St. Catherine of Siena

St. Catherine of Siena was born on 25 March 1347 in Siena, Italy, the twenty-third of some twenty-five children, and died in Rome on 29 April 1380, aged thirty-three. From childhood she was given to prayer and visions, and she resisted her family's plans for marriage in order to consecrate her virginity to Christ. She joined the Dominican Third Order, living at first in seclusion before pouring herself out in service to the sick, the poor, and prisoners, gathering around her a wide circle of disciples.

Though she never learned to write with ease, she dictated hundreds of letters and her great mystical work, the Dialogue of Divine Providence. A fearless counselor of popes and princes, she played a decisive role in persuading Pope Gregory XI to end the Avignon papacy and return to Rome in 1377, and later labored to heal the Western Schism. She is said to have received the stigmata invisibly. Canonized in 1461, she was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970 — one of the first two women so honored — and is a co-patroness of both Italy and Europe.