CATHERINE OF GENOA, Saint. - Born in Genoa in 1447, posthumously, to Giacomo Fieschi and Francesca di Negro, and died there on 14 (or 15) September 1510.
At barely thirteen she had asked, in vain, to be admitted to the monastery of S. Maria delle Grazie, where her sister Limbania was; instead, three years later she was given in marriage to Giuliano Adorno, a choleric and prodigal man. Having spent the first five years of her marriage in deep melancholy, she wished to emerge from her isolation and take part in worldly life, until that interior illumination, received on 22 March 1473 during a sacramental confession, and the vision of Jesus dripping with blood, which determined her instantaneous conversion. She gave herself over to extraordinary penances, which humanly, in her own words, "seemed things to die of," dedicating herself at the same time to the service of the sick, even lepers, first at home with the Ladies of Mercy, then in the hospitals. Very soon (1476) Giuliano himself was moved to live with her in chastity and later to become a Franciscan tertiary. Whether she too was a tertiary is not documented, but, beyond tradition and the logic of the inferences, an indication of it might be given by the mention of two tunics of Franciscan cloth in the inventory of the objects found at her death; Franciscan notes in her, not to speak here of the intellectual correspondences, are also her love for creatures, of which the Vita bears witness in ch. 42, and her joyful conception of death as "sweet, gentle, gracious, beautiful, rich, strong, worthy" (ibid., ch. 20).
In 1482 she moved with her husband into rooms adjoining the Pammatone hospital (in the adjoining church of S. Caterina in Portoria her body is preserved incorrupt) and in 1489 she was elected there as rector for the women's ward. While assisting a tertiary there who was afflicted with the plague, she contracted the plague herself, in 1493. Four years later she was left a widow. Thereafter she suffered, until her death, from an infirmity that the most illustrious physicians declared to be of a supernatural nature: one of its characteristics was the excessive heat that manifested itself from within on the surface, especially in the region of the heart, accompanied by an unquenchable thirst and other exceptional phenomena, which would suggest neuropathic symptoms, were it not that the study of her doctrine and the knowledge of her beneficent activity lead to a judgment of profound admiration for the acumen and culture, the uprightness and spiritual vigor of this elect noblewoman of the Renaissance, to whom her contemporaries gave the name of "seraphina" and posterity that of "doctress of Purgatory." She was canonized by Clement XII on 16 June 1737. Feast day 22 March.
Doctrine. - Catherine's thought unfolds on the following pivots: a) the goodness of God, which manifests itself even in Hell, and constitutes the secret of His justice, so that the name most frequently used by her is "Love God"; b) abomination of sin, not only mortal but also venial, insofar as it is an irreconcilable antithesis to God and an obstacle to the soul's receiving its glorification; c) the importance of free will, which contains within itself life and eternal death, and cannot be violated by any creature, nor is it compelled even by God, but only disposed along the paths of love through illuminations; d) the weight of self-love, tenacious in its perfidy, a thief and hypocrite that knows how to do evil clothed in the appearance of good, whence arises the absolute necessity of freeing oneself from it through the deliberate or at least resigned mortification of the will and the senses, in order to reach the total annihilation of everything that is not "pure, upright, clean love." The theme of pure love, illustrated with varied and ingenious images, may be called the alpha and omega of the spirituality of "madonna Caterinetta."
Purgatory. - The self-emptying of the ego, in all its faculties, for the conquest of the sovereignty of the spiritual soul (C. subtly distinguishes between soul and spirit) must be not only the concern of the militant souls, but also the rule of the purgant souls. As has generally been noted, there is a very close bond between the statements in her treatment of the state of the souls in Purgatory and her own experiences, especially of passive purification, which made her a most refined and effective interpreter of that otherworldly realm. Therefore she does not linger to represent crudely the pains of sense, though she does not exclude them, but ranges within the elevated sphere of the pain of loss, which constitutes the most perfect purgation, the loving fire that gradually consumes the rust of sin and feeds on the sorrow of the delayed fulfillment of desire, while the soul nonetheless rejoices, because in Purgatory it fulfills the divine will, to such a point that, even if it had the power, it would not diminish its own sufferings, by which it pays the debt it has contracted. In this precisely, besides in duration, Purgatory differs from Hell; the purgant souls find a tempering of their suffering in the desire to identify themselves with the will of God, whereas the damned are embittered by rebellion. The sublime indifference of the purgant souls is reflected in their attitude concerning suffrages, not longed for by them, although owed, by justice and charity, by the survivors. The pain can be shortened in time, not diminished in intensity; indeed it grows the closer its end approaches, because the increased knowledge of God makes the desire more vehement. Nor does this disturb their peace, since the souls "stand immovable before all that God gives them."
It is the apex of the transforming union, already reached on earth by the great mystic and described by her with bold expressions that recall the teaching and the cry of St. Paul. "I find myself (thus in the Vita, ch. 22), by the grace of God, a contentment without nourishment, a love without fear, that is, of never lacking it; faith seems to me entirely lost, hope dead; because I seem to have and hold certain that which at other times I believed and hoped for. I no longer see union, because I do not know, nor can I any longer see, save Him alone without me... almost always outside myself." Or again: "My me is God, nor do I know anything else, save the same God my..." (ibid., ch. 14).
The writings. - Against the traditional attribution to St. C. of the Trattato del Purgatorio and the Dialogo tra anima, corpo, amor proprio, spirito, umanità e Dio, F. von Hügel in 1908 maintained the thesis that the two works, together with the Vita, were the result of a slow elaboration completed from 1495 to 1551, that is, from a first draft written by Ettore Vernazza, spiritual son of C., to the first Genoese edition of Bellono, with the collaboration of other followers of the Saint, and especially of Battistina Vernazza, daughter of Ettore, for the so-called Caterinian Writings. An exhaustive confutation, even if in some particulars debatable, was made in 1935 by Fr. Umile Bonzi da Genova, to whose conclusions we refer, after direct examination of the sources.
One may therefore consider as a genuine work of the Fieschi the first part of the autobiographical Dialogo, where, with artistic procedure, she reweaves the propaedeutic to the life of union, that is, the gradual passage from worldliness to the victory of the spirit over the humanity and even over the sensitive and intellective soul. The second part (chs. 2 and 3), on the other hand, is attributed by Fr. Umile, with some hesitation, to the blessed angel Carletti of Chivasso, Franciscan, and, as a secondary hypothesis, to the priest Tommaso Doria, a Genoese. In the Trattato del Purgatorio, C. would have been rather the inspirer than the author; that is, it would appear to be a mosaic of expressions of hers, which abound also in the Vita, on a framework by the priest Cattaneo Marabotto, her confessor and author of the Vita itself, to which it was joined in the earliest manuscripts, and with which it forms a whole clearly distinct, in style, from the Dialogo, and with contributions by Ettore Vernazza, Battista Strata, Tommasina Fieschi, d. Giacomo Clarenzio, Argentina del Sale and others.
The social movement. - Great was C.'s influence in the field of social charity, both directly exercised through that group of followers who gathered in the Compagnia del Divino Amore, and indirectly through other contemporary apostles who knew her, such as the blessed Bernardino of Feltre. Rightly therefore, in 1944, by His Holiness Pius XII she was proclaimed secondary patroness of hospitals in Italy.
Bibliography6 works
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