St. Catherine timed her nights by a bell on the hill

SIENA, 1365 AD — Twenty-five children. One house, with a dye-works running inside it all day long. And one girl in that house who, for three years, has spoken only in confession.

St. Catherine of Siena is one of those twenty-five children. Her father, Giacomo Benincasa, is a dyer in the Fontebranda quarter of Siena. For three years she has left his house only to go to church. Her confessor, Fra Tommaso della Fonte, wrote it down in the notes he keeps of her life.

Nobody asked her to be quiet

When she was fifteen, the Dominican Sisters of Penance clothed her. She wore their black mantle over a white habit. The Sisters were not nuns. They made no vows and lived behind no walls. Each one kept a rule in her own house.

So nothing about the black mantle kept St. Catherine in. The quiet was her own idea. No one had asked it of her. She made that rule herself, and the rule that took her out of the house only for church.

Her family gave up trying

St. Catherine’s family had wanted her to marry a man who would make the Benincasa stronger in the city. But at seven she had promised God that she would stay unmarried. So St. Catherine called her father, her mother and her brothers together. She told them she was already promised to God, and that she would take no husband. Giacomo Benincasa gave his daughter his blessing, and told the rest of the family to stop fighting her.

The room they gave her was a little cell under the house. It was five metres long and three wide, with one small window and a few brick steps up to it. Her bed was a few planks, with a log of wood for a pillow. At fifteen she gave up wine and drank only water. From the day she took the cell she ate no meat and nothing sweet or savoury.

Her mother, Monna Lapa Benincasa, tried to stop her. She asked her daughter to leave the plank bed and sleep beside her instead. St. Catherine came to her mother’s room and prayed the whole night through. Then she hid two boards under the sheet on her own side of the bed. When Monna Lapa found the boards, she gave up.

The bell on the hill

She has no choir of her own, but she can hear one. San Domenico, the church of the friars, stands on the hill above the dye-house. Its bell carries all the way to her room. It rings at each of the hours, calling the friars to choir — to go and pray together.

She arranges her nights by that bell. She cut her own sleep down to half an hour in two days and two nights. She told her confessor that this was the hardest thing she did. So while the friars sleep, she stays awake and prays for them. Then the second toll rings for matins, in the middle of the night. The friars get up, and that is when she lies down.

This is what she prays at that bell: “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.”

Inside the cell, Christ was her teacher. She left Fra Tommaso della Fonte, her first confessor, the mantle the Sisters of Penance had given her. On her deathbed she said she could not remember having failed even once in obedience.