. Paul VI described its plan when he declared St. Catherine a Doctor of the Church in 1970 AD. She asks and God answers, and in his answers God the Father explains to her the life of grace, in each person and in the whole Church. It opens with four things she asked of God. The first was a request on her own behalf. The second was for the reform of the Church. The third was for the whole world, and above all for peace among the Christians who were rebelling against the Church and persecuting it. The fourth asked God’s providence for things in general and for one matter that concerned her.

Fra Tommaso Caffarini, a Dominican of Siena who often watched her in that chapel, saw her begin to pray and then speak with God as in a dialogue. As she dictated she sometimes held her hands clasped on her breast, sometimes walked about the room or knelt, and kept her eyes turned toward heaven the whole time. When interruptions kept her from the work for days, she picked it up exactly where she had stopped. Blessed Stefano Maconi, who had often seen her in ecstasy, later testified: “She gives the explanation of these things in her Book, great part of which I wrote from her dictation”. Blessed Stefano had also seen her write many sheets of it in her own hand. He kept some of them and left them for safekeeping at the Carthusian monastery of Pontignano, two miles from Siena.

On October 13, by Fra Tommaso Caffarini’s dating, she finished the work. The book ends with St. Catherine’s prayer: “Clothe me, clothe me with Thee, oh! Eternal Truth, that I may run my mortal course with true obedience and the light of holy faith, with which light I feel that my soul is about to become inebriated afresh”. Under it the book carries a closing line: “Here ends the book made and compiled by the most venerable virgin, most faithful servant and bride of Jesus Christ crucified, Catherine of Siena, of the habit of Saint Dominic, in the year of the Lord 1378, in the month of October”.