Preaching the Word

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You are warmly invited to participate in liturgical prayer with the Dominican Sisters' Community at Santa Sabina Chapel. Unless otherwise indicated, Evening Prayer will be celebrated on selected Sundays at 5.30pm.
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Feast of St Catherine of Siena

Preacher: Sr Patricia Madigan OP

Perhaps some of you watched the recent program on ABC TV called “The Abbey” in which a selected group of Australian women lived in a monastery with a community of nuns for a period of several of weeks. At a certain stage of the process one of the women tearfully declared: “This is the most unfamiliar place I’ve ever been!” However as time progressed she came to see that her journey was not as unfamiliar as she had thought as she began to connect her everyday human experiences and desires with what she came to recognize as “God-experiences” – moments in her life when God has been present.

In a similar way I believe that as we come to know something about the life of Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth century Dominican laywoman whose life we celebrate today, we at first have a sense of encounter with something which seems disturbingly unfamiliar. Yet, at the same time one has a growing sense of uncanny familiarity.

There are many aspects of Catherine which seem very unfamiliar. Catherine was the last of twenty-four children of a middle-class Tuscan family of dyers. How many families do we know today who have twenty-four children? Early in life Catherine’s experience of God was so intense that at age seven she took a vow of virginity. While still a teenager she declared herself betrothed to Christ and retired to live in a room in the family home set apart as a monastic cell. Hardly typical teenage behaviour as we know it today.

Yet at the same time there is something undeniably familiar about Catherine and her times. Perhaps this was because Catherine lived in a century and a world which, like our own, was plagued by disease, economic stress, war and famine. In Catherine’s time, whole cities were being decimated by the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. Think of the ravages of AIDS in today’s countries of Africa or Papua New Guinea. The Hundred Years War between France and England engaged European consciousness as the “war on terror” engages our consciousness today.

In Catherine’s time many of the great banking houses of Tuscany had gone bankrupt leading to economic depression and social unrest. The Italian city-states were at war with each other and with the papacy. The pope had fled Rome and was residing in Avignon. Beseiged from without, the church was also in internal decline. The clergy suffered from corruption and infidelity while an ever-increasing clericalism had diminished the role of the laity.

Yet somehow, graced by God, Catherine discovered her own identity as did Jesus in the Gospel reading (John 17: 1-11) today, in the knowledge she gained through contemplative prayer. She knew that she had, like Jesus, come from God – that her Christian calling was to complete the work that God had given her to do – and that her eternal destiny was to be drawn forever into unending union with God. Catherine had a Johannine understanding of God – coming from a high Christology which may seem unfamiliar to us today. For her, Christ is the revealer of God’s “foolish” love for human beings. Every Christian believer who is united to Christ through love is to become “another Christ,” sharing in the life and love of Christ and his mission to give life to the world.

Many of the ways Catherine lived out her divine calling would seem unfamiliar and remote from us today. Her letters and her Dialogue show she entered fully as a peace-maker into the social, political and ecclesial worlds of her time, corresponding and meeting with an amazingly wide variety of people – which included criminals, prelates and politicians. Her approach was often direct. To one churchman she wrote “You must be a sweet-smelling flower, not a stinking one…” Catherine wrote to Pope Urban VI instructing him to “mitigate for the sake of Christ crucified the sudden impulses of your nature,” and urged him to “acquire a manly heart grounded in humility”.

Yet, in all her actions and teaching Catherine was sustained by the central teaching of the Gospel that every Christian is called by their baptism to be “another Christ” – a teaching which may even seem quite familiar to us today because of the impact of the Second Vatican Council. Her understanding of the gospel of Christ was centred in the two great Christian mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption. As well as being called to incarnate the love of God, the vocation of the Christian is to participate in the redemptive love of God by entering into the suffering of the world.

For Catherine, in Christ’s human form God’s love for humanity burnt “like live coals under the cinders,” and in Christ’s passion God’s love was made visible and attractive to human minds and hearts.

The way to perfect love, Catherine believed, was ‘staying on the cross, like one in love” (Letter 225). It is by entering into the woundedness of the world, through the wounded side of Christ, that one is introduced to what she called the “secret of the heart” – the divine love that is found at the roots of both Creation and Redemption.

Such perfect love, Catherine believed, leads to union with God and with others: “A soul in love with my truth never refrains from being of help to the whole world” (D, VII)

In a way that is familiar even today, as a woman Catherine often found herself discriminated against in both society and the church. In Avignon Catherine countered opposition from French diplomats and politicians who tried to create obstacles by having her charged with heresy. In the church of her time, as in ours, in which women’s fully-lived Christian identity remained unfamiliar and unrecognized, Catherine located the source of her authority not in official commissioning by the church or the pope (although she did have universal ecclesiastical support), but in her baptismal identity as “another Christ.” She identified herself with a tradition of preachers that went back to Mary Magdalen and the first disciples. She wrote: “Fear and serve God selflessly and then don’t be bothered by what people say, except to have compassion for them.”

In a way familiar to many people working for peace and justice in society and in the church today, Catherine was confronted by plagues and wars, poverty and papal politics, the struggle for survival and hunger of the spirit. Like many such people today she met resistance, saw her efforts fail and her dreams remain unrealized. Yet her memory remains with us, like “live coal burning under the cinders,” to light the fires of future struggles in a world and church still moving towards their final fulfilment in God.