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Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa (25 March 1347 – 29 April 1380), known as Catherine of Siena (Italian: Caterina da Siena), was an Italian mystic and pious laywoman who engaged in papal and Italian politics through extensive letter-writing and advocacy. Canonized in 1461, she is revered as a saint and as a Doctor of the Church due to her extensive theological authorship. She is also considered to have influenced Italian literature. Born and raised in Siena, Catherine wanted from an early age to devote herself to God, against the will of her parents. She joined the "mantellates", a group of pious women, primarily widows, informally devoted to Dominican spirituality; later these types of urban pious groups would be formalized as the Third Order of the Dominicans, but not until after Catherine's death. Her influence with Pope Gregory XI played a role in his 1376 decision to leave Avignon for Rome. The Pope then sent Catherine to negotiate peace with the Florentine Republic. After Gregory XI's death (March 1378) and the conclusion of peace (July 1378), she returned to Siena. She dictated to secretaries her set of spiritual treatises, The Dialogue of Divine Providence. The Great Schism of the West led Catherine of Siena to go to Rome with the pope. She sent numerous letters to princes and cardinals to promote obedience to Pope Urban VI and to defend what she calls the "vessel of the Church". She died on 29 April 1380, exhausted by her rigorous fasting. Urban VI celebrated her funeral and burial in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. Devotion around Catherine of Siena developed rapidly after her death. Pope Pius II canonized her in 1461; she was declared a patron saint of Rome in 1866 by Pope Pius IX, and of Italy (together with Francis of Assisi) in 1939 by Pope Pius XII. She was the second woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church, on 4 October 1970 by Pope Paul VI – only days after Teresa of Ávila. In 1999 Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a Patron Saint of Europe. Catherine of Siena is one of the outstanding figures of medieval Catholicism due to the strong influence she had in the history of the papacy and her extensive authorship. She was behind the return of the Pope from Avignon to Rome, and then carried out many missions entrusted to her by the pope, something quite rare for a woman in the Middle Ages. Her Dialogue, hundreds of letters, and dozens of prayers also give her a prominent place in the history of Italian literature. Early life Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa was born on 25 March 1347 (shortly before the Black Death ravaged Europe) in Siena, Republic of Siena (today Italy), to Lapa Piagenti, the daughter of a local poet, and Jacopo di Benincasa, a cloth dyer who ran his enterprise with the help of his sons. The house where Catherine grew up still exists. Lapa was about forty years old when she gave birth prematurely to her 23rd and 24th children, twin daughters, named Catherine and Giovanna. After birth, Giovanna was handed over to a wet nurse and died soon after. Catherine was nursed by her mother and developed into a healthy child. She was two years old when Lapa had her 25th child, another daughter named Giovanna. As a child, Catherine was so merry that the family gave her the pet name of "Euphrosyne", which is Greek for "joy", and the name of an Euphrosyne of Alexandria. Catherine is said by her confessor and biographer Raymond of Capua's Life to have had her first vision of Christ when she was five or six years old: she and a brother were on the way home from visiting a married sister when she is said to have experienced a vision of Christ seated in glory with the Apostles Peter, Paul, and John. Raymond continues that at age seven, Catherine vowed to give her whole life to God. When Catherine was 16, her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth; already anguished by this, Catherine soon learned that her parents wanted her to marry Bonaventura's widower. She was absolutely opposed and started a strict fast. She had learned this from Bonaventura, whose husband had been far from considerate, but his wife had changed his attitude by refusing to eat until he showed better manners. Besides fasting, Catherine further disappointed her mother by cutting off her long hair in protest of being encouraged to improve her appearance to attract a husband. Catherine would later advise Raymond of Capua to do during times of trouble what she did now as a teenager: "Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee." In this inner cell, she made her father into a representation of Christ, her mother into the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her brothers into the Apostles in the New Testament. Serving them humbly became an opportunity for spiritual growth. Catherine resisted the accepted course of marriage and motherhood on the one hand, or a nun's veil on the other. She chose to live an active and prayerful life outside a convent's walls, following the model of the Dominicans. Eventually, her parents gave up and permitted her to live as she pleased and stay unmarried. A vision of Dominic de Guzmán gave strength to Catherine, but her wish to join his order was no comfort to Lapa, who took her daughter with her to the baths in Bagno Vignoni to improve her health. Catherine fell seriously ill with a violent rash, fever and pain, which conveniently made her mother accept her wish to join the "Mantellate", the local association of devout women. The Mantellate taught Catherine how to read, and she lived in almost total silence and solitude in the family home. It was customary for Catherine to give away clothing and food without asking anyone's permission, which cost her family significantly. However, she requested nothing for herself and by staying in their midst, she could live out her rejection of them more strongly. She did not want their food, referring to the table laid for her in Heaven with her real family. Shortly after joining the Mantellate, Catherine started to fast for longer but found it challenging. While tending to a woman with cancerous breast sores, she was disgusted. Intending to overcome that disgust, she gathered the sore pus into a ladle and drank it all. That night, she was visited by Jesus who invited her to drink the blood gushing out of his pierced side. It was with this visitation that her stomach "no longer had need of food and no longer could digest." Later life According to Raymond of Capua, at the age of twenty-one (c. 1368), Catherine experienced what she described in her letters as a "Mystical Marriage" with Jesus, later a popular subject in art as the Mystic marriage of Saint Catherine. Caroline Walker Bynum imagines one surprising and controversial aspect of this marriage: "Underlining the extent to which the marriage was a fusion with Christ's physicality [...] Catherine received, not the ring of gold and jewels that her biographer reports in his bowdlerized version, but the ring of Christ's foreskin." Cathe.... Discover the Francisco De Capua Santo popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Francisco De Capua Santo books.