A dyer's daughter tells the Pope to have no fear

SIENA, October 5, 1378 AD — Saint Catherine of Siena had been home in Siena since the summer of 1378 AD. She was dictating a book called the Dialogue, saying it aloud while her secretaries wrote it down. Then news reached the city that the cardinals had chosen an antipope, a rival to Pope Urban VI.

St. Catherine was thirty-one and the daughter of a dyer. She held no office and commanded no one. She was one of the Mantellate, Dominican women who wore the order’s habit but lived in their own homes. But Pope Urban trusted her, because he had known her at Avignon.

In June 1376 AD, two years earlier, St. Catherine went to Avignon. She went as the envoy of Florence, sent to speak for the city. The Pope, Gregory XI, was living there and not in Rome. Pope Gregory was so impressed by her that he moved back to Rome the following January. The French king and nearly all his cardinals had wanted him to stay. The future Pope Urban was an archbishop then, and he saw her at Avignon. Her confessor, Blessed Raymond of Capua, wrote that he “had there formed a high idea of her wisdom and virtue.”

In April 1378 AD the cardinals elected that archbishop Pope. He soon became proud, suspicious and at times quick to lose his temper with the men who had chosen him. In one of her letters, St. Catherine asked Pope Urban to calm those sudden flashes of temper a little. She asked it for the love of Christ crucified.

Now the cardinals said fear of the Roman crowd had forced their vote, and that the election didn’t count. By the end of the summer the French cardinals had left Rome and gathered at Fondi. On September 18 Pope Urban named twenty-six new cardinals, all but two of them Italians. Two days later, thirteen of the old cardinals met at Fondi. They chose Cardinal Robert of Geneva, who took the name Clement VII.

Nineteen months before that, Cardinal Robert had ordered the Church’s hired soldiers to kill the people of the town of Cesena. At least four thousand of them died.

Two men now claimed to be Pope, and each needed the kings and rulers of Europe to accept him.

Demons in human form

St. Catherine 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.” Then she told him that the cardinals at Fondi were demons in human form. “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.”

St. Catherine did not stop at taking Pope Urban’s side. 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. Pope Urban should look after his safety, she wrote. But he must not hold back from his work as Pope, or be afraid for his life. If the Pope’s life was asked of him, St. Catherine wrote, “it must be given willingly.”

She told Pope Urban to keep good and holy churchmen near him. He was not to count on any human help.

St. Catherine also made Pope Urban a promise. She and those with her, she wrote, were ready to obey him “and to endure until death.”