Second-youngest of twenty-five children, St. Catherine wins her own room

SIENA, 1362 AD — Saint Catherine of Siena was born on March 25, 1347 AD, in a dyer’s house in Siena. She was a twin. The other baby was a girl called Giovanna. She died soon after the two of them were born.

Then their mother, Lapa Benincasa, had one more baby. It was another girl. Lapa gave her the same name, Giovanna, after the daughter she had lost. That baby was her twenty-fifth child, and the last.

Her father, Giacomo Benincasa, is a dyer in the Fontebranda quarter of Siena. He rents three floors from the woolworkers’ guild. The family live in the upper rooms of the same building he dyes his cloth in.

Thirteen of the twenty-five children lived to grow up, and four of them were brothers. Three of the four married. That was what sons did then: they brought their wives into the family house instead of moving out. Only Stephen stayed unmarried.

The married sons’ children were born in the house and grew up in it. They helped their grandfather with the dyeing, along with the men he hired. The workmen were in and out all day at the dye vats. A fire burned in the house day and night to heat the dyes.

St. Catherine was fifteen in 1362 AD. Since the age of twelve she had not been allowed out of the house on her own. Her parents were looking for a husband for her. They wanted her to marry into a family important enough to raise their standing in Siena. She had no intention of marrying anyone. At seven she had promised God that she would belong to Christ, and she had refused to marry ever since.

In August her married sister Bonaventura died having a baby. After that her family pushed her harder than before to make the marriage they wanted. Her parents asked Father Tommaso della Fonte to talk her into saying yes. He was a friar the family had brought up in their own house. He took her side instead, and told her to cut her hair off: “Cut off your hair, entirely; perhaps they will then let you enjoy tranquility.”

She cut it all off with a pair of scissors and hid her head under a coif. For a girl of her age that was a shocking thing to do. Her mother pulled the coif away and saw the cropped head. She cried out, and the whole family came in.

Her mother and her brothers dismissed the kitchen-maid and gave St. Catherine the maid’s job. They took away the room she slept in, so that she would have no quiet hour to pray in. She was told she had to share a room. She picked Stephen’s, because he was out all day and slept soundly at night, so she could still pray.

She did not give in. Her mother used to say that in those days St. Catherine carried loads on her shoulders. One load was as much as a horse was given to carry. She would run up two flights of stairs to the attic with it. Her brothers watched her and said to one another that they were beaten.

One day she called her father, her mother and her brothers together. She told them she had promised herself to God years before and would never take a husband. Her father answered her first. “From this day forth none in this house shall hinder you,” he said.

Then St. Catherine asked her parents for a room of her own. She said she did not mind how small or how awkward it was. What she got was not her old room back. It was a cell five metres long and three metres wide. It lay underneath the upstairs rooms where the rest of the family slept.

All the light it had came from one small window. A few brick steps inside the cell led up to it. She often slept with her head resting on those steps. For a bed she laid down a few planks with nothing over them. For a pillow she used a log of wood.