Sainte
Catherine de Gênes
Mystique italienne (+ 1510)
Fille d'une noble famille de Gênes, Catherine Fieschi
aspire dès son enfance à se consacrer à Dieu. Mais sa noble famille ne l'entend
pas de cette oreille, car, à cette époque, le mariage d'une fille est chose
importante pour les stratégies familiales. A 16 ans, la jeune fille qui voulait
entrer au couvent doit épouser un homme violent et mécréant, mais dont
l'alliance est souhaitable pour la famille Fieschi. Désemparée, elle se livre
aux frivolités de la vie mondaine. Mais elle n'y gagne que tristesse et amertume.
Subitement à 26 ans, elle change de vie. Une vision du Christ crucifié lui fait
mesurer l'inanité de sa conduite. Dès lors le feu de l'amour de Dieu la brûle
continuellement. Elle vit tout d'abord une vie de pénitence et de dures
austérités afin d'expier ses fautes passées, puis dépassant le souvenir de ses
fautes, elle vit dans l'union à Dieu, au milieu d'extases et de phénomènes
mystiques. D'un même mouvement, elle convertit son mari, qui mourra tertiaire
franciscain, lui le mécréant et le violent. Elle visite les malades, soigne les
lépreux et les pestiférés. On lui attribue des écrits qui témoignent de ses
expériences mystiques. Mais il faut rendre à la vérité qu'elle n'en est pas
l'auteur.
Le 12 janvier 2011, Benoît XVI a consacré sa catéchèse
à sainte Catherine de Gênes (1447-1510), auteur de deux livres: "Le traité
sur le purgatoire" et "Le dialogue entre l'âme et le corps".
Catherine reçut dans sa famille une bonne éducation
chrétienne. Elle se maria à seize ans, et sa vie matrimoniale ne fut pas
facile. Au début elle menait une existence mondaine qui suscita en elle un
profond sentiment de vide et d'amertume. Suite à une expérience spirituelle
particulière, dans laquelle elle vit clairement ses misères et ses défauts mais
aussi la bonté de Dieu, elle prit la décision de changer de vie et d'entamer un
chemin de purification et de communion mystique avec Dieu. Le lieu de son
ascension vers les sommets de la mystique fut l'hôpital de Pammatone, le plus
grand de Gênes, dont elle fut la directrice.
"De sa conversion jusqu'à sa mort, a observé le
Pape, il n'y eut pas d'évènements extraordinaires, mais deux éléments
caractérisèrent toute son existence: d'une part l'expérience mystique, la
profonde union avec Dieu (...) et d'autre part (...) le service du prochain,
surtout aux plus nécessiteux et aux abandonnés".
"Nous ne devons jamais oublier - a souligné le
Saint-Père - que plus nous aimons Dieu et plus nous sommes constants dans la
prière, plus nous aimerons ceux qui nous sont proches, car nous serons capables
de voir en toute personne le visage du Seigneur, qui aime sans limites et sans
distinctions".
Benoît XVI s'est ensuite référé aux œuvres de la
sainte, et a rappelé que "dans son expérience mystique, Catherine n'a pas
eu de révélations spécifiques sur le purgatoire ou sur les âmes qui s'y
purifient". La sainte ne présente pas le purgatoire "comme un élément
du paysage des entrailles de la terre: c'est un feu non pas extérieur, mais
intérieur (...). On ne part pas de l'au-delà pour raconter les tourments du
purgatoire (...) et indiquer ensuite le chemin pour la purification et la
conversion, mais on part de l'expérience intérieure de l'homme en marche vers
l'éternité".
C'est pourquoi, pour Catherine, "l'âme est
consciente de l'immense amour et de la parfaite justice de Dieu et, par
conséquent, souffre de ne pas avoir répondu de façon parfaite à cet amour,
tandis que l'amour même de Dieu (...) la purifie des scories de son
péché".
Chez la mystique génoise on trouve une image typique
de Denys
l'Aréopagite, a expliqué le Pape: celle du fil d'or qui unit le cœur
humain à Dieu. "Ainsi le cœur humain est-il envahi par l'amour de Dieu qui
devient l'unique guide, l'unique moteur de son existence. Cette situation
d'élévation vers Dieu et d'abandon à sa volonté, exprimée dans l'image du fil,
est utilisée par Catherine pour exprimer l'action de la lumière divine sur les
âmes du purgatoire, lumière qui les purifie et les élève jusqu'aux splendeurs
de la lumière resplendissante de Dieu".
"Les saints, dans leur expérience d'union avec
Dieu - a insisté le Pape - atteignent un "savoir" si profond sur les
mystères divins, dans lequel amour et connaissance se compénètrent presque,
qu'ils aident les théologiens dans leur étude".
"Par sa vie - a conclu le Pape - Catherine nous
enseigne que plus nous aimons Dieu et plus nous entrons dans l'intimité avec
Lui par l'oraison, plus Il se révèle à nous et enflamme notre cœur de son
amour. Dans ses écrits sur le Purgatoire, la sainte nous rappelle une vérité
fondamentale de la foi, qui pour nous représente une invitation à prier pour
les défunts, pour qu'ils arrivent à la vision de Dieu dans la communion des
saints".
"Le service humble, fidèle et généreux, que la
sainte a rendu toute sa vie dans l'hôpital de Pammatone, est d'autre part un
exemple lumineux de charité pour tous, et un encouragement particulier pour les
femmes qui apportent une contribution fondamentale à la société et à l'Église
par leur précieuse œuvre, enrichie par leur sensibilité et par leur attention
aux plus pauvres et aux plus nécessiteux."
(source: VIS 20110112 670)
À Gênes en Ligurie, en 1510, sainte Catherie Fieschi,
veuve, remarquable par son mépris du monde, ses jeûnes répétés, son amour de
Dieu et sa charité envers les pauvres et les malades.
Martyrologe romain
SOURCE : http://magnificat.ca/cal/fr/saints/sainte_catherine_de_genes.html
SOURCE : http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2011/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20110112_fr.html
_13_Domenico_Piola.jpg)
Domenico Piola raffigurante Gesù con la croce appare a Santa Caterina Fieschi Adorno. San Filippo Neri (Genova)
SAINTE CATHERINE DE GÊNES
Sainte Catherine naquit á Gênes vers la fin de 1447. Elle
était fille de Jacques Fiesque et petite-fille de Robert, frère du pape
Innocent IV.
Elle avait trois frères et une soeur ainée, qui portait
le nom de Simbania. Le nom de Catherine lui fut donné en l’honneur de Catherine
de Sienne et de Catherine d’Alexandrie. Des biographes ont cru que Dieu l’avait
placée sous le patronage de sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie, qui eut le don de l’intelligence. Catherine de Gênes l’eut aussi,
et le martyre visible de la première Catherine fut remplacé ici par le
sacrifice invisible de l’amour.
Ce dernier mot contient la vie de cette sainte très
extraordinaire et peu connue.
A l’âge de treize ans sa vie intérieure avait éclaté,
sa vie profonde et mystérieuse, pleine de larmes, pleine de feu, pleine de
sang. Une précocité singulière l’avait livrée avant l’âge aux étreintes de
l’Esprit. Elle savait à treize ans ce que les hommes passent leur vie à
ignorer. Ils savent le nom du cuisinier de Julien l’Apostat; mais ils savent à
peine le nom de Catherine et n’ont rien lu de ses ouvrages.
Pauvres hommes instruits, si vous daigniez lire sainte
Catherine de Gênes, même en n'y comprenant rien, vous y gagneriez quelque
chose, ne fût-ce qu’un peu d'étonnement et de vagues soupçons qu’il vous reste
en ce bas monde quelque chose à apprendre ! Ce soupçon, à lui tout seul, vaudrait
mieux que plusieurs années d’étude. Mais continuons.
A treize ans Catherine voulut entrer dans le couvent
de Notre-Dame de Grâce, soumis à la règle de saint Augustin. Son âge l’empêcha
d’y être admise. Il y a généralement dans la vie des saints, et surtout dans la
vie des saints contemplatifs, une série de fausses démarches tout à fait
inintelligibles. Ils hésitent, ils tâtonnent, ils se trompent, ils avancent,
ils reviennent sur leurs pas, ils changent de route. Ils ont l’air de perdre leur
temps. Les voies insondables par lesquelles ils sont conduits semblent d’une
longueur extrême. On se demande pourquoi l’Esprit, qui les guide, ne leur
indiquerait pas immédiatement la route courte et droite qui va au but. Pourquoi
? Oh ! pourquoi ? La question est sans réponse.
Cependant s’il fallait absolument, pour soulager
l’esprit, en imaginer une, on pourrait dire que leurs erreurs leur donnent sur
eux-mêmes, par la vertu du repentir et celle de l’expérience, des lumières
profondes qu’ils n’auraient pas eues si leur vie avait été constamment simple
et leur route constamment droite. Sainte Catherine de Gênes, qui avait
spécialement horreur du mariage, se laissa marier par ses parents. Il en
résulta une série de catastrophes. Le mariage fut conclu à son insu, et elle
n’osa pas résister aux intérêts de famille. Elle se laissa conduire à l’autel
et prononça, dit son historien, le oui
fatal.
Son mari était un des plus mauvais sujets de son
époque, et ce n’est pas peu dire, Il n’était pas seulement léger, il était
joueur ; il n’était pas seulement vicieux, il était railleur et méchant. Catherine
était d’une beauté rare, son esprit était charmant, Julien Adorne, son mari,
absolument insensible aux avantages même extérieurs de sa femme, ne songeait,
dans les moments où il pensait à elle, qu’à la tourmenter de toutes les façons.
Le reste du temps il l’oubliait, et ses oublis n’étaient pas innocents. Cet
homme, très riche au moment de son mariage, donna à ses vices la permission de
le ruiner. Accablée depuis cinq ans des traitements les plus horribles,
Catherine maigrit au point de ne plus être reconnue par ses amies. Sa beauté
s’en alla avec sa santé. Toute sa famille, désespérée du mariage auquel elle
l’avait contrainte, la supplia de ne pas mourir de chagrin, de chercher loin de
son mari les consolations que le monde donne aux esprits légers dont il est
plein. Catherine, usée par le malheur, se laissa persuader, sortit de sa vie
intérieure et mena pendant cinq ans l’existence d’une femme du monde, Quand je
disais que les routes sont impossibles à comprendre, évidemment je ne disais
pas trop, et même je ne disais pas assez. Ceux qui veulent expliquer tout
pourraient trouver dans le mariage de Catherine le moyen de la conduire, par une
voie terrible, à une perfection plus élevée. Mais voici qu’elle succombe. Voici
qu’elle abandonne l’attrait intérieur qu’elle suivait à treize ans; voici que,
désespérée, découragée, repoussée de Dieu en apparence, et en réalité repoussée
de l’homme à qui Dieu l’avait unie, elle tombe de toute sa hauteur ! Après cinq
années de malheurs, voici cinq années de fautes ! Voilà cinq années de perdues
! A moins que cinq ans d’erreur ne fussent nécessaires pour donner au repentir
l’occasion d’entrer et de creuser l’âme !
Cependant celle qui était une sainte à treize ans ne
pouvait pas tout oublier. « C’était en vain, a-t-elle dit plus tard, que tous
ces plaisirs se réunissaient pour satisfaire mes appétits, ils ne pouvaient les
rassasier : mon âme était d’une capacité infinie; toutes les jouissances de la
terre seraient entrées en elle sans la remplir. »
Un jour Catherine se plaignit à sa soeur Simbania du
vide affreux dont elle souffrait. Sa soeur, qui connaissait un très saint
religieux, supplia Catherine de s’approcher du sacrement de pénitence. Catherine,
ébranlée par ses propres souvenirs, ne dit pas non. Simbania fit prévenir le
prêtre qu'il s’agissait d’une très grande conversion, et que celle qui allait
peut-être s’adresser à lui le lendemain était apellée à gravir les sommets. En
effet, le lendemain Catherine se décide; elle se rend à l’église, demande le
prêtre, et s’agenouille, en l’attendant, dans le confessionnal.
Ici se passe un grand drame.
Un rayon de lumière tombe sur Catherine agenouillée ;
elle voit. Que voit-elle ? Elle seule pourrait le dire, ou plutôt elle-même ne
le pourrait pas. Elle voit sa prédestination, elle voit sa vie depuis sa chute.
Les cinq années qu’elle vient de passer lui apparaissent telles qu’elles sont
dans la lumière divine. Catherine perd la parole et le sentiment. Le prêtre,
qui était entré au confessionnal, croit qu’elle se prépare en silence, et la
laisse à son recueillement. Le silence continuait. Catherine était en extase.
Le temps passe. On vient chercher le prêtre pour une affaire pressante. Il avertit
Catherine de son départ et de son prompt retour. Catherine n’entend rien. Il
s’en va; il revient : Catherine est dans la même attitude et dans le même
silence. Il l’exhorte à parler. Rappelée péniblement du fond de l’extase, elle
fait un immense effort, mais ne peut dire qu’un mot : « Mon Père, je ne peux
pas parler. Si vous le voulez, je remettrai à plus tard cette confession ».
Elle rentre à la maison, jette loin d’elle ses ornements,
répand des torrents de larmes. Le pavé de sa chambre est inondé, visiblement
inondé, comme la terre après un orage. Il paraít que, pendant l’extase, un dard
brûlant lui était entré dans le coeur. Elle raconte dans ses dialogues qu’à travers
ses sanglots elle prononçait une seule parole : Se peut-il, ó Amour, que vous m’ayez prévenue et révélé en un seul
instant tout ce que la parole ne peut exprimer ?
Elle avait eu son chemin de Damas. Elle avait été
foudroyée.
Pendant quelque temps elle poussa le repentir jusqu’à
la fureur. L’horreur de sa chute la conduisit à des violences dont le récit
serait à peine accepté aujourd’hui. On n’oserait plus même raconter les choses qu’elle osa faire. L’hôpital de la Miséricorde
fut souvent le témoin discret de ses audaces singulières. Elle se dévoua aux
soins les plus difficiles envers les maladies les plus répugnantes, et dépassa
ce qui était nécessaire. Elle céda à cet instinct que saint Paul appelle la
Folie de la Croix. Ses actes extérieurs n’étaient que les ombres des actes
intérieurs qui les inspiraient. Elle disait souvent : « Les macérations
imposées au corps sont parfaitement inutiles lorsqu’elles ne sont pas accompagnées
de l’abnégation du moi. »
Après quatorze mois d’une pénitence terrible, elle reçut
l’assurance d’avoir complétement satisfait à la justice.
A cette époque, disent les biographes contemporains,
le souvenir poignant de ses fautes, qui jusqu’alors l’avait poursuivie jour et
nuit, lui fut enlevé complètement. Elle ne se souvint pas plus de ses péchés
que s’ils eussent été noyés au fond de la mer.
Ici commence la vie nouvelle da Catherine, la vie sur
la hauteur. Elle atteint et décrit elle-même cet état qu’elle appelle la nudité de l'amour. Depuis le jour da
son foudroiement, elle ne perdit pas de vue une seule fois la présence de Dieu.
Sa conversion ne procéda pas, comme tant d’autres, par degrés : elle fut
soudaine et éternelle. Jamais elle n’avança méthodiquement.
« Si je revenais sur mes pas, disait-elle, je voudrais
qu’on m’arrachât les yeux, et je ne trouverais pas que ce fût assez. »
La contemplation de sainte Catherine alla toujours en
montant et sa fixa sur les sommets. Pendant que d’autres, comme sainte Gertrude
par exemple, suivaient sur la poussière des routes humaines la trace des pas de
Jésus-Christ et s’attachaient de toutes leurs forces à suivre son humanité,
sainte Catherine de Gênes était emportée vers l’abîme de sa divinité. Sans
exclure de son oraison et de sa contemplation les mystères qui donnent sur la
vie humaine de Jésus, elle se nourrissait plus spécialement de ceux qui donnent
sur la vie divine du Christ. Peu de regards partis de la terre sont allés si
haut dans le ciel.
Catherine eut la vue intérieure du péché, et sachant
ce qu’il y a au fond d’un péché véniel, elle en conçut une horreur telle
qu’elle allait mourir si Dieu ne l’eût affermie.
Si elle croyait voir en elle la plus légère imperfection,
elle était, disait-elle, jusqu’à ce qu’elle en fût délivrée, elle était dans
une chaudière bouillante.
« Ma vision du péché véniel n’a duré qu’un instant
disait-elle ; elle eût suffit pour réduire en poudre un corps de diamant, si
elle s’était prolongée. Qu’est-ce donc que le péché mortel ? Quiconque comprend
ce que sont le péché et la grâce ne peut redouter ni estimer autre chose. »
« Je vois, disait Catherine, je vois dans le Tout-Puissant
un tel penchant à s’unir à la créature raisonnable, faite par lui et à son
image, que si le diable pouvait se délivrer de son péché, le Seigneur l’élèverait
à cette hauteur où Lucifer voulait monter par sa révolte, c’est-à-dire qu’il le
ferait comme Dieu, non pas sans doute par nature ou par essence, mais par
participation. »
Je livre cette sublime pensée aux méditations de ceux
qui aiment à respirer l’air des montagnes. Les horizons qui s’ouvrent de ce
côté sont des horizons inconnus. « Dieu peut faire, dit saint Paul, plus que
nous ne pouvons désirer. »
Un jour sainte Catherine entendit cette parole que le
Saint-Esprit lui adressait :
Il
te serait plus doux d’être dans une fournaise ardente que de subir le
dépouillement parfait auquel je veux faire arriver ton âme.
L'histoire de ce dépouillement a été écrite ou plutôt
balbutiée par sainte Catherine elle-même. Sa parole consiste dans un silence
tremblant. Elle s'excuse de parler, comme Angèle de Foligno. Elle nous avertit
que les mots trahissent, au lieu de la révéler, l’ardeur qui la consume.
« Le Seigneur, dit-elle, voulut séparer en elle l’âme
de l’esprit. Cette séparation est accompagnée d’une souffrance profonde et
subtile, et absolument inexprimable. Le Seigneur versa dans l’âme de cette
créature (c’est d’elle-même qu’elle parle) un nouvel amour si véhément qu’il
tira l’âme à lui avec toutes ses puissances, de telle manière qu’elle était
enlevée à son être naturel. L’oeuvre, ajoute Catherine, est surnaturelle. Elle
s’accomplit dans l’océan de l’amour secret, et telle est la profondeur de cet
océan, qu’on n’y entre pas sans se noyer. Une chose si haute ne se peut
comprendre : elle excède les puissances de l’âme.
Sainte Catherine rend à chaque instant témoignage à
l’impuissance de la parole humaine. Elle habite, au-dessus des choses qui se
pensent, le domaine des choses qui se sentent, et ses cris ressemblent aux efforts
du silence qui, mécontent de lui-même, essayerait de vaincre sa nature.
Le silence tourne en rugissant autour de la parole de
saint Paul : « Le verbe de Dieu est vivant, efficace, plus pénétrant que le
glaive ; il atteint jusqu’à la division de l’âme et de l’esprit. »
L’âme et l’esprit ne sont pas deux substances
différentes comme l’âme et le corps. Au point de vue philosophique, il n’y a
dans l’homme que l’âme el le corps. Qu’est-ce donc que la division de l’âme et
de l’esprit ? Saint Paul lance dans le monde cette parole inconnue, comme un
glaive de feu au milieu d’un champ de bataille, et s’en va n’expliquant rien.
Sainte Catherine de Gênes relève le glaive de feu. Elle passe sa vie à commenter
la parole de saint Paul ; mais son commentaire, par cela même qu’il est
magnifique, augmente la nuit noire au lieu de la dissiper ; car ici, la nuit,
c’est la lumière. Plus sainte Catherine développe la parole de saint Paul, plus
elle dégage le mystère contenu, plus les ténèbres sacrées s’étendent et
l’envahissent. Aussi, après chaque phrase elle sent grandir en elle
l’impossibilité de parler ; mais le silence succombe à son tour devant un nouvel
effort de langage qui ne naît que pour mourir. Ainsi la parole et le silence se
succèdent, tous deux insuffisants, tous deux nécessaires. Chacun d’eux fait un
effort pour racheter la misère de l’autre.
Écoutons-la :
« Et l’esprit dit à l’âme : - Je veux me séparer de
toi. Maintenant je te répondrai en paroles ; plus tard je te répondrai par des
faits, et alors tu porteras envie aux morts. Tu as dérobé les grâces de Dieu;
tu les as rapportées à toi, tu te les appropries si subtilement que tu ne t'en aperçois
pas.
« Et l’âme répondit : - Je reconnais mon larcin. J’ai
volé les choses les plus importantes qui soient au monde. Mon péché est grand
et subtil.
« Et l’esprit étant lui-même attiré par Dieu, quoique
sans le savoir, attira tout à lui avec impétuosité, et l’âme fut consumée avec
tous les sentiments corporels, et la créature demeura noyée en Dieu.
« Et l’âme s’écria : O langue, pourquoi parles-tu,
puisque tu n’as pas de mots pour exprimer l’amour ?
« O mon coeur, pourquoi ne me consumes-tu pas ? Seigneur,
vous m’avez montré une lumière nouvelle par laquelle j’ai vu que tout mon précédent
amour n’était qu’amour-propre. Mes opérations étaient souillées, elles
demeuraient cachées en moi, je les abritais sous votre ombre, et je me les
appropriais ! Que dire de l’amour ? Je suis surmontée, je le sens opérer en moi et je ne comprends pas l’opération. Je me sens brûlée, et je ne vois pas le
feu. O amour, tu m’as fermé la bouche. Je ne sais, je ne puis plus parler. Je
ne veux plus chercher ce qui ne se peut trouver. »
Et après un silence, elle recommence à crier :
« O amour, celui qui te sent ne te comprend pas, et
celui qui veut te connaître ne peut te comprendre. O coeur navré, tu es
incurable, et, conduit à la mort, tu recommences à vivre ! Si je pouvais
exprimer l’amour, il me semble que tous les coeurs s’enflammeraient. Avant de quitter
cette vie, je voudrais être capable d’en parler une fois. Quelle chose délicieuse
ce serait de parler de l’amour, si l’on trouvait des paroles ! L’amour redresse
les choses tortueuses et unit les contraires. O amour, comment appelez-vous les
âmes qui vous sont chères ? »
Et le Seigneur répondit: « Ego dixi, dii estis et filii Excelsi omnes. Je l’ai dit : vous êtes
des dieux et les fils du Très-Haut. »
Après vingt-cinq ans, Dieu adressa Catherine à
Cattaneo. Elle alla vers lui et lui dit : « J’ai persévéré vingt-cinq ans dans
la voie spirituelle ; maintenant je ne puis supporter la violence des assauts
intérieurs et extérieurs; c’est pourquoi j’ai été pourvue de vous. Je crois que
Dieu vous a confié le soin de ma personne toute seule et que vous ne devriez
vous occuper que de moi. »
Et, parlant à un de ses enfants spirituels : « Si je
parle de l’amour, disait-elle, il me semble que je l’insulte, tant mes paroles
sont loin de la réalité. Sachez seulement que si une goutte de ce que contient
mon coeur tombait en enfer, l’enfer serait changé en paradis. »
Tel est le langage de sainte Catherine de Gênes. Ce
sont des discours, des cris, des sanglots et des silences, et chacune de ces
choses appelle les autres à son secours, comme pour triompher avec leur aide
des faiblesses de sa nature.
Ernest Hello. Physionomies de saints.
SOURCE : https://archive.org/stream/PhysionomiesDeSaintsParErnestHello/physionomies%20de%20saints_djvu.txt
La visión de santa Catalina Fieschi Adorno, 1747
Sainte Catherine de Gênes
Veuve (1447-1510)
Catherine Fieschi, fille d’un vice-roi de Naples,
naquit à Gênes. Sa famille, féconde en grands hommes, avait donné à l’Église
deux Papes, neuf cardinaux et deux archevêques. Dès l’âge de huit ans, conduite
par l’Esprit de Dieu, elle se mit à pratiquer de rudes mortifications ;
elle dormait sur une paillasse, avec un morceau de bois pour oreiller ;
mais elle avait soin de cacher ses pénitences. Elle pleurait toutes les fois
qu’elle levait les yeux sur une image de Marie tenant Jésus mort dans Ses bras.
Malgré son vif désir du cloître, elle se vit obligée
d’entrer dans l’état du mariage, où Dieu allait la préparer par de terribles
épreuves à une vie d’une incroyable sainteté. Après cinq ans d’abandon, de
mépris et de froideur de la part de son mari, après cinq ans de peines
intérieures sans consolation, elle fut tout à coup éclairée de manière
définitive sur la vanité du monde et sur les joies ineffables de l’amour
divin : "Plus de monde, plus de péché," s’écria-t-elle. Jésus
lui apparut alors chargé de Sa Croix, et couvert de sang de la tête aux
pieds : "Vois, Ma fille, lui dit-Il, tout ce sang a été répandu au
Calvaire pour l’amour de toi, en expiation de tes fautes !" La vue de
cet excès d’amour alluma en Catherine une haine profonde contre
elle-même : "O amour ! Je ne pécherai plus,"
s’écria-t-elle.
Trois jours après, elle fit sa confession générale
avec larmes, et désormais elle communia tous les jours. L’Eucharistie devint la
nourriture de son corps et de son âme, et pendant vingt-trois ans il lui fut impossible
de prendre autre chose que la Sainte Communion ; elle buvait seulement
chaque jour un verre d’eau mêlée de vinaigre et de sel, pour modérer le feu qui
la dévorait, et, malgré cette abstinence, elle jouissait d’une forte santé.
À l’abstinence continuelle se joignaient de grandes
mortifications ; jamais de paroles inutiles, peu de sommeil ; tous
les jours six à sept heures de prière à genoux ; jamais Catherine ne se
départit de ces règles ; elle était surtout si détachée d’elle-même,
qu’elle en vint à n’avoir plus de désir et à se trouver dans une parfaite
indifférence pour ce qui n’était pas Dieu.
Ses trois maximes principales étaient de ne jamais
dire : Je veux, je ne veux pas, mien, tien : - de ne jamais
s’excuser, - de se diriger en tout par ces mots : Que la Volonté de Dieu
soit faite ! Elle eut la consolation de voir son époux revenir à Dieu,
dans les derniers jours de sa vie, et de l’assister à sa mort. A partir de ce
moment, Catherine se donna tout entière au soin des malades, et y pratiqua les
actes les plus héroïques.
SOURCE : http://viechretienne.catholique.org/saints/4275-sainte-catherine-de-genes
Voici la Prière « Ô mon Amour doux Jésus » de
Sainte Catherine de Gênes (1447-1510), Religieuse et auteur mystique qui
visitait les malades, soignait les lépreux et les pestiférés et qui fut
canonisée en 1737 par le pape Clément XII. La pensée de Sainte Catherine de
Gênes se concentre en un seul point à quoi tout se ramène et de quoi tout
jaillit : la pureté de l'amour.
La Prière de Sainte Catherine de Gênes « Ô
mon Amour doux Jésus » :
« Ô Amour, le cœur qui te goûte atteint déjà en
ce monde le commencement de la vie éternelle. Mais toi, Seigneur, tu gardes
cachée cette œuvre à celui qui la possède, pour qu'il n'aille point gâter ton
œuvre par son amour-propre. Ô Amour, que peut-on dire de toi ? Qui te
ressent ne te comprend pas, qui te veut comprendre ne peut te connaître. Ô
Amour, je ne puis plus me taire et jamais je ne pourrai parler comme je le
voudrais de tes suaves et douces opérations. Ton amour me remplit de toute
part, il me donne un vif mouvement de parler et aussitôt je m'en trouve
empêchée. Je me parle alors à moi-même de cœur et d'esprit, mais quand je veux
prononcer les mots et exprimer ce que je sens, aussitôt je suis arrêtée et
déçue par cette langue impuissante. Je voudrais donc me taire et je ne puis,
parce que l'instinct de parler m'aiguillonne ; j'ai l'impression que si je
pouvais exprimer cet amour que je ressens au cœur, tout autre cœur s'enflammerait,
si loin soit-il de l'amour. Ô Amour fort et suave, heureux celui que tu
possèdes ! Tu le fortifies, tu le défends, tu le gardes de toute
opposition de 1'âme et du corps. Tu mènes doucement toute chose à sa fin et
jamais tu n'abandonnes l'homme, tu lui es fidèle, tu lui donnes lumière contre
les tromperies du démon, contre la malice du monde et contre lui-même. Ô Amour,
ta douceur brise les cœurs plus durs que le diamant et les liquéfie comme la
cire au feu. Ô Amour, tu chasses du cœur tout chagrin, toute dureté, toute
propriété et toute délectation terrestre. Ô Amour, ton nom est si suave qu'il
rend suave toute chose. Douce est la bouche qui te nomme. Ô Amour, qu'elle est
douce ta suavité et suave la douceur que tu apportes avec toi ! Tu en fais
part à chacun et à mesure que tu te répands en plus de créatures, à mesure
aussi s'accomplit ta volonté. Plus l'homme ressent et connaît ton ardeur suave,
plus il en est embrasé, étourdi, affolé. Ô Amour, bienheureux le cœur que tu
possèdes et que tu emprisonnes ! Ô Amour, tout ce qui se fait par toi se
fait sans peine, avec joie, avec élan. Ô Amour, tes liens sont si suaves et si
forts qu'ils lient ensemble les anges et les saints, ils tiennent ferme et
serré et jamais ne se rompent. Les hommes liés de ce lien restent si fortement
unis qu'ils n'ont qu'une volonté, un seul objet; on voit que toute chose leur
est commune, soit temporelle, soit spirituelle. Dans ce lien il n'est fait
nulle différence de riche à pauvre, de nation à nation, toute sorte
d'opposition est exclue dès qu'existe cet amour qui redresse tout ce qui est
tortu et unit les contraires. Ô mon Amour, doux Jésus, qui t'a fait venir du
ciel en terre ? L'amour. Qui t'a fait subir jusqu'à la mort tant et de si
horribles tourments ? L'amour. Qui t'a fait donner toi-même en nourriture
à l'âme ta bien-aimée ? L'amour. Qui t'a mû au point que tu nous as envoyé
et continuellement tu nous envoies, pour être notre force et notre guide, ton
Saint-Esprit ? L'amour. Amen.»
Sainte Catherine de Gênes (1447-1510)
SOURCE : http://site-catholique.fr/index.php?post/Priere-de-Sainte-Catherine-de-Genes
Denys Savchenko. Saint Catherine of Genoa, Church of St. Catherine, Genoa, Italy.
Sainte
Catherine de Gênes, une sainte en Purgatoire
Florent Thibout
Sainte Catherine de Gênes (1447-1510) a été gratifiée
d’une expérience mystique par laquelle il lui fut donné d’éprouver dans sa
chair la souffrance des âmes du purgatoire mais surtout d’en comprendre, autant
que faire se peut, la nature et les raisons.
Rappelons en passant que la doctrine du purgatoire
n’est pas, comme on le croit aujourd’hui trop souvent, une trouvaille tardive
de l’Église. Son existence est attestée dans les Évangiles (Mt 5,25-26 ;
Lc 12,58-59), surtout dans saint Paul (1 Co 3,15), mais aussi dans l’Ancien
Testament. Dans le deuxième Livre des Maccabées (ch.12), il est question de
prier pour les morts, donc pour des âmes qui ne sont ni au ciel ni en enfer.
Les curieux seront déçus. La révélation de sainte
Catherine de Gênes ne donne lieu a aucune imagerie fantastique mais à un
véritable traité théologique dont les informations (et c’est évidemment une
garantie) concordent en tous points avec l’enseignement de l’Église, qu’elles
éclairent sans rien y ajouter, avec sa foi, qui est la même hier, aujourd’hui
et demain. Le Traité du purgatoire est, stricto sensu, une œuvre
traditionnelle.
Il pourrait aussi bien s’appeler « traité du
péché » ou « traité de la justice divine », ou encore
« traité de la miséricorde de Dieu ». Ce sont des pages de feu dont
la lecture donne vraiment envie de gagner ici-bas notre paradis sans faire le
détour par un purgatoire que l’on a tendance aujourd’hui (dans la mesure, et
elle est faible, où l’on s’en soucie encore et où les paroissiens entendent
prêcher les fins dernières) à considérer comme une salle d’attente assez
tranquille, un peu ennuyeuse sans doute, mais guère plus, avant la vision
béatifique. Détrompons-nous. Les souffrances du purgatoire sont aussi vives que
celles de l’enfer quand même elles s’accompagnent, mais sans les diminuer,
d’une joie intense due à la certitude d’être sauvé et, au terme de la
purification, d’être pleinement uni à Dieu.
C’est dans cette tension que réside l’essentiel des
souffrances des âmes du purgatoire. Elles sont unies à Dieu par un lien de
charité parfaite (elles veulent ce que Dieu veut) et elles voient par
conséquent toute l’horreur du péché. C’est une souffrance d’amour. Leurs peines
sont d’autant plus intenses qu’elles sont attirées vers Dieu et qu’elles voient
toute la laideur des souillures qui les empêchent de Lui être déjà unies. Un
raisonnement hâtif pourrait faire croire que leurs souffrances diminuent à
mesure que le feu de l’amour les débarrasse de leurs scories. Il est vrai qu’à
mesure qu’elles sont purifiées, elles voient de mieux en mieux la bonté, la
beauté et la pureté de Dieu, et c’est le motif d’une paix grandissante. Mais en
même temps, c’est aussi leur regard sur leurs péchés, sur tout ce qui les
sépare encore de Dieu, qui gagne en acuité, et c’est la source de la plus vive
souffrance. Le temps de la peine diminue, pas l’intensité des souffrances.
C’est l’amour de Dieu, l’amour que Dieu a pour les
âmes, qui les attire à Lui et suscite en elles un amour toujours plus
grand :
L’amour divin, en subjuguant cette âme, lui confère
une paix inimaginable, quoique celle-ci ne diminue en rien ses souffrances,
puisque c’est l’amour différé qui les occasionne, et elles sont d’autant plus
grandes que Dieu l’a faite plus capable de son amour ». (chapitre XII)
Et pourtant, comme la volonté de ces âmes est si
complètement unie à celle de Dieu par la charité parfaite, et qu’elles se
trouvent si heureuses d’être placées sous sa divine dépendance, on ne peut pas
dire que leur peine (qualifiée néanmoins ailleurs « d’épouvantable »)
soit une souffrance. (Chapitre II)
Les peines du purgatoire ne sont pas d’ordre
« psychologique ». L’âme y souffre, elle ne se torture pas. C’est une
souffrance sans médiation aucune. L’âme souffre parce qu’elle n’est pas encore
unie à ce Dieu pour lequel elle est faite : la souffrance est l’effet
direct de son exil ontologique et non pas la conséquence d’une quelconque
ratiocination, de quelque rumination de ses fautes. Une âme exilée, oui, mais
pas une conscience malheureuse.
Ses souffrances ne peuvent pas être de type
psychologique parce qu’à l’heure de la mort, les âmes sauvées sont débarrassées
de toute intériorité.
A l’instant où elles quittent la terre, elles voient
pourquoi elles sont envoyées en purgatoire, mais plus jamais après ;
autrement, elles retiendraient encore quelque chose de personnel, ce qui ne
peut avoir accès en ce lieu. Étant affermies en la charité, elles ne peuvent
plus en dévier par aucun défaut (la peine du purgatoire, c’est donc d’être
dans un rapport de pleine charité avec Dieu mais non encore satisfait par une
pleine union avec Lui) et n’ont plus d’autres désirs que la pure volonté
du parfait amour, ne pouvant en être séparé par quoi que ce soit. Elles ne
peuvent ni commettre le péché, ni mériter en s’en abstenant. (chapitre I)
C’en est fini du remords, de la contrition, de la
considération du temps passé et des fautes commises. Nous sommes dans
l’éternité. Affranchis du temps et de l’espace. Il y a un mystère de cet état
qui nécessairement est hors temps, puisque nous avons franchi les portes de la
mort, mais où, pourtant, l’on endure. Mystère, puisque toute endurance suppose
une forme de temporalité. Au moins pouvons-nous supposer qu’au purgatoire
celle-ci ne se compte plus en jours [1].
Elle doit être une sorte d’écoulement mais sans possibilité pour l’âme de se
projeter vers un lendemain ou de se retourner vers un hier. Donc une sorte de
durée sans passé ni avenir..., sans être pour autant l’Instant éternel, sans
durée ni endurance, le perpétuel présent de l’éternité bienheureuse.
Où l’on voit aussi confirmé ce que nous avons
l’occasion de constater ici-bas bien souvent : que la temporalité est
peineuse et pénible. Certes, l’endurance du temps peut être sereine puisque
l’espace temporel est la carrière qui nous est ouverte pour la course vers le
ciel. Mais le temps demeure le milieu où la psyché trouve à languir et à
souffrir ici-bas et apparemment, mais d’une façon nouvelle (plus pure dans son
être donc plus dure), dans l’au-delà. Ainsi, les damnés, bien que se retrouvant
dans l’éternité propre à ce qui est post mortem, semblent, d’après sainte
Catherine et contrairement aux âmes du purgatoire, ne pas être affranchis de la
rumination du passé, de la considération de soi et donc de l’enlisement dans la
temporalité qui en est la condition. Les âmes du purgatoire souffrent de la
peine de leur péché mais pas de la culpabilité. Les damnés, si. Ils demeurent
dans la prison de leur moi, à jamais rongés par le désespoir, entre un passé
qui les condamne et un avenir sans avenir, animés d’une éternelle volonté
mauvaise que la bonté de Dieu ne peut plus toucher puisqu’avec la mort, ils
sont fixés dans l’état où leur liberté les a mis.
L’intensité des souffrances des âmes du purgatoire et
même celles des damnés ne doivent pas nous faire douter de la miséricorde de
Dieu. Bien au contraire. Ces souffrances sont dans l’ordre. Cet ordre est juste
et cette justice est miséricordieuse. Ce n’est pas Dieu qui veut la souffrance,
c’est le péché qui les imposent.
On se plaît depuis quelques années à opposer de façon
caricaturale (et pas toujours innocente) une Église d’aujourd’hui qui aurait
« redécouvert » que Dieu est miséricorde à une Église du passé (n’y
en a-t-il pas qu’une ?), dite « janséniste », qui aurait été
exclusivement préoccupée, pour ne pas dire obsédée, par la justice d’un Dieu
vengeur. Et d’invoquer, pour soutenir ce poncif lancinant, l’enseignement de
Thérèse de Lisieux dont aucune parole, pourtant, n’a jamais opposé justice et
miséricorde, mais qui toujours rappelle que la justice de Dieu est d’autant
plus miséricordieuse qu’elle inclut la considération de notre faiblesse (et
cela jusqu’au purgatoire où, d’après sainte Catherine, pour ne pas désespérer
l’âme qui Le désire, Dieu a la bonté de la libérer de la considération
réflexive des fautes dont elle doit être purifiée. Considération qui, vu leur
nouvelle et entière lucidité, serait la source d’une douleur, d’un désespoir
insupportable). Oui, la justice de Dieu inclut la charité mais inversement,
comme dit saint Vincent de Paul, « il n’y a point de charité qui ne soit
accompagnée de Justice ».
La justice de Dieu est miséricordieuse, même aux
damnés. Les âmes sont conduites dans le « lieu » qui correspond à
l’état de péché mortel ou de sainteté où elles sont trouvées, du fait de leur
liberté, à l’heure de la mort. Ce n’est pas Dieu qui les y conduit.
A l’instant même où l’âme se sépare du corps, elle va
au lieu qui lui est assigné, n’ayant besoin d’autres guides que la nature du
péché lui-même, si elle a quitté le corps en état de péché mortel. Et si l’âme
était empêchée d’obéir à ce décret (procédant de la justice de Dieu), elle
se trouverait dans un enfer plus profond encore, car elle serait en dehors de
l’ordre divin, dans lequel la miséricorde trouve toujours place et mitige la
peine complète que l’âme a méritée. C’est pourquoi, ne trouvant pas de lieu
mieux approprié, ni dans lequel la peine serait moindre, elle se précipite
d’elle-même dans celui qui l’attend. (chapitre VII)
Il n’est nulle « partie » de l’ordre voulu
par Dieu qui ne soit habitée de la présence de Celui qui l’a instituée. L’enfer
est dans l’ordre des choses divines. Il faut donc croire que Dieu n’en est pas
absent, pas complètement, même si l’enfer se définit comme l’état de séparation
définitive d’avec Dieu — « Si descendero in infernum, ades » (Psaume
138). Il y a au moins une relation entre l’enfer et Dieu, c’est qu’il
appartient à l’ordre voulu par la divine prudence. Il y a donc pire que les
pires décrets de l’ordre divin, et ce serait, s’il était possible, le
désordre : une situation (ou plutôt non-situation) sans aucun référent
pour dire même en quoi elle serait désordonnée, une situation où Dieu serait
alors, en tout sens absolument absent.
La vision de sainte Catherine nous est aussi
l’occasion d’évacuer un autre lieu commun, lié au premier en ce qu’il est lui
aussi l’effet d’une allergie très moderne à la notion même de justice. Il se
manifeste par l’incompréhension des notions de peines et de rachats. On n’y
voit guère autre chose que l’exigence d’un Dieu rémunérateur, comptable, et
finalement bien peu généreux, pour ne pas dire cruel. En général, on ne manque
pas de conclure la tirade en parlant de « juridisme ».
Mais ce n’est pas Dieu qui veut la peine, elle est le
fruit (amer, sans doute) de la liberté — de la liberté de l’homme dans son
rapport à la vérité, donc, le fruit de la justice.
On se demandera alors, pourquoi Dieu ne passe-t-il pas
tout simplement l’éponge ? Ce serait Lui demander d’aller contre son
ordre, au Logos d’aller contre sa Logique et de commettre une
absurdité, au Tout-puissant de commettre l’impossible. Sans doute, Dieu est-il
maître de l’ordre des choses, puisque celui-ci est un décret de son infinie
liberté. Cela n’implique pourtant pas que Dieu puisse se contredire en le
bouleversant (l’exception du miracle est une exception, qui, d’ailleurs, loin
de bouleverser l’ordre, le manifeste avec plus d’éclat). La liberté de Dieu est
infinie, elle n’est pas arbitraire. L’ordre qu’Il a voulu Lui est, de quelque
façon, « co-naturel » (même si, évidemment, la création n’est pas
pour Dieu une nécessité).
Qui réfute la nécessité des peines de l’enfer et du
purgatoire, réfute aussi, contre toute évidence (quelques catholiques, ou
prétendus tels, catholiques à gros tirage, le font aujourd’hui volontiers), la
nécessité des souffrances que doit endurer sur terre celui qui veut se
sanctifier, et même celle des souffrances du Fils pour la rédemption des hommes
(et pourtant, « Il faut qu’il souffre beaucoup », dit
l’évangile). A chaque fois, c’est faire peu de cas du péché originel,
méconnaître la nature du mal et celle de la créature qui doit être sauvée puis,
sauf accès direct au Paradis, être encore purifiée.
Récrimination classique : Dieu ne pouvait-Il pas
nous sauver autrement ? D’un coup de force, ou de baguette magique, faire
notre salut en expulsant à tout jamais le péché du monde ? Mais c’est
l’homme que Dieu veut sauver. Et l’homme est une créature libre : une
personne. Ce coup de force reviendrait à nier sa liberté. Il n’y aurait alors
plus personne à sauver puisque l’objet du salut ne serait plus une personne...
Sauver l’homme, c’est s’adresser à sa liberté, c’est sauver sa liberté faussée
par le péché originel. Or, en toute logique (logique ontologique, certes mise à
mal depuis notre père Adam), une liberté ne peut être sauvée que par elle-même.
Elle se perd ou elle se sauve elle-même. Sinon, elle n’est plus libre. Le salut
est son affaire, son choix. Situation paradoxale : pour se sauver, il faut
une liberté parfaitement libre ; or, non seulement, celle-ci ne l’est plus
— depuis la Chute, elle est bien incapable de se restaurer elle-même — mais si
elle l’était encore, elle n’aurait pas besoin d’être sauvée, étant alors
d’elle-même toujours en accord avec la vérité, avec la volonté de Dieu.
Cercle vicieux dont seul Dieu peut nous... libérer. Et
cela, seulement par l’Incarnation, qui fait paraître sur terre, une liberté
humaine authentique, parfaitement libre, qui veut toujours ce que veut Dieu
parce qu’elle est aussi celle d’un Dieu : la liberté du Christ, seule
liberté humaine qui n’a pas besoin d’être sauvé mais qui a le pouvoir de faire
l’humainement impossible : sauver toutes les autres libertés, les libérer
du péché, les sauver à leur place. A la seule condition que celles-ci
acceptent de prendre place en Lui, de faire corps avec Lui. Donc, aussi de
souffrir avec Lui.
Nécessité de la souffrance. L’œuvre du salut est
nécessairement une souffrance. Souffrance d’une liberté parfaite, qui, dans un
monde de péché, veut absolument ce que veut le Père. Souffrance du pur qui se
fait impur (le sans péché s’est fait péché pour nous, dit saint Paul) pour le
purifier. Abaissement de l’Incarnation : pour un Dieu, c’est la première
(« Il ne s’est pas prévalu de sa condition divine, mais il s’est anéanti...
devenant semblable aux hommes... », Ph 2,6) Le Christ souffrira les
injures, les coups et la croix. Dans sa chair, mais plus encore, et plus
durement que tout homme soumis à un même calvaire, dans son âme, avec une
sensibilité surhumaine, avec une inimaginable aversion pour le mal, parce qu’il
est le Bien en personne.
Une pure souffrance, plus qu’humaine, plus que
physique et psychologique, une souffrance vraiment ontologique, où le Bien
souffre du Mal. Et cela n’est pas arbitraire, ce n’est pas l’exigence d’un Dieu
cruel, c’est dans la nature du bien et mal, de l’être et du non être. Le
Christ, qui n’est que Bien et Bonheur, pur esprit qui ne peut donc souffrir, ne
peut néanmoins que souffrir, et jusqu’à la croix, dès qu’Il
s’incarne. C’est nécessaire et volontaire. Il veut souffrir ce que nous
devrions souffrir, si nous le pouvions et le voulions, pour vaincre le mal et
redevenir les êtres bons que la bonté divine avait créés à son image et
ressemblance.
Toutes proportions gardées, c’est une souffrance du
même ordre — en ce qui concerne la nécessité, l’acuité dans la sensibilité, et
le consentement — qu’endure l’âme du purgatoire (avec, bien sûr, au moins cette
différence que la sensibilité du Christ au mal est extrême et que ses
souffrances sont d’autant plus cruelles qu’il ne les a mérité en rien). Elle
voit en toute lucidité le mal, ce qui la sépare encore de Dieu et elle veut sa
purification. Elle souffre de ses impuretés « comme » le Christ
souffrait de l’impureté de sa création ; et, « comme » Lui, bien
plus que physiquement (bien obligée : elle n’a plus de corps).
L’âme du purgatoire, qui est une âme sauvée, est
désormais en pleine communion de charité avec Dieu. Elle veut ce que veut Dieu,
à la façon dont le Fils veut tout ce que veut le Père) et elles ont donc
désormais une aversion semblable pour le péché. Une aversion, en tout cas, bien
plus grande que le plus grand saint sur terre, qui souffre et mérite, qui se
bat contre la chair, mais qui aussi sera toujours empêché par cette même chair,
jusqu’à la mort, de voir parfaitement l’horreur du péché. Le Christ a été le
seul homme pour qui la chair n’a pas été une telle limite.
Le Christ devait souffrir parce qu’il est Dieu jeté
dans le péché. Le Sauf dans la perdition. L’âme du purgatoire doit souffrir
parce qu’elle est sauvée mais encore embarrassée par ses péchés, brûlants comme
la tunique de Nessus ; parce qu’elle est dans un pur amour avec Dieu, mais
pas encore avec Lui. Elle est du bien qui doit encore se séparer de ses maux,
de l’être qui doit laisser se résorber le non-être qui la mine encore, afin
d’être comme Dieu et pouvoir le rejoindre.
Nécessité, enfin, de la souffrance des damnés. De ce
point de vue, les peines de l’enfer sont l’inverse de celles du purgatoire. Ce
ne sont pas les souffrances du pur encore flétri par de l’impur, mais qui sait
qu’il rejoindra le Saint. Ce sont les souffrances de l’impur qui sait qu’il ne
rejoindra jamais le Pur (c’est donc, s’il est vrai que seul le même connaît le
même — « nous serons comme Lui parce que nous Le connaîtrons », dit
saint Jean — c’est donc que le damné garde une idée de Dieu. Comment
souffrirait-il, sinon, de son éternelle séparation d’avec Dieu, le parfaitement
Pur ? Une parcelle, non pour sa consolation, mais pour son désespoir. Encore
que l’on puisse y voir aussi l’effet de la miséricorde divine dont parle sainte
Catherine, selon laquelle, on l’a vu, il y a pire que l’enfer).
Si, à la mort corporelle, les jeux sont faits ;
si l’âme ne peut plus mériter, elle n’en reste pas moins l’âme immortelle d’un
être créé libre. Même en enfer, l’homme reste libre en quelques façons :
non plus libre de choisir entre le bien et le mal, non plus libre de se
purifier en participant aux souffrances du Christ, mais libre parce qu’il reste
une personne, non une chose ni un animal. Il reste donc affronté aux
conséquences de sa liberté (une liberté qui désormais a un bilan mais plus de
champs d’action, une liberté qui s’est détruite en se séparant de Dieu). Il
reste une liberté au sens où il reste esprit, qui pense, veut, considère, et
souffre (il est, dit sainte Catherine, animé d’une éternelle volonté mauvaise).
Et comme être séparé de Dieu est toujours une souffrance, il souffre pour
toujours d’être à jamais séparé de Dieu.
On souffre sur terre de n’être pas à Dieu (et c’est
vrai même du pire incroyant, puisqu’objectivement Dieu manque à tous — sans, en
un autre sens, Lui qui est toujours fidèle, avoir jamais manqué à personne). Au
purgatoire de n’être pas encore à Lui. En enfer, de n’être plus jamais à Lui,
mais séparé de Dieu comme personne ne l’a jamais été sur terre.
On souffre de n’être pas ce pour quoi, ce pour Qui on
a été fait. Sur terre, notre liberté souffre de n’être pas libre. On souffre,
pour parler comme Nietzsche, parfois chrétien malgré lui, d’être humains, trop
humains. Il aurait dû lire sainte Catherine de Gênes :
Finalement, pour tout conclure, comprenez bien que
tout ce qui est humain est entièrement transformé par notre Dieu tout puissant
et miséricordieux et que c’est l’œuvre du purgatoire.
Florent
Thibout, né en 1959. Maîtrise de Philosophie. Auteur de Après le
déluge (Gallimard).
[1] Ce qui, soit dit en passant, n’ôte rien à la
pertinence des indulgences partielles que l’Église accordait naguère (elle n’en
accorde plus que des plénières pour éviter justement toute équivoque dans les
esprits modernes, donc calculateurs), en vertu du pouvoir que son Fondateur lui
a donné de remettre les péchés et de dispenser sur terre les grâces divines. On
croit souvent qu’une indulgence, par exemple de 100 jours, signifie 100 jours
de purgatoire en moins. En vérité, il s’agit d’une rémission de la peine
« temporelle » qui reste due (sur terre ou au purgatoire) quand le
péché a été confessé et que l’âme est de nouveau en état de grâce — non pas une
rémission de 100 jours de purgatoire mais une rémission équivalente à celle
qu’aurait obtenu une pénitence de 100 jours, telle qu’elle se pratiquait
couramment dans l’Église primitive. L’Église garantit la réalité de la
réduction de peine, mais c’est Dieu seul qui connaît les termes de
l’équivalence, qui sait ce que valent ces 100 jours, Lui seul qui se charge de
faire la conversion de ces jours de pénitence terrestre en telle ou telle durée
de cette mystérieuse temporalité propre au purgatoire.
© Revue
Résurrection - 68 avenue Denfert-Rochereau, 75014 Paris - contact@revue-resurrection.org
Site du Mouvement Résurrection
SOURCE : http://www.revue-resurrection.org/Sainte-Catherine-de-Genes-une
Also known as
Apostle of Purgatory
Caterina Fieschi Adorno
Caterina of Genoa
Caterinetta
formerly 22 March
Profile
Daughter of Jacopo Fieschi and Francesca di
Negro, Geonese nobles;
she was related to Pope Innocent
V and Pope Adrian
V, and her father became
viceroy of Naples, Italy.
Youngest of five children.
A pious and prayerful girl,
she early felt a call to religious
life, tried to enter a convent at
age 13, was turned away because of her youth. At 16 she entered into an
arranged marriage with
a young Genoese nobleman,
Giuliano Adorno. They were a childless couple,
he was careless and unsuccessful as a husband and provider, often cruel,
violent and unfaithful,
and reduced them to bankruptcy. Catherine became indifferent to her faith,
and fell into a depression.
In 1473,
while going to Confession in
a convent in Genoa,
Catherine was struck down by a vision,
the revelation of God‘s love
and her own sinfulness, and fell into a religious ecstasy;
her interior state, and her contact with the truth she had received in
the vision,
stayed with her the rest of her life. She returned home, helped lead her
husband to the faith,
and the two lived together chastely the rest of their lives, working with
the sick and poor till
the death of
Julian in 1497.
She became a Franciscan tertiary,
serving as a tertiary directress
in 1490. Caught and
survived the plague in 1493.
Spiritual student of Father Cattaneo
Marabotti in 1499,
and he helped her to write and
arrange descriptions of what she had seen and learned in her visions.
It is her writings that
have continued her fame today; during her canonization inquiry,
the Holy Office announced that her writings alone
were enough to prove her sanctity. Online and downloadable versions are linked
below.
Born
1447 at Genoa, Italy as Caterina
Fieschi Adorno
15
September 1510 at Genoa, Italy of
natural causes
6 April 1675 by Pope Clement
X
16 June 1737 by Pope Clement
XII
people
ridiculed for their piety
Additional Information
Book
of Saints, by the Monks of
Ramsgate
Little
Lives of the Great Saints
Lives of the Saints, by Father Alban
Butler
Lives
of the Saints, by Father Francis
Xavier Weninger
Pope
Benedict XVI, General Audience, 12
January 2011
Saint
Catherine of Genoa and Her Contemporaries, Catholic World
Saints
of the Day, by Katherine Rabenstein
Transit
of the Seraphic Virgin, by Ser Barduccio di Piero Canigiani
—
Life and Doctrine of Saint Catherine of Genoa
Spiritual Dialogue, by Saint Catherine of Genoa
Treatise on Purgatory, by Saint Catherine of Genoa
free audio book with images
books
Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Saints
Catherine of Genoa: Purgation and Purgatory, the Spiritual
Dialogue, by Serge Hughes (editor)
The Mystical Element of Religion: As Studied in Saint Catherine
of Genoa and Her Friends, by Friedrich Von Hugel
other sites in english
New International Encyclopedia
images
video
Treatise on Purgatory, by Saint Catherine
of Genoa (Librivox audiobook)
webseiten auf deutsch
Stadler’s Bollstandiges Heiligenlexkion
Vollständiges Heiligen-Lexikon
sitios en español
Martirologio Romano, 2001 edición
fonti in italiano
Readings
If it were given to a man to see virtue’s reward in
the next world, he would occupy his intellect, memory and will in nothing but
good works, careless of danger or fatigue. – Saint Catherine
of Genoa
MLA Citation
“Saint Catherine of Genoa“. CatholicSaints.Info.
20 April 2021. Web. 2 October 2021.
<https://catholicsaints.info/saint-catherine-of-genoa/>
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/saint-catherine-of-genoa/
Mausoleo di S. Caterina da Genova di Francesco Schiaffino,
1737-1738
On St. Catherine of Genoa
“Love Itself Purifies [the Soul] From Its Dross of
Sin”
JANUARY 12, 2011 00:00ZENIT STAFFGENERAL
AUDIENCE
VATICAN CITY, JAN. 12, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the
address Benedict XVI gave today during the general audience in Paul VI Hall. In
his address, continuing the series of catecheses on the saints, he reflected on
the figure of St. Catherine of Genoa, of the 15th century.
* * *
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
Catherine was born in Genoa in 1447, the last of five
children. She lost her father, Giacomo Fieschi, when she was very young. Her
mother, Francesca di Negro, educated them in a Christian way, so much so that
the elder of her two daughters became a religious. At 16, Catherine was married
to Giuliano Adorno, a man who, after several experiences in the area of trade
and in the military world in the Middle East, had returned to Genoa to get
married. Their conjugal life was not easy, above all because of the husband’s
character [and his] affection for games of chance. Catherine herself in the
beginning was induced to lead a worldly life, in which she did not find
serenity. After 10 years, she had a feeling of profound emptiness and
bitterness in her heart.
Her conversion began on March 20, 1473, thanks to an
unusual experience. Catherine went to the church of St. Benedict and to the
monastery of Our Lady of Graces for confession and, kneeling before the priest,
“I received,” as she herself writes, “a wound in my heart of the immense love
of God,” and such a clear vision of her miseries and defects, and at the same
time of the goodness of God, that she almost fainted. She was wounded in her
heart by the knowledge of herself, of the life she led and of the goodness of
God. Born from this experience was the decision that oriented her whole life,
which expressed in words was: “No more world, no more sin” (cf. Vita Mirabile,
3rv). Catherine then left, leaving her confession interrupted. When she
returned home, she went to the most isolated room and thought for a long time.
At that moment she was inwardly instructed on prayer and became conscious of
God’s love for her, a sinner — a spiritual experience that she was unable to
express in words (cf. Vita Mirabile, 4r). It was on this occasion that the
suffering Jesus appeared to her, carrying the cross, as he is often represented
in the iconography of the saint. A few days later, she returned to the priest
to finally make a good confession. The “life of purification” began here, a
life that for a long time caused her to suffer a constant pain for the sins
committed and drove her to impose penances and sacrifices on herself to show
her love of God.
On this path, Catherine became increasingly close to
the Lord, until she entered what is known as the “unitive life,” that is, a
relationship of profound union with God. She wrote in her “Life” that her soul
was guided and trained only by the gentle love of God, who gave her everything
she needed. Catherine so abandoned herself in the Lord’s hands that she lived,
almost 25 years, as she wrote, “without the need of any creature, only
instructed and governed by God” (Vita, 117r-118r), nourished above all on
constant prayer and Holy Communion received every day, something unusual at
that time. Only years later, the Lord gave her a priest to care for her
soul.
Catherine was always reluctant to confide and manifest
her experience of mystical communion with God, above all because of the
profound humility she felt before the Lord’s graces. Only in the perspective of
giving him glory and being able to help others in their spiritual journey, was
she convinced to recount what had happened at the moment of her conversion,
which was her original and fundamental experience.
The place of her ascent to mystical summits was the
hospital of Pammatone, the largest hospital complex in Genoa, of which she was
director and leader. Thus, Catherine lived a totally active life, despite the
profundity of her interior life. In Pammatone a group of followers, disciples
and collaborators was formed around her, fascinated by her life of faith and
her charity. She succeeded in having her husband himself, Giuliano Adorno,
abandon his dissipated life, become a Franciscan tertiary and go to the
hospital to help her. Catherine’s participation in the care of the sick went on
until the last days of her earthly journey, Sept. 15, 1510. From her conversion
to her death, there were no extraordinary events; only two elements
characterized her whole existence: on one hand, her mystical experience, that
is, her profound union with God, lived as a spousal union, and on the other,
care of the sick, the organization of the hospital, service to her neighbor,
especially the most abandoned and needy. These two poles — God and neighbor —
filled her life, which was spent practically within the walls of the
hospital.
Dear friends, we must not forget that the more we love
God and are constant in prayer, the more we will truly love those who are
around us, those who are close to us, because we will be able to see in every
person the face of the Lord, who loves without limits or distinctions.
Mysticism does not create distances with others; it does not create an abstract
life, but brings one closer to others because one begins to see and act with
the eyes, with the heart of God.
Catherine’s thought on purgatory, for which she is
particularly known, is condensed in the last two parts of the book mentioned at
the beginning: “Treatise on Purgatory” and “Dialogues on the Soul and Body.” It
is important to observe that, in her mystical experience, Catherine never had
specific revelations on purgatory or on souls that are being purified there.
However, in the writings inspired by our saint purgatory is a central element,
and the way of describing it has original characteristics in relation to her
era.
Theological and mystical sources typical of the era
can be found in Catherine’s work. Particularly there is an image from Dionysius
the Areopagite: that of the golden thread that unites the human heart with God
himself. When God has purified man, he ties him with a very fine thread of
gold, which is his love, and attracts him to himself with such strong affection
that man remains as “overcome and conquered and altogether outside himself.” Thus
the human heart is invaded by the love of God, which becomes the only guide,
the sole motor of his existence (cf. Vita Mirabile, 246rv). This situation of
elevation to God and of abandonment to his will, expressed in the image of the
thread, is used by Catherine to express the action of the divine light on souls
in purgatory, light that purifies them and elevates them to the splendors of
the shining rays of God (cf. Vita Mirabile, 179r).
Dear friends, the saints, in their experience of union
with God, reach such profound “knowledge” of the divine mysteries, in which
love and knowledge are fused, that they are of help to theologians themselves
in their task of study, of “intelligentia fidei,” of “intelligentia” of the
mysteries of the faith, of real deepening in the mysteries, for example, of
what purgatory is.
With her life, St. Catherine teaches us that the more
we love God and enter into intimacy with him in prayer, the more he lets
himself be known and enkindles our heart with his love. Writing on purgatory,
the saint reminds us of a fundamental truth of the faith that becomes for us an
invitation to pray for the deceased so that they can attain the blessed vision
of God in the communion of saints (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1032).
Moreover, the humble, faithful and generous service that the saint gave during
her whole life in the hospital of Pammatone is a luminous example of charity
for all and a special encouragement for women who give an essential
contribution to society and to the Church with their precious work, enriched by
their sensitivity and by the care of the poorest and neediest. Thank you.
NOTES
[1] cf. “Libro de la Vita mirabile et dottrina santa,
de la beata Caterinetta da Genoa” (Book of the Life and Doctrine of St.
Catherine of Genoa), which contains a useful and Catholic demonstration and
declaration of purgatory, Genoa, 1551.
[Translation by ZENIT]
[The Holy Father then greeted pilgrims in several
languages. In English, he said:]
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Our catechesis today deals with Saint Catherine of
Genoa, a fifteenth-century saint best known for her vision of purgatory.
Married at an early age, some ten years later Catherine had a powerful
experience of conversion; Jesus, carrying his cross, appeared to her, revealing
both her own sinfulness and God’s immense love. A woman of great humility, she
combined constant prayer and mystical union with a life of charitable service
to those in need, above all in her work as the director of the largest hospital
in Genoa. Catherine’s writings on purgatory contain no specific revelations,
but convey her understanding of purgatory as an interior fire purifying the
soul in preparation for full communion with God. Conscious of God’s infinite
love and justice, the soul is pained by its inadequate response, even as the
divine love purifies it from the remnants of sin. To describe this purifying
power of God’s love, Catherine uses the image of a golden chain which draws the
soul to abandon itself to the divine will. By her life and teaching, Saint
Catherine of Genoa reminds us of the importance of prayer for the faithful
departed, and invites us to devote ourselves more fully to prayer and to works
of practical charity.
I am pleased to greet the many university students
present at today’s Audience. Upon all the English-speaking pilgrims and
visitors, especially those from Finland, Malta, China, Indonesia and the United
States of America, I cordially invoke God’s blessings of joy and peace.
Copyright 2011 — Libreria Editrice Vaticana
[In Italian, he greeted the youth, sick and newlyweds
present:]
Finally, I address an affectionate greeting to young
people, the sick and newlyweds. The events of our time bring very much to light
the urgent need for Christians to proclaim the Gospel with their life. To you,
dear young people, I say therefore: Always be faithful to Christ, to be among
your contemporaries sowers of hope and joy. You, dear sick, do not be afraid to
offer on the altar of Christ the incalculable value of your suffering for the
benefit of the Church and of the world. And finally you, dear newlyweds, I hope
that you will make of your family a genuine school of Christian life.
[Translation by ZENIT]
SOURCE : https://zenit.org/2011/01/12/on-st-catherine-of-genoa/
Oratorio presso il Castello di Borgo Adorno, Comune di Cantalupo Ligure, Piemonte, Italia
Catherine (Caterinetta) of Genoa, Widow (RM)
Born in Genoa, Italy, 1447; died there, September 14, 1510; beatified in 1737 and equipollently canonized by Pope Benedict XIV a few years later (others say she was canonized in 1737); feast day formerly on March 22.
"He who purifies himself from his faults in the present life, satisfies with a penny a debt of a thousand ducats; and he who waits until the other life to discharge his debts, consents to pay a thousand ducats for that which he might before have paid with a penny."
--Saint Catherine, Treatise on Purgatory.
The biography of Saint Catherine of Genoa, who combined mysticism with practicality, was written by Baron Friedrich von Hügel. She was the fifth and youngest child of James Fieschi and his wife Francesca di Negro, members of the noble Guelph family of Fieschi, which had produced two popes (Innocent IV and Adrian V). After her birth, her father later became viceroy of Naples for King René of Anjou.
From the age of 13 Catherine sought to became a cloistered religious. Her sister was already a canoness regular and her confessor was the chaplain of that convent. When she asked to be received, they decided that she was too young. Then her father died and, for dynastic reasons, her widowed mother insisted that the 16-year-old marry the Genoese Ghibelline patrician, Guiliano Adorno. Her husband was unfaithful, violent, and a spendthrift. The first five years of their marriage, Catherine suffered in silence. In some ways it seems odd that he did not find her attractive, because Catherine was a beautiful woman of great intelligence, and deeply religious. But they were of completely different temperaments: she was intense and humorless; he had a zest for life.
Then she determined to win her husband's affection by adopting worldly airs. As it turns out, this only made her unhappy because she lost the only consolation that had previously sustained her-- her religious life. Ten years into her marriage, Catherine was a very unhappy woman; her husband had reduced them to poverty by his extravagance. On the eve of his feast in 1473, Catherine prayed, "Saint Benedict, pray to God that He make me stay three months sick in bed." Two days later she was kneeling for a blessing before the chaplain at her sister's convent. She had visited her sister and revealed the secrets of her heart. Her sister advised her to go to confession.
In following her sister's advice, Catherine experienced a sort of ecstasy. She was overwhelmed by her sins and, at the very same time, by the infinite love of God for her. This experience was the foundation for an enduring awareness of the presence of God and a fixed attitude of soul. She was drawn back to the path of devotion of her childhood. Within a few days she had a vision of our Lord carrying His cross, which caused her to cry out, "O Love, if it be necessary I am ready to confess my sins in public!" On the Solemnity of the Annunciation she received the Eucharist, the first time with fervor for ten years.
Thus began her mystical ascent under very severe mortifications that included fasting throughout Lent and Advent almost exclusively on the Eucharist. She became a stigmatic. A group of religious people gathered around Catherine, who guided them to a spirit- filled life.
Eventually her husband was converted, became a Franciscan tertiary, and they agreed to live together in continence. Catherine and Giuliano devoted themselves to the care of the sick in the municipal hospital of Genoa, Pammatone, where they were joined by Catherine's cousin Tommasina Fieschi. In 1473, they moved from their palazzo to a small house in a poorer neighborhood than was necessary. In 1479, they went to live in the hospital and Catherine became its director in 1490. The heroism of Catherine's charity revealed itself in a special way during the plagues of 1493 and 1501. The first one killed nearly 75 percent of the inhabitants. Catherine herself contracted the disease. Although she recovered, she was forced to resign due to ill health three years later.
After Giuliano's death the following year (1497), Catherine's spiritual life became even more intense. In 1499, Catherine met don Cattaneo Marabotto, who became her spiritual director. Her religious practices were idiosyncratic; for instance, she went to communion daily when it was unusual to do so. For years she made extraordinarily long fasts without abating her charitable activities. Catherine is an outstanding example of the religious contemplative who combines the spiritual life with competence in practical affairs. Yet she was always fearful of "the contagion of the world's slow stain" that had separated her from God in the early years of her marriage.
Her last three years of life were a combination of numerous mystical experiences and ill health that remained undiagnosed by even John-Baptist Boerio, the principal doctor to King Henry VII. In addition to her body remaining undecomposed and one of her arms elongating in a peculiar manner shortly before her death, the blood from her stigmata gave off exceptional heat.
A contemporary painting of Catherine, now at the Pammatone Hospital in Genoa, possibly painted by the female artist Tomasina Fieschi, shows Catherine in middle age. It reveals a slight woman with a long, patrician nose; pronounced, cleft chin; easy smile of broad but thin lips (and, surprisingly, deep laugh lines); high cheekbones; and large dark eyes punctuated by thin, graceful eyebrows.
Dialogue between the soul and the body and Treatise on purgatory are outstanding works in the field of mysticism, which were inspired by her and contain the essence of her, but were actually composed by others under her name. She is the patron of Genoa and of Italian hospitals (Attwater, Benedictines, Delaney, Farmer, Harrison, Schamoni, Schouppe, Walsh).
Of interest may be The Life and Doctrine of Saint
Catherine of Genoa.
SOURCE : http://www.saintpatrickdc.org/ss/0915.shtml
St. Catherine of Genoa, 1893
(CATERINA FIESCHI ADORNO.)
Born at Genoa in
1447, died at the same place 15 September, 1510. The life of St.
Catherine of Genoa may be more properly described as a state than as
a life in the ordinary sense. When about twenty-six years old she
became the subject of one of the most extraordinary operations of God in
the human soul of
which we have record, the result being a marvellous
inward condition that lasted till her death. In this state, she
received wonderful revelations, of which she spoke at times to those
around her, but which are mainly embodied in her two celebrated works: the
"Dialogues of the Soul and Body", and the "Treatise on
Purgatory". Her modern biographies, chiefly translations or adaptations of
an old Italian one which is itself founded on "Memoirs"
drawn up by the saint's own confessor and
a friend, mingle what facts they give of her outward life with
accounts of her supernatural state
and "doctrine", regardless of sequence, and in an almost casual
fashion that makes them entirely subservient to her psychological history.
These facts are as follows:
St. Catherine's parents were
Jacopo Fieschi and Francesca di Negro,
both of illustrious Italian birth. Two popes — Innocent
IV and Adrian
V — had been of the Fieschi family,
and Jacopo himself became Viceroy of Naples. Catherine is
described as an extraordinarily holy child,
highly gifted in the way of prayer,
and with a wonderful love of Christ's
Passion and of penitential practices; but, also, as having
been a most quiet, simple, and exceedingly obedient girl. When about
thirteen, she wished to enter the convent,
but the nuns to
whom her confessor applied having refused her on account of her
youth, she appears to have put the idea aside
without any further attempt. At sixteen, she was married by her parents' wish
to a young Genoese nobleman, Giuliano Adorno.
The marriage turned out wretchedly; Giuliano proved faithless,
violent-tempered, and a spendthrift. And made the life of his wife a
misery. Details are scanty, but it seems at least clear
that Catherine spent the first five years of
her marriage in silent, melancholy submission to her husband;
and that she then, for another five, turned a little to the world for
consolation in her troubles. The distractions she took were most
innocent; nevertheless, destined as she was for an extraordinary life,
they had the effect in her case of producing lukewarmness, the end of
which was such intense weariness and depression that she prayed earnestly
for a return of her old fervour. Then, just ten years after
her marriage, came the event of her life, in answer to her prayer.
She went one day, full of melancholy, to a convent in Genoa where
she had a sister, a nun.
The latter advised her to go to confession to the nuns' confessor,
and Catherine agreed. No sooner, however, had she knelt down
in the confessional than a ray of Divine light pierced her soul,
and in one moment manifested her own sinfulness and the Love of God with
equal clearness. The revelation was so overwhelming that she
lost consciousness and fell into a kind of ecstacy,
for a space during which the confessor happened to be
called away. When he returned, Catherine could only murmur that she
would put off her confession, and go home quickly.
From the moment of that sudden vision of
herself and God,
the saint's interior
state seems never to have changed, save by varying in intensity and
being accompanied by more or less severe penance,
according to what she saw required of her by the Holy
Spirit Who guided her incessantly. No one could describe it except
herself; but she does so, minutely, in her writings, from which may here be
made one short extract: — "[The souls in Purgatory] see
all things, not in themselves, nor by themselves, but as they are in God,
on whom they are more intent than on their own sufferings. . . . For
the least vision they have of God overbalances
all woes and all joys that can be conceived. Yet their joy in God does
by no means abate their pain. . . . This process of purification to which I see
the souls in Purgatory subjected,
I feel within myself." (Treatise on Purgatory, xvi, xvii.) For about
twenty-five years, Catherine, though frequently making confessions,
was unable to open her mind for direction to anyone; but towards the
end of her life a Father Marabotti was appointed to be
her spiritual guide. To him she explained her states, past and
present, in full, and he compiled the "Memoirs" above referred to
from his intimate personal knowledge of
her. Of the saint's outward life,
after this great change, her biographies practically tell us but two facts:
that she at last converted her husband who died penitent in 1497; and
that both before and after his death — though more entirely after it — she gave
herself to the care of the sick in the great Hospital of Genoa,
where she eventually became manager and treasurer. She died worn out with
labours of body and soul,
and consumed, even physically, by the fires of Divine love within
her. She was beatified in
1675 by Clement
X, but not canonized till
1737, by Clement
XII. Meantime, her writings had been examined by the Holy Office and
pronounced to contain doctrine that
would be enough, in itself, to prove her sanctity.
Sources
The first published life, based on early MSS., is
GENUTI, "Vita mirabile e dotrrina santa della Beata Caterina da
Genova" (Florence, 1551). Founded on the above: FLICHE, "Sainte Catherine de Gênes, sa vie et son esprit' (1881); "Life and Doctrine
of St. Catherine of Genoa" (Eng. Tr., New York, 1874). For a
discussion of her doctrine, PARPERA, "Beata Caterina Genuensis
illustrata (Genoa, 1682). See also BUTLER "Lives of the
Saints", IX, 14 Sept., and a modern life by DE BUSSIERE.
Capes, Florence. "St. Catherine of Genoa."
The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company,
1908. 14 Sept. 2015 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03446b.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for
New Advent by John Looby.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. November
1, 1908. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal
Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Copyright © 2020 by Kevin Knight.
Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
SOURCE
: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03446b.htm
Saint Catherine of Genoa Catholic Church, 45603
Limestone Street, Concrete, Washington, U.S.
St. Catherine of Genoa, Widow
CATHERINE or Catterinetta Fieschi Adorno, was born at Genoa in 1447. Her father, James Fieschi, died viceroy of Naples under Renatus of Anjou, king of Sicily. 1 From the first dawn of her reason, she appeared to be a child of spiritual benedictions. By a singular privilege of divine grace, and the attention of virtuous parents, she seemed from the cradle entirely exempt from frowardness, and little passions of anger or the like vices, with which infancy itself is often stained. It was something still more admirable and more edifying in her, to see a tender child, to join with the most perfect simplicity of heart, and obedience to her parents and others, a serious love of prayer, the most heroic practices of self-denial, and the most tender devotion, particularly towards the sacred passion of Christ. That at twelve years of age she was favoured by God with extraordinary supernatural comforts and illustrations of the Holy Ghost in prayer, we are assured by her own testimony. Experience teaches, that by humble obedience, and fervent love of prayer, the most tender age is capable of making great advancement in the paths of divine love and interior solid virtue; and that the Holy Ghost delights wonderfully to communicate himself to those who so early open their hearts entirely to him. But whilst he attracts them after the sweet odour of his ointments, he prepares them for the most severe trials, which furnish them with occasions for the exercise of the most heroic virtues, and perfects the crucifixion of inordinate attachments in their hearts. This conduct of divine providence St. Catherine experienced.
At thirteen years of age she earnestly desired to consecrate herself to the divine service in a religious state, thinking a contemplative life the most secure for her, and it best suited her inclinations. But she was overruled by obedience to her parents, and by the advice of those from whom she hoped to learn what the divine will required of her. Three years after, she was married by her father to Julian Adorno, a gay young nobleman of Genoa. Her husband, drunk with youth, and giddy with ambition, brought on her a long series of grievous afflictions, which she suffered during ten years, and which, by the good use she made of them, exceedingly contributed to her more perfect sanctification. His brutish humour afforded a perpetual trial to her patience; his dilapidation of his own patrimony, and of the great fortune she had brought him, perfected the disengagement of her heart from the world, and his profligate life was to her a subject of continual tears to God for his conversion. This, her prayers, patience, and example at length effected, and he died a penitent in the third Order of St. Francis. Catherine had a cousin named Tommasa Fieschi, who being left a widow about the same time, made her religious profession in an austere nunnery of the Order of St. Dominic, and died prioress in 1534. Our saint seeing herself freed from the servitude of the world, and in a condition now to pursue the native bent of her inclination to live altogether to herself and God, deliberated some time in what manner she might best execute her holy desire. At length, in order to join the active life with the contemplative, and to have the happiness of ministering to Christ in his most distressed and suffering members, she determined to devote herself to the service of the sick in the great hospital of the city. Of this house she lived many years the mother superior, attending assiduously upon the patients with incredible tenderness, performing for them the meanest offices, and dressing herself their most loathsome ulcers. So heroic is this charity, that with regard to the institutions set apart for the relief of the poor, and attendance on the sick, Voltaire forgets his usual censorious malignant disposition in regard to religious institutions, to give them due praise. He declares that nothing can be nobler than the sacrifice which the fair sex made of beauty and youth, and oftentimes of high birth, to employ their time at the hospitals in relieving those miserable objects, the sight of which alone is humbling to our pride, and shocking to our delicacy. In overcoming this repugnance of nature in doing many offices about certain patients it cost our saint much difficulty in the beginning, till by perseverance she had gained a complete victory over herself.
Her charity could not be confined to the bounds of her own hospital; she extended her care and solicitude to all lepers and other distressed sick persons over the whole city, and she employed proper persons, with indefatigable industry, to discover, visit, and relieve such objects. Her fasts and other austerities were incredible, and it was her constant study to deny her senses every superfluous gratification, and still more vigorously to humble her heart, and overcome her own will in every thing. Even whilst she lived in the world with her husband, it was a rule with her never to excuse herself when blamed by others, but always to be readily inclined sincerely to accuse and condemn herself. She made it her constant earnest request to God, that his pure and holy love might reign in her heart, and in her whole conduct, by the extinction of all inordinate self-love, and in this sense she took for her device that petition of our Lord’s prayer: Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. The necessity of the spirit of universal mortification and perfect humility to prepare the way for the pure love of God to be infused into the soul, is the chief lesson which she inculcates in the two principal treatises, which she wrote, the first entitled, On Purgatory, and the second called, A Dialogue. In this latter work, she paints strongly the powerful effects of divine love in a soul, and the wonderful sweetness and joy which frequently accompany it. 2 St. Catherine having suffered the martyrdom of a tedious and painful illness, in which, for a considerable time, she was scarcely able to take any nourishment, though she received every day the holy communion, expired in great peace and tranquillity, and her soul went to be united to the centre of her love on the 14th day of September, 1510, she being sixty-two years old. The author of her life relates certain miracles by which God was pleased to testify her sanctity to men. Her body was taken up eighteen months after her death, and found without the least sign of putrefaction. From that time it was exposed aloft in a marble monument in the church of the hospital, as the body of a saint; and she was honoured with the title of Blessed, which Pope Benedict XIV. changed into that of Saint, styling her in the Martyrology St. Catherine Fieschi (in Latin Flisca) Adorno. 3 See her life compiled by Marabotti, her confessor, published in 1551; also her works. And the comments of Sticker the Bollandist, ad 15 Sept. t. 5, p. 123. For the justification of her doctrine, and the commendations of her sanctity, see Parpera, the Oratorian’s book entitled B. Catherina Genuensis illustrata. Printed at Genoa A. D. 1682.
Note 1. The family of the Fieschi was for many ages one of the most illustrious in Italy. Its chiefs were counts of Lavagna in the territory of Genoa. They were for some ages perpetual vicars of the empire in Italy, and afterwards enjoyed very extraordinary privileges in the republic of Genoa, and among others that of coining money. This house gave to that commonwealth its greatest generals during its long wars, both in the East and against the Venetians; and to the church many cardinals and two popes, Innocent IV. and Adrian V. The family of Fieschi suffered much by the miscarriage of the conspiracy formed by count John Lewis Fieschi against the Dorias, then masters of the commonwealth, in 1547. The plot only failed by the death of count Fieschi, who was drowned by falling into the sea, as he was going out of one galley into another. [back]
Note 2. These treatises are not written for the common class of readers. [back]
Note 3. Bened. XIV. De Canoniz. Sanct. l. 3, c. 3, p. 20. [back]
Rev. Alban Butler (1711–73). Volume IX: September. The Lives of the Saints. 1866.
SOURCE : http://www.bartleby.com/210/9/142.html
An image of Saint
Catherine of Genoa's Church taken from a 1914 publication entitled "The Catholic Church in the United States of
America: Undertaken to Celebrate the Golden Jubilee of His Holiness, Pope Pius
X, Volume 3." page 320.
Weninger’s Lives of the Saints –
Saint Catherine of Genoa
Article
Saint Catherine was born of noble parents at Genoa, in
1447, and derived her surname from her native place. Her father was a
descendant of the house of Fieschi. She was hardly eight years of age, when she
already gave distinct signs of her future holiness. It is related of her, that
even at that age she was filled with intense devotion, and with a desire to
suffer for the love of Christ Hence she would not use a soft bed, but rested on
straw, with a block of wood for a pillow; she also sought other means to give
pain to her body. At thirteen, she desired most ardently to enter a convent,
and to remain there her entire life; but on account of her tender age, she was
not admitted. She then continued her pious life until she was sixteen years
old, when her father gave her in marriage to Julian Adorno, a youth of a noble
and rich family, but unhappily not in the least suited to Catherine. He treated
her, from the first day of their marriage, with so little consideration, that
every one pitied her. She left nothing untried to soften his disposition, but
all was useless. Julian was a slave to gaming, eating and drinking, and seeking
only the comforts and pleasures of life; he hated and persecuted the pious
Catherine, who falling a prey to deep melancholy, shunned all society, and
lived secluded in her room. At the end of five years, her relatives advised
her, in order to divert her mind somewhat, to visit her friends, and give a
part of the time, now employed in prayer, to innocent amusements. She followed
this advice, but was very careful, so as not to offend God by doing wrong. Thus
she passed five more years; but the more she gave herself up to the pleasures
of the world, the more distasteful they became to her, and her melancholy
increased to such a degree, that she became tired of life, and was harrassed
with fears and scruples. Not knowing how to find relief, she went to her
sister, who led a very edifying life in a convent, and who advised her to make
known the whole state of her mind to the Confessor of the convent. Catherine,
after a severe struggle with herself, went into the confessional. Hardly,
however, had she knelt down, when the thought of God’s mercy filled her soul
with such love, whilst at the same time, the remembrance of her faults
oppressed her with such bitter grief, that, sinking down, she could only cry.
“O Lord, I will renounce the world and sin: I will sin no more, O Lord, I will
sin no more.” When she was somewhat more composed, she went home with the
resolution to prepare herself for a general confession. Grief and love
accompanied her and increased in such a manner, that, as she afterwards said,
she thought she would die under their violence. Soon after, it appeared to her
as if Christ were standing before her, carrying His heavy cross, and bleeding
from His holy wounds, and said to her: “Behold all this blood has been shed for
thee, and to redeem thee from thy sins.” The feelings which this awakened in
Catherine’s heart it is impossible to describe: it was truly a miracle of
divine mercy that the greatness of her pain and love did not immediately
deprive her of life. “O love!” she cried aloud, “O Love! No more sin; no more
sin!” After her mind had become more quiet, she prepared herself with great
care for a general confession, which she made, amid a flood of tears, on the
eve of the feast of the Annunciation. On the day of the festival, she partook
of holy communion, and from that moment conceived an intense desire to receive
this holy sacrament as often as possible.
She was not satisfied, however, with having
repentantly confessed her faults, but to atone more effectually for them, she
exercised herself continually in penances. In regard to her fasting, suffice it
to say that she henceforth abstained from all those viands which were agreeable
to her. For twenty-three years she touched no food during Lent, and, on the
ember days, only took sometimes a little water and even with this she mixed
vinegar or salt. The Blessed Sacrament, which she daily received, sustained her
most miraculously. Although fourteen months after her general confession she
received from God the assurance that her sins were expiated, she continued her
penances as long as she lived. In works of Christian charity she evinced equal
perseverance. At first she nursed the sick at their homes; afterwards, she went
into the large hospital, where she remained as long as her strength permitted.
She had by nature a great aversion to wounds and ulcers, and the mere sight of
them caused her nausea. To overcome this she frequently kissed the wounds and
ulcers of the sick, and dressed them with the most tender care. In attending to
the sick, she thought not only of their bodies but also of their immortal
souls. Speaking gently to them, she encouraged them to bear their suffering
patiently, exhorted them to repentance, and did all that Christian charity can
do for the salvation of souls. For many who would have despaired in their
sufferings, she obtained from God patience by her prayers. Among these stands
foremost her own husband, who was laid low by a very painful malady which
tormented him a long time. No remedy soothed his suffering; day and night he
had not a moment’s peace, and hence often gave way to expressions of the
greatest impatience. Catherine’s utmost endeavors were bestowed in comforting
him. She exhorted him most kindly to submit to divine Providence, to exercise
Christian patience, and other virtues; seeing, however, that all was fruitless,
and fearing that he would go to eternal destruction, she addressed most fervent
prayers for him to the Almighty. One day, while she was thus praying for his
conversion, in a room adjoining his, she was heard to say: “O love! I pray Thee
for this soul. Give it to me, for Thou hast the power.” After this, a complete
change came over the sick man. He repented of his impatience, submitted to the
will of the Almighty, confessed his sins, and prepared himself earnestly for
his last hour. Catherine received, from God Himself, the assurance of his
salvation. Her prayers effected several similar conversions.
In her widowhood she redoubled her zeal in the
practice of good works, and her life affords a perfect example of all the
Christian virtues, especially the most fervent devotion to God. The fire of
love which burned in her heart frequently inflamed her whole body to such a
degree, that she seemed to glow with heat, like iron in the fire. One day they
laid her hands in cold water, which soon began to boil as if it had been long
standing over the fire. It happened several times that the fire of divine love
in her heart almost suffocated her, and addressing God, she cried: “O Love,
come to help me!” God sent to this holy widow in the last years of her life,
the most singular and painful maladies, which no remedies alleviated; she had
desired to suffer for Christ’s sake, and God complied with her request. Her
patience was heroic, and her cheerfulness forsook her not during the greatest
pain.
Her life and suffering ended on 15 Septemper 1510, in
the sixty-third year of her life, after she had spoken to those around her of
the love of God. Her last words were those of the Saviour – “Lord, into thy
hands I commend my spirit.” Several holy persons saw, at the moment of her
death, that her soul, arrayed in heavenly brightness, ascended to eternal
bliss. Her holy body remains incorrupt to this hour, and is greatly venerated.
The miracles that God wrought by her intercession, fill several volumes. Saint
Catherine herself wrote two books which prove that she was not only graced by
God with visions and revelations, but that she also possessed truly heavenly
wisdom. Illuminated by God, she gave to many persons most wholesome advice. To
one who went into a convent and desired to receive an instruction from her, she
said: “Let Jesus be in your heart, Eternity in your mind, the world under your
feet, and the divine will in all your actions: but above all this, let the love
of God shine in your whole being.” She commended nothing more earnestly to
those who came to discourse with her, than the love of God, and the avoidance of
the least sin for love of Him. God once showed her the horror of a venial sin,
and she acknowledged that she would have expired with fear, if she had been
obliged to regard this horror one moment longer. Hence it was that she guarded
herself most carefully from the least shadow of sin, and admonished others so
earnestly to keep their conscience unspotted.
The Church of St.
Catherine of Genoa located at 504 West 153rd Street between Broadway
and Amsterdam in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City,
was built in 1890 and was designed by Thomas H. Poole in an Eclectic version of
the Gothic revival style. A rectory was added c.1926, and a schoolhouse in
1937. The parish school closed in 2006, and the building is now P.S. 226
Practical Considerations
• Did you understand the lesson that Saint Catherine
gave to a person who went into a Convent and after which she herself moulded
her life? “Let Jesus be in your heart, Eternity in your mind, the world under
your feet, etc.” Ah! how far are you from observing these directions! Can you
say that Christ lives in your heart? Jesus does not dwell in a heart possessed
by vanity, pride, envy, impure love and other sinful inclinations! Is eternity
in your thoughts? How seldom you think of it! Is the world under your feet? You
are devoted to all that is temporal; a proof that the world is not under your
feet but in your heart! Is the divine will in all your actions? Where our own
will reigns, the will of the Almighty is put aside! Does the love of God shine
out in your whole life and being? You offend God so often, if not by mortal,
yet by venial sins, which you do not dread! Ah, this is no sign of love to the
Almighty. Those who truly love God, carefully avoid everything that is
displeasing to Him. If you wish to manifest a sign of true love to God, make
today the resolution to shun even the smallest venial sin. Impress this deeply
into your innermost heart, and let it inspire you with horror of all that can
offend the Majesty of God. Make the resolution that Saint Catherine made: “I
will sin no more, O Lord, I will sin no more!”
• From her tender youth, Saint Catherine exercised
herself in severe penances. She sought everywhere to give pain to her body.
This same body God glorifies now before the world by not allowing it to
corrupt. How He will exalt it one day in heaven! Had Saint Catherine treated
her body as the children of the world do in our time, it would neither be so
greatly honored now in this world, nor could it ever expect great glory in
heaven. What have you to say to this? All you seek after, all you aspire to, is
the well-being of your body. Hence all your care is directed towards its
health, and its enjoyments, even if God should be offended by them. But this is
not the right way to preserve the real well-being of the body. If you desire
this, be solicitous for its eternal welfare, which can be secured only by
attending to the salvation of your soul, and therefore by not allowing your
body anything that is forbidden, but by bridling it and mortifying it with
penances. “If we neglect the salvation of our soul, we cannot even make our
body happy,” writes Saint Chrysostom; and Saint Bernard says: “Time is given us
to take care of our soul, not of our body. These are days of salvation, not of
pleasures. Now we have to work for the salvation of our soul; for, upon it
depends the happiness of our body. Nothing is more beneficial to the body than
to be solicitous for the salvation of the soul. At present the body must be the
soul’s companion in suffering and doing penance, that it may also be one day
its companion in the glories of heaven.”
MLA Citation
Father Francis Xavier Weninger, DD, SJ. “Saint
Catherine of Genoa”. Lives of the Saints, 1876. CatholicSaints.Info.
5 May 2018. Web. 2 October 2021. <https://catholicsaints.info/weningers-lives-of-the-saints-saint-catherine-of-genoa/>
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/weningers-lives-of-the-saints-saint-catherine-of-genoa/
Palazzo Fieschi Adorno, Vico Indoratori, Genova
Palazzo Fieschi Adorno, Vico Indoratori, Genova
Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her
Contemporaries
On the 13th of January 1463, the notary Oberto
Foglietta, of Genoa, registered the marriage settlements of Catherine Fiesco,
in the parish of Saint Lawrence, in a house belonging to the bride’s family in
the lane called “del Filo,” and of Giovanni Adorno, also of noble birth, the
contracting parties being the widowed mother of the bride and her two brothers
on her behalf, and the bridegroom alone on his, while two neighbors signed
their names as witnesses. The instrument sets forth the amount of the dowry, a
thousand pieces of silver – which, reckoning by the lira, or present franc,
would come to about $250 – two hundred francs of which were given by Adorno and
eight hundred by Francesca di Negro, the bride’s mother and widow of Giacomo
Fiesco, who promised four hundred in jewels, gala-dresses, and cash at once,
and the remainder in two years, at present invested in a house in the same
street where her own dowry was invested, and which during that time she agreed
to give up to the young couple as a residence. The bridegroom, in his turn,
swears to settle the amount upon his wife, the security being a house of his
own on the street known as that of Saint Agnes.
Such complicated documents are not infrequent in the
city archives of Genoa, and represent correctly the ordinary legal machinery of
marriages and their attendant circumstances. Catherine Adorno, sixteen years of
age at the time of her marriage, became the well-known Saint Catherine of
Genoa, an extraordinary and gifted woman, who, though visited by very wonderful
signs of supernatural origin as her contemporaries and, later on, her
canonizers agreed was for thirty years directress of the city hospital, almoner
and visitor of the city poor, and keeper of the accounts, and would have been,
with more opportunities, an excellent writer, her spiritual treatises having a
remarkable stamp of individuality, being expressed in fluent, elegant, and
appropriate language and bearing much likeness to the quaint allegorical poems
of Calderon. Yet education in her time was on a low level, that of social
intercourse being the only one worth mentioning as an influence in mature life.
Girls, whether in convents or at home and both systems were in full operation
during the great days of the Genoese republic were taught chiefly Bible and
church history and religious dogmas, besides elaborate needlework and polite
demeanor. Their future was fixed almost from their birth; one daughter out of
several was usually intended to marry and the others to take the veil, a
wedding portion being regarded as so much money taken out of the family
treasury. Thus, without regard to the inclinations of the children,
crosspurposes were often effected, and sometimes disastrously, for scandals
would follow and family rapacity was shown up as, for instance, in the case of
Paolina Franzoni, who had been forced into a convent by fraud as well as
violence, and whose profession was voided and annulled at Rome by the papal
authorities on the facts being represented by her advocate several years later,
when her sister, married to a Durazzo, and who had profited by Paolina’s loss
of worldly goods, was her most strenuous adversary. On the other hand, girls
who had a true vocation, or at any rate a decided inclination, towards
conventual life, but whose beauty or priority of age made their marriage more
convenient to their parents, were more or less forced into alliances which only
their sense of duty made bearable to them. Catherine Fiesco was a noteworthy
example of this, the more so as her husband’s temper proved both eccentric and
vexatious and reacted disastrously upon his business affairs. Before ten years
of her married life were over he had contrived to fritter away most of his own
and her money, and they were reduced to unpleasant straits; while his fits of jealousy
were such that, to please and soothe him, she spent the earlier years of her
marriage in an unaccustomed seclusion. Genoese customs contained a mingling of
outward devotion and actual laxity, and gave occasion to severe repressive
statutes from the Council of State and equally stringent remonstrances from
preachers, confessors, and episcopal authorities. The domestic annals of the
middle ages, on the one hand fruitful in lives of extraordinary sanctity, are
also distinguished on the other by perpetual abuses of sacred things and
occasions, and among the literary productions remaining to us from mediaeval
times social satires by indignant reformers, chiefly priests, form an important
part. A social sketch recently published in Italian by a Genoese notary,
familiar with the state archives and the details of domestic life revealed in
them, gives interesting and abundant proof that human nature was not more
heroic and self-restrained in days gone by than it is at present, although the
temper of the special people among whom Catherine Adorno spent her life was
fervid enough to explain the thoroughness with which they entered upon any
occupation, whether worldly or spiritual.
The little pamphlet above mentioned vividly reproduces
the background of the picture in which she forms an exceptional and admirable
feature. Outside of the circle of the really pious and devoted women, whose
number in all places and ages has been a minority, society in mediaeval Genoa
was intensely frivolous, and well justified the horror which “the world ”
inspires among saints of that time. Society, though it made festivals an excuse
for dissipation, never questioned the principle of festivals; the state gravely
and effectually supported the church, but quite as much by policy as by conviction.
The half-oriental seclusion of women found a counterpoise in the exceptional
liberty allowed under the pretexts of collecting alms or attending processions,
when marriageable girls and married women were both allowed by custom to wear
such disguises as afforded them chances for escapades, whether innocent or
otherwise. The penitential processions known as casaccie, peculiar to Genoa,
took place long after their original character and aim were lost sight of, and
the sackcloth with holes for the eyes and mouth only, which had been the dress
consecrated to this particular occasion, became a convenient mask for gadding
and gossiping women visiting their acquaintance on the pretence of making
distant “stations” at country churches or even within the city limits. Again,
the collection of alms in church, known as bacili, became, like the similar
French custom in modern times, and like our own too frequent churchfairs, etc.,
occasions for scandal and abuse; women in rich, and not seldom immodest,
dresses, bedecked with flowers and jewelry, sat, wand in hand, at the door of
the church and solicited alms, touching the heads and shoulders of their
friends, either playfully or gallantly, in somewhat profane imitation of the
forms of bestowing certain indulgences forms still kept up in Saint Peter’s at
Rome. The synod of 1567 forbids women under fifty to collect alms in this
fashion. Archbishops, popular preachers, and state councillors alike inveighed
against the dress and manners of women in church, enacting penalties and
maintaining spies to report upon the conduct of women, generally of high rank,
and to guard the young from actual dangers; ecclesiastical orders were issued
against the opening of churches before daylight or the prolonging of ceremonies
far into the night; and some sorrowing and indignant persons, at the time of a
French invasion, petitioned both the council and the archbishop to revert to
the apostolical custom of dividing the sexes in church, believing, as they did,
that the national calamities of the war were a punishment from Heaven. At one
time there was a decree of the council, or Signoria, bidding the clergy of San
Siro remove the special chairs, desks, and carpets which a Princess Doria had
insisted upon keeping for her individual use in a chapel belonging to her
family, and there was again a similar decree in the case of a Princess Orsini
who had upholstered her pew in San Francesco with velvet benches and cushions,
while unseemly quarrels of precedence often took place between noble ladies and
the wives of rich and rising citizens. While the fixed seats were thus
prohibited, sacristans and others managed to elude the law by providing
removable ones of various degrees for various prices, and so arose the present
custom of piling chairs for use at Mass in a corner or chapel of a church and
renting them out. Many churches, however, have modified. the latter detail by
making the chairs free; and no one can accuse these seats of coarse straw and
ill-planed wood of luxury.
Outside of the regular ceremonies, whose frequent
recurrence gave life and animation to the female world of Genoa, there were
particular “functions,” special festivals, processions, and also private or
popular devotions in house-oratories or at street shrines; and for all this, for
the oil or candles which supplied the only street-lighting of the city, for the
flowers and ribbons destined for a favorite image, or for the money to be
distributed among certain favored poor, special collections from door to door
were made by women, or windows were adorned and balconies turned into temporary
shrines with rich hangings, fresh garlands, and multitudinous little lamps.
Youth and high spirits could not but often turn these opportunities to worldly
account; and an education which, restricted as it generally was to the
catechism and needlework, was supplemented by the legend-lore and superstitious
influence of old servants not too severe on clandestine love-affairs, resulted
in a disposition to Romeo-and-Juliet lovemaking. What was innocent was crushed
by an artificial standard of manners, while what was disreputable was
unfortunately condoned with less severity. Public opinion was everywhere more
lenient than civil and ecclesiastical authority, which it too often set at
defiance. Such a world necessarily seemed to enthusiastic souls too corrupt to
be reformed, while an individual refuge was afforded by open renunciation of it
and isolation from its customs and concerns. Many of the convents maintained an
honorable reputation from their foundation, the Capuchin nuns and the Turchine
being especially exemplary and never’ having deviated from their original
strictness; while others became scarcely less worldly than the world itself,
and needed the hand of a Saint Teresa to bring them out of the state which the
Prior Silvestro Prierio, one of the consulting theologians of the Council of
Trent, described in forcible terms. Neither was there any lack of vulgar
contentions and small, feminine spite in ancient Genoese society, whether among
nuns or lay women. Again, want of education and of serious interests was to
blame for the vehement partisanship of women for such and such an individual or
order, in the choice of a confessor; in one convent a dispute about the organ
resulted in a disintegration of the instrument, of which each sister retained
one pipe as a memento or trophy; in another a ludicrous assault in the garden
resulted from a personal preference for a regular over a secular spiritual
adviser.
The city life of young girls was comparatively dull,
excepting such occasions for display as have been mentioned already or the
excitements of a friend’s wedding, which, however, were confined to visiting
and gossiping among their own sex; for unmarried girls (and such is the custom
in Italy even at present) did not ‘appear at marriage festivities. Little
children were never taken beyond the walls of the house (a garden was attached
to every house of any note and size) after their baptism until the age of
seven, when they were taken to church to hear Mass; but even grown women
frequented the streets very little, and of course never alone. The occasional
infraction of this rule which is another still practically surviving in Italy
was generally the cause of deplorable incidents; for at one time it became a custom
for young men of inferior station to use violence or offer rude liberties in
public to girls of noble birth and reputed wealth, with a view to compromising
them sufficiently to make a marriage likely between the maiden and her rough
suitor, the object being generally not the girl but her dowry. Of more
villanous practices also, in the reversed case of an unprotected girl of low
position and a dissipated young noble, there was no lack in a city which, like
all the rest, had its hired ruffians and complaisant go-betweens in the favor
and pay of its best families.
A peculiarity of Italian marriages before the Council
of Trent was what we should call their civil character, although in intention
they were legitimate religious ceremonies and were always styled “according to
the rites and custom of the Holy Roman Church,” although as a matter of fact
there was seldom any church ceremony. The betrothal and wedding were both
performed in private, and generally, but not necessarily, in the presence of a
notary-public, who registered them as well as the accompanying settlements.
Sometimes an old friend of the family took the place of a notary, and an
ecclesiastic not seldom appears on the registers in the character of this
friend, his clerical capacity, however, being simply an accident. After the
Council of Trent this custom was changed and the ceremony with which we are
familiar substituted under pain of severe religious penalties. What really
served as a proof of marriage in the earlier middle ages, in Genoa and many
other Italian cities, was the public passage of a bride to her husband’s house,
witnessed by the large concourse of people usually crowding the streets. The
receipt for the dowry was also taken as legal evidence. These bridal
processions were gay and picturesque, and gave occasion to so much display that
the council, time after time, enacted sumptuary laws limiting the number of
cavaliers and servants attending the bride, and the sum total expended in the
ornamentation of her saddle, harness, litter, or other trappings. In the
twelfth century her dresses even were carried in public behind her, hung on
frames or lay figures, much as our milliners now exhibit their goods; but the
council deemed this an abuse and forbade it, though as soon as one technical
point was struck at the ingenuity of private luxury devised another vent. The
bridal procession was known as the “traductio” and took place sometimes on the
same day as the wedding, though almost as often two or three days after. Sunday
was the favorite day for marriages, because a state rule allowed wedding
banquets on the three first days of the week only; at times the dissipation
consequent on these suppers called forth still more repressive legislation, and
the bridegroom was required to limit the number of the friends he might ask to
the feasts at his father-in-law’s to two for the first and to eight for the
second. If the traductio did not occur the same day as the marriage the
bridegroom returned alone to his own house and waited the bride’s arrival,
which in other Italian and some Spanish cities, if not in Genoa itself, was
occasionally delayed by the performance of a counter ceremony called the
serraglio, consisting of a make-believe carrying off of the bride by her
relations. The savage ideal of a bridal being an affair of force and sale
survived in this odd custom long after any significance but that of a rough
game remained to it in the mind of the people. However little reality there was
in this fashion, it still gave opportunity at times for unpleasant practical
jokes or other unseemly disturbances, and the local authorities in most cities
repeatedly put bounds to these excesses or forbade the continuance of the
custom, till at last a commutation came to occupy its place, and the bride gave
a ring or other costly pledge, which was presented by her relations next day at
the bridegroom’s house, and redeemed by the groom with a sum of money to be
spent in a convivial meeting by the supposed protectors of the bride. The
morning after the bride’s entrance was also marked by the custom of a public
offering of broth or cordial, carried to the door of the bridal couple’s room
by the mother-in-law, or some ancient female relation of the groom if his
mother were dead; and various other requirements of etiquette marked the days
on which she received congratulatory visits, and the first day on which she
went out in state to return them. Our notion of honeymoon privacy did not make
its way to Italy until the beginning of the present century, when a few rich and
travelled people began to escape from the old tedious publicity by retiring for
a week or two to their country villas, and thereby much scandalizing the
conservative members of society, who saw nothing but perfection in those “good
old times” which were really rather coarse. Marriages have gradually come to
be, even among antiquated circles in Italian society, something more than
“alliances” not universally so, by any means, for personal experience recalls
to my mind many cases, not twenty years ago, in which these old fashions were
closely followed; but still the principle of love-matches is not wholly
ignored, and it follows that where there is inclination a natural desire for
retirement accompanies it. But in republican Genoa of old it would have been somewhat
of a contradiction to shut up together for a month two young strangers, one of
whom had been looking forward to her marriage as the period of her comparative
social emancipation. All that the bridegroom rejoiced in having secured was a
suitable bearer and transmitter of his name, while the bride’s special subject
of joy was her possession of so much jewelry, lace, and gold cloth, and the
appropriate display of them to her intimates. Although the people were
practically less ceremonious, even their marriages were the subject of
diplomatic arrangements, and contracts of great solemnity are registered
concerning business and family matters combined, though the amount of money
involved is often very small. An exceptional arrangement was one recorded as occurring
between a smith, Domenico Deferrari, in 1488, with another smith betrothed to
his daughter, in which he promises in cash, clothes, and jewelry a dowry of
four hundred francs, but fixes the date of the marriage at four years hence,
admitting his future son-in-law to his home, table, and business partnership
during the interval, subject to the latter forfeiting all these advantages if
he should misbehave himsell towards his future bride, or even persuade her to a
clandestine marriage. Though exceptional, such an arrangement is explained by
the fact that, to make a marriage tolerably certain, girls of tender age were
sometimes given away on paper, and such promises, and virtually marriages, were
considered legal after the child, either boy or girl, had attained the age of
seven, though twelve was the actual age required by the canon law for a real
marriage. Such facilities for laying hands on important estates or dowries also
explains the frequent trials, resulting in a dissolution of marriage between the
two parties, which occur in the records of Genoa. Marriage-brokers, also, were
a peculiarity of the middle ages, and something not unlike them, though no
longer legally recognized, exists to this day. In old times it was a legitimate
profession, and poor men, both lay and ecclesiastics, kept regular registers of
marriageable youths and maidens, with personal and genealogical details, and
especially commercialones touching their possessions or prospects. “Fast”
women, too, were not unknown even among the jealously watched and guarded wives
of the rich; a Princess Doria who figured somewhat disreputably in a divorce
suit in the lax times of the eighteenth century was stated in the evidence
given at the trial to have ridden on horseback in a man’s dress, attended by
her male friends and admirers, several times back and forth between her villa
and the city. But turning from mere social effervescence such as processions,
serenades, mattinatas (the song at dawn under a bride’s window), or the less
poetical and derisive welcome of tins, pots, horns, and mocking laughter which
awaited a second marriage and still survives in Spanish popular custom, and
which in Genoa went by the name of tenebra to the more substantial consequences
of marriage, it is curious to see how, as far back as the eleventh century, a
wife’s right to a third of her husband’s property was maintained by law,
whether she had children or not; and how, in the case of the husband’s
bankruptcy, her dowry was the first lien on his estate, and might be redeemed
by application to the council before other creditors could touch anything.
Also, before her first child was born, a woman had the absolute right of
willing her property the only instance in which she could act by and for
herself; for in all these documents the signatures are almost invariably those
of male relations acting for their sisters, daughters, nieces, etc. But
ignorance often deprived a woman of her few privileges, and young widows
sometimes had almost a valid excuse for a second marriage in spite of the
popular prejudice against; such unions in the rapacity of relations of their
first husband who would try to cheat her out of her share. Dress was considered
of so much importance in mediaeval times that a provision was made by law for
the widow’s weeds out of the husband’s estate, and bridegrooms, as they do
still in France, presented gala-dresses to their brides. In fact, it is chiefly
the English-speaking nations who have evolved the independent ideal of a bride
who scorns to receive necessaries from a man before he is actually her husband.
A good many women, not at all given to nonsense about woman’s sphere and
duties, are highly shocked and offended at the notion of even their trousseau
linen being marked in their new name, and resent it as suggesting the idea that
“they never had any clothes worth speaking of before they were married.”
Artificial scruples had less weight with the Genoese women, who cared little
whence came the supply of finery which they craved. Indeed, as a rule, the parents
and husband divided the burden of supporting the bride, and her property was
duly secured on certain real estate, often house property, belonging to the
bridegroom.
The country or rather the autumn villeggiatura,
for Italians know nothing corresponding to what we call the country was the
chief delight of Genoese women, and especially of unmarried girls, who were
there given a dangerous liberty in foolish contrast to the equally dangerous
repression in the city. The dnnghters of the rich enjoyed dances, suppers,
concerts, and gossiping leisure in their beautiful villas, where young men had
opportunities, unchecked by custom, to make love. This, however, even with the
most honorable intentions, generally came to an abrupt and disastrous ending
through the pressure of the arbitrary code of social life. But of genuine
country life and its healthy pursuits as we know them the Genoese were
ignorant, as are most Italians of any position even at present. Conviviality
was the amusement of the older men, gossip and gambling that of the older
women, the latter passion being strangely intense in Genoa. Women of high rank
were always the foremost, and, before the present lottery system was invented,
vied with the men in betting on public, social, or domestic events. They had
fortune-telling wheels and sundry like devices, and gathered together round
tables covered with embroidered carpets of rich stuff representing numbers and
combinations of figures; in the sixteenth century loto was introduced, and from
that came the present popular Italian lotteries which have done so much
mischief. The ecclesiastical as well as civil laws recorded in the Genoese
archives were constantly prohibiting such abuses, and signalize the dangerous
consequences of betting on births in illustrious families (this was prohibited
under pain of mortal sin), and many other details on which the gambling
propensity spent itself, both among men and women. Politics and municipal
elections, as well as domestic events, were favorite betting subjects. Again,
drunkenness and license we are accustomed too lightly to suppose that the
former does not exist in wine-growing countries are often mentioned in these
warnings, pastorals, laws, and regulations. At marriages the old Greek custom
of libations, and a symbolic participation of the same cup by the bride and
groom, was early perverted into an excuse for drinking and noise, and repeated
injunctions under pain of mortal sin were issued against the custom by the
church authorities. The use of sweetmeats of various kinds at weddings goes at
least as far back as the later Roman times; nuts being the sine-qua-non of
Genoese marriages, as cake is of ours, though at present fashion has tabooed
these as vulgar, and boxes of French sugar-plums are the correct substitute, so
that, except in country districts among the mountains, the saying, “When will
you send me the nuts?” as equivalent to the query, “When are you going to be
married?” has lost its meaning. At the ceremony of the taking of the veil or
the profession of a nun similar customs were kept up, and the archbishop
received certain vials of syrup and boxes of homemade sweets and candies as
part of his fees, the vicar-apostolic and others sharing the latter. In later
times the presents of candies were commuted for money contributions, paid out
of thedowry of the novice or professa.
Such was the society in which Catherine Adorno found
herself at the time of her marriage. Her early childhood had been, say her
biographers, remarkable for devotion, bodily mortification, and obedience; her
health was always delicate and precarious. Her style she wrote several
spiritual dialogues and a treatise on purgatory was pure, elegant, and
impassioned. Saint Francis of Sales was accustomed to read the treatise twice a
year, admiring its literary merit as well as its religious import; and
Schlegel, who translated the dialogues into German, considered them models of
style. Her life, which was that of a Sceur Rosalie transported into mediaeval
conditions, is chiefly associated in the minds of Catholics with her work and
services at the city hospital, where, before becoming the head, she labored
some years as a subordinate, her husband living there with her. It is quite
possible, though her historians do not say so, that Adorno’s circumstances were
such as to make such a home desirable; for he was both extravagant, careless,
and eccentric, while her executive abilities and her peculiar tact had long
been known to her large circle of friends. The hospital was very likely an
honorable retreat as well as an important charge. Saint Catherine had the care
of the accounts as well as of the patients, and kept them accurately and
faithfully. Brought up as she had been in the use of devout practices, she
experienced, nevertheless, so passionate a spiritual change some years after
her marriage that she always dated from her ” conversion”; but this event was
only the culminating-point of a long and painful trial of mind. Her Italian
biographer says that one day toward the climax of her suspense and uneasiness
of mind, and her nervous depression at the vexations of her husband, she went
into the church of Saint Benedict and prayed, in a species of desperation, ”
that for three months God would keep her sick in bed.” For five years after the
first years of her married life, when she secluded herself to please her
exacting husband, she ” sought solace for her hard life, as womem are prone to
do, in the diversions and vanities of the world, . . . external affairs and
feminine amusements, . . . yet not to a sinful extent . . .”; and in connection
with this brief indication the foregoing social details of Genoese female life
are interesting. It is a pleasure to reconstruct in fancy the ordinary and
legitimate surroundings of great or holy personages, and the few glimpses
afforded of Saint Catherine’s gatherings of friends at her own house, when she
would discourse on holy things to them; or of her own absentmindedness, her
trances, her extraordinary fasts while still living with a household of her
relations and receiving visits, walking in her garden, superintending her
servants, according to the domestic programme of her rank, are very
interesting.
After the culminating moment of her “conversion,”
which was during a ‘confession she was making at the suggestion of her sister,
who was a nun, she experienced a singular self-knowledge of her smallest sins,
which state lasted fourteen months, but which she took to be in itself an
intellectual expiation of those sins, so that she tells us herself that, this
satisfaction having been made, God ” relieved her of the sight of her sins so
entirely that she never beheld again the least of them.” She gathered about her
a devoted knot of spiritual followers, forming a society apart, a guild of
charity and .devotion, who helped her in her outer works, and forced her to
give them advice and guidance in their own daily life and troubles. She began
her life of self-denial by visiting the poor of the city under the auspices of
” the Ladies of Mercy,” who, according to the custom of her day, gave certain
moneys and provisions into her charge for the purpose of distribution,
something after the fashion of modern district-visitors or of the members of
the Brotherhood of Saint Vincent of Paul. She was deputed to cleanse the houses
of the poor and to cook their food, to tend the sick in their own homes, and to
take home ragged and filthy clothes to be cleansed, pieced, and mended by her
own hands. Spiritual teaching formed part of her duties as visitor, and
naturally she continued these ministrations when attached to the hospital. Many
years after she had been there a rector was appointed, who became her spiritual
friend and director; but for the greater part of her life she says that God
allowed her no special spiritual help but such as he directly gave her in
internal visitations. Her dialogues, exalting and celebrating divine love,
remind one very much of the fourth book of the Imitation. While remaining
within the church’s limits” of doctrine concerning grace and free-will, she was
strangely and deeply impressed with the natural perversity of human nature, and
its helplessness unless assisted by God, and she repeatedly dwells upon the
superior sinfulness of man as a being possessed of a double instrument of
rebellion; ” for,” she says, ” the devil is a spirit without a body, while man,
without the grace of God, is a devil incarnate. Man has a free-will, … so that
he can do all the evil that he wills; to the devil this is impossible, . . .
and when man surrenders to him his evil will the devil employs it as the
instrument of his temptation.” She was as acutely distrustful of self-love as
it was natural considering her intimate union with God, and, in the quaint,
direct way that characterizes mediaeval literature, she says in one of the
dialogues: ” Self-love is so subtle a robber that it commits its thefts even
upon God himself, without fear or shame, employing his goods as if they were
its own, and assigning as a reason that it cannot live without them. And this
robbery is hidden under so many veils of apparent good that it can hardly be
detected. . . .” In many of the dialogues she treats ” Self ” as a separate
being and a born enemy, Humanity appearing as a sort of Caliban, hindering the
soul’s perfection and acting as a clog, even when only asking for toleration of
its physical needs.
Some time before his death Catherine Adorno’s husband
became a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, as many pious laymen were
used to do from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century; but his natural
impatience was far from quelled, and broke out in excusable though vexatious
bitterness during his last illness. He was sick for a long” time, and bore his
sufferings as most men do; but as his death became more and more certain his
wife grew very anxious about his salvation. She prayed incessantly for him,
and.some inner warning seemed to tell her that her prayers were heard at least
so she once hinted to one of her younger followers in the path of holiness. Her
friends firmly believed in the omnipotence of her prayers, so much so that they
went to her as to a spiritual physician, and even strangers to her followed
their example. The story of her adoption of a young widow, Argentina del Sale,
illustrates this trait. Marco del Sale was sick of a cancer, and became so
impatient over his hopeless disease that his wife, as a last resort, went to
the hospital and begged Saint Catherine to go and see him, which the latter did
at once, and marvellously calmed him by “a few humble and devout words.”
Argentina then accompanied her back, and on their way they stopped at the
church of Our Lady of Grace, and there prayed for the sick man. When the poor
wife returned home she found a great change for the better in her husband’s
temper; he felt resigned to whatever might be God’s will, and was anxious to
see Catherine again, which was readily granted him next day. But the saint and
the sufferer alike had forebodings of the fatal end of the disease, and Marco,
telling Catherine of a vision he believed he had had, revealing to him his
approaching death, said: “Therefore I pray you, most kind mother, that you may
be pleased to accept Argentina as your spiritual daughter, retaining her always
near you; and I pray you, Argentina, to consent to this.” He died the eve of
Ascension day, as he expected he would, and the legend adds that ” his spirit
knocked at the window of his confessor’s cell, crying, i Ecce Homo,’ Avhich
when the confessor heard he knew that Marco had passed to his Lord.” Argentina
attached herself to Saint Catherine and became her constant companion. A lady
friend of Saint Catherine, and a great contrast to her, was Tommasa, a cousin
of her own, and, like herself, a married woman anxious to live a more than
commonly devout life. She prudently gave up by degrees the ordinary and
legitimate occupations of her rank, and dedicated her many talents to devout
purposes; but Catherine, in her superior fervor, wondered how Tommasa could
make such slow progress and could dream of the possibility of turning back. ”
If I should turn back ” (by which she meant only a return to blameless and
somewhat dull occupations), ” I should not only wish my eyes to be put out, but
that every kind of punishment and insult should be inflicted upon me.” Madonna
Tommasa, however, wrought a good work in a frivolous world, and, after the
death of her husband, became a nun in an Observantine (Franciscan) convent,
whence, after twenty years, she was sent to another convent of the same order,
to reform it by introducing the strict observance which she had contributed to
restore in her first monastery. She was a skilful writer, painter, and
embroiderer, had exquisite and affable manners, and, though zealous, was never
either fanatical or inconsiderate. Her prudence and discretion won her many
disciples. Among her writings were two treatises, one on the Apocalypse and the
other on Dionysius the Areopagite; her paintings and needlework were delicate
and dignified representations of holy scenes, Biblical allegories, etc.; she
illustrated manuscripts and copied the text with great skill. In her we see another
exceptional specimen of Genoese education. Another of Catherine’s friends, an
unmarried woman, who lived some years in her house and is said by the
biographer to have had ” a powerful intellect,” was, to the belief of those
about her, possessed by the devil; at any rate, she was subject to violent
paroxysms which lasted till her death. Catherine’s presence always soothed her,
and she called the saint Serafina, from her fervent spirit of heavenly love.
Catherine’s writings partook of some of the qualities
that distinguish those of Saint Thomas, and abound in pleasing diversities as
well as literary merit, Here they sound like a theological treatise, there like
a sweet poem such as the Minnesingers of Germany in previous centuries had
composed. Of the action of grace she says: ” Grace increases in proportion as
man makes use of it. Hence it is evident that God gives man from day to day all
that he needs, no more and no less, and to each according to his condition and
capacity; . . . because we are so cold and neglectful, and because the instinct
of the spirit is to arrive quickly at perfection, it seems as if grace were
insufficient.” Poetical fancy was not wanting in Saint Catherine’s writings,
but among similes common to most poets the following appears original: ” At
length that befell the soul which happens to a bombshell when, the fire being
applied to it, it explodes and loses both fire and powder; thus the soul,
having conceived the fire of pure, divine love, suddenly lost that which had
before inflamed her, and, deprived of all sensibility, could never more return
to it.” The language of the Imitation continually occurs to one’s memory.
She constantly interchanges the personal for the
abstract in her allegorical account of the journey of the Soul, the Body, and
Self-Love, which reads very like some of Calderon’s poems. Occasionally the
Spirit, meaning the higher part of human nature, is distinguished from the
Soul, though not systematically. The Soul and Body agree to call in Self-Love
as an arbiter, so that neither shall be wholly starved or confined, but both
enjoy some part of the delights peculiar to each. This partnership, however,
fails to work satisfactorily, and the Body, after much fasting and subjection,
breaks loose and asserts itself so as to cripple the Soul, who sorrowfully
allows it for a time to have its way, but subsequently is allured by earthly
delights and comes down to the level of the Body. Then follows a period of sin,
in which Remorse plays an occasional part as Mentor, but is often stifled, and
at last, after much conversation in the mediaeval style, the light of God is
restored to the Soul, who gains definitive mastery over her companion and
dismisses their common arbiter. The conceit is entirely foreign to our notions,
the nearest thing to it in later English being some of Herbert’s poetry.
Saint Catherine’s treatise on purgatory has some very
poetical similes, and the leading idea namely, that the soul’s consciousness of
the requirements of divine purity is such that it voluntarily casts itself out
of God’s presence until purified is almost identical with that of Cardinal
Newman’s poem on death, “The Dream of Gerontius.” A rather original simile is
that of the single loaf destined for the satisfaction of the hunger of mankind.
Purgatory is likened to the pains of the hungry man who is detained from
possession of the loaf, the sight of which alone is supposed to appease hunger,
while hell is portrayed by the despair of the man who is certain that he never
will possess the mystic bread. This has a flavor of the legends of the Round
Table, and would serve well for Tennyson’s pen. One thing more is worthy of
remark in Saint Catherine’s writings on this subject. She warns devout persons
to rely upon daily watchfulness against sin rather than upon the gaining of
plenary indulgences and the precarious fact of actually possessing perfect
contrition, for she says: “Did you know how hardly it is come by you would
tremble with fear and be more sure of losing than of gaining it.”
– from Catholic World,
July 1881
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/saint-catherine-of-genoa-and-her-contemporaries/
In the Name of Jesus Christ.
Dearest Mother in Christ Jesus, and Sister in the holy
memory of our blessed mother Catherine, I, Barduccio, a wretched and guilty
sinner, recommend myself to your holy prayers as a feeble infant, orphaned by
the death of so great a mother. I received your letter and read it with much
pleasure, and communicated it to my afflicted mothers here, who, supremely
grateful for your great charity and tender love towards them, recommend
themselves greatly, for their part, to your prayers, and beg you to recommend
them to the Prioress and all the sisters that they may be ready to do all that
may be pleasing to God concerning themselves and you. But since you, as a
beloved and faithful daughter, desire to know the end of our common mother, I
am constrained to satisfy your desire; and although I know myself to be but
little fitted to give such a narration, I will write in any case what my feeble
eyes have seen, and what the dull senses of my soul have been able to
comprehend.
This blessed virgin and mother of thousands of souls,
about the feast of the Circumcision, began to feel so great a change both in
soul and body, that she was obliged to alter her mode of life, the action of
taking food for her sustenance becoming so loathsome to her, that it was only
with the greatest difficulty that she could force herself to take any, and,
when she did so, she swallowed nothing of the substance of the food, but had
the habit of rejecting it. Moreover, not one drop of water could she swallow
for refreshment, whence came to her a most violent and tedious thirst, and so
great an inflammation of her throat that her breath seemed to be fire, with all
which, however, she remained in very good health, robust and fresh as usual. In
these conditions we reached Sexagesima Sunday, when, about the hour of vespers,
at the time of her prayer, she had so violent a stroke that from that day
onwards she was no longer in health. Towards the night of the following Monday,
just after I had written a letter, she had another stroke so terrific, that we
all mourned her as dead, remaining under it for a long time without giving any
sign of life. Then, rising, she stood for an equal space of time, and did not
seem the same person as she who had fallen.
From that hour began new travail and bitter pains in
her body, and, Lent having arrived, she began, in spite of her infirmity, to
give herself with such application of mind to prayer that the frequency of the
humble sighs and sorrowful plaints which she exhaled from the depth of her
heart appeared to us a miracle. I think, too, that you know that her prayers
were so fervent that one hour spent in prayer by her reduced that dear tender
frame to greater weakness than would be suffered by one who should persist for
two whole days in prayer. Meanwhile, every morning, after communion, she arose
from the earth in such a state that any one who had seen her would have thought
her dead, and was thus carried back to bed. Thence, after an hour or two, she
would arise afresh, and we would go to Saint Peter’s, although a good mile
distant, where she would place herself in prayer, so remaining until vespers,
finally returning to the house so worn out that she seemed a corpse.
These were her exercises up till the third Sunday in
Lent, when she finally succumbed, conquered by the innumerable sufferings,
which daily increased, and consumed her body, and the infinite afflictions of
the soul which she derived from the consideration of the sins which she saw
being committed against God, and from the dangers ever more grave to which she
knew the Holy Church to be exposed, on account of which she remained greatly
overcome, and both internally and externally tormented. She lay in this state
for eight weeks, unable to lift her head, and full of intolerable pains, from
the soles of her feet to the crown of her head, to such an extent that she
would often say: “These pains are truly physical, but not natural; for it seems
that God has given permission to the devils to torment this body at their
pleasure.” And, in truth, it evidently was so; for, if I were to attempt to
explain the patience which she practiced, under this terrible and unheard-of
agony, I should fear to injure, by my explanations, facts which cannot be
explained. This only will I say, that, every time that a new torment came upon
her, she would joyously raise her eyes and her heart to God and say: “Thanks to
You, oh eternal Spouse, for granting such graces afresh every day to me, Your
miserable and most unworthy handmaid!”
In this way her body continued to consume itself until
the Sunday before the Ascension; but by that time it was reduced to such a
state that it seemed like a corpse in a picture, though I speak not of the
face, which remained ever angelical and breathed forth devotion, but of the bosom
and limbs, in which nothing could be seen but the bones, covered by the
thinnest skin, and so feeble was she from the waist downwards that she could
not move herself, even a little, from one side to another. In the night
preceding the aforesaid Sunday, about two hours or more before dawn, a great
change was produced in her, and we thought that she was approaching the end.
The whole family was then called around her, and she, with singular humility
and devotion, made signs to those who were standing near that she desired to
receive Holy Absolution for her faults and the pains due to them, and so it was
done. After which she became gradually reduced to such a state that we could
observe no other movement than her breathing, continuous, sad, and feeble. On account
of this it seemed right to give her extreme unction, which our abbot of Sant’
Antimo did, while she lay as it were deprived of feeling.
After this unction she began altogether to change, and
to make various signs with her head and her arms as if to show that she was
suffering from grave assaults of demons, and remained in this calamitous state
for an hour and a half, half of which time having been passed in silence, she
began to say: “I have sinned! Oh Lord, have mercy on me!” And this, as I believe,
she repeated more than sixty times, raising each time her right arm, and then
letting it fall and strike the bed. Then, changing her words, she said as many
times again, but without moving her arms, “Holy God, have mercy on me!” Finally
she employed the remainder of the above-mentioned time with many other formulas
of prayer both humble and devout, expressing various acts of virtue, after
which her face suddenly changed from gloom to angelic light, and her tearful
and clouded eyes became serene and joyous, in such a manner that I could not
doubt that, like one saved from a deep sea, she was restored to herself, which
circumstance greatly mitigated the grief of her sons and daughters who were
standing around in the affliction you can imagine.
Catherine had been lying on the bosom of Mother
Alessia and now succeeded in rising, and with a little help began to sit up,
leaning against the same mother. In the meantime we had put before her eyes a
pious picture, containing many relics and various pictures of the saints. She,
however, fixed her eyes on the image of the cross set in it, and began to adore
it, explaining, in words, certain of her most profound feelings of the goodness
of God, and while she prayed, she accused herself in general of all her sins in
the sight of God, and, in particular, said: “It is my fault, oh eternal
Trinity, that I have offended You so miserably with my negligence, ignorance,
ingratitude, and disobedience, and many other defects. Wretch that I am! for I
have not observed Your commandments, either those which are given in general to
all, or those which Your goodness laid upon me in particular! Oh mean creature
that I am!” Saying which, she struck her breast, repeating her confession, and
continued: “I have not observed Your precept, with which You commanded me to
seek always to give You honor, and to spend myself in labors for my neighbor,
while I, on the contrary, have fled from labors, especially where they were
necessary. Did You not command me, oh, my God! to abandon all thought of myself
and to consider solely the praise and glory of Your Name in the salvation of
souls, and with this food alone, taken from the table of the most holy Cross,
to comfort myself? But I have sought my own consolation. You did ever invite me
to bind myself to You alone by sweet, loving, and fervent desires, by tears and
humble and continuous prayers for the salvation of the whole world and for the
reformation of the holy Church, promising me that, on account of them, You
would use mercy with the world, and give new beauty to Your Spouse; but I,
wretched one, have not corresponded with Your desire, but have remained asleep
in the bed of negligence.
“Oh, unhappy that I am! You have placed me in charge
of souls, assigning to me so many beloved sons, that I should love them with
singular love and direct them to You by the way of Life, but I have been to
them nothing but a mirror of human weakness; I have had no care of them; I have
not helped them with continuous and humble prayer in Your presence, nor have I
given them sufficient examples of the good life or the warnings of salutary
doctrine. Oh, mean creature that I am! with how little reverence have I
received Your innumerable gifts, the graces of such sweet torments and labors
which it pleased You to accumulate on this fragile body, nor have I endured
them with that burning desire and ardent love with which You sent them to me.
Alas! oh, my Love, through Your excessive goodness You chose me for Your
spouse, from the beginning of my childhood, but I was not faithful enough; in
fact, I was unfaithful to You, because I did not keep my memory faithful to You
alone and to Your most high benefits; nor have I fixed my intelligence on the
thought of them only or disposed my will to love You immediately with all its
strength.”
Of these and many other similar things did that pure
dove accuse herself, rather, as I think, for our example than for her own need,
and then, turning to the priest, said: “For the love of Christ crucified,
absolve me of all these sins which I have confessed in the presence of God, and
of all the others which I cannot remember.” That done, she asked again for the
plenary indulgence, saying that it had been granted her by Pope Gregory and
Pope Urban, saying this as one an hungered for the Blood of Christ. So I did
what she asked, and she, keeping her eyes ever fixed on the crucifix, began
afresh to adore it with the greatest devotion, and to say certain very profound
things which I, for my sins, was not worthy to understand, and also on account
of the grief with which I was laboring and the anguish with which her throat
was oppressed, which was so great that she could hardly utter her words, while
we, placing our ears to her mouth, were able to catch one or two now or again,
passing them on from one to the other. After this she turned to certain of her
sons, who had not been present at a memorable discourse, which, many days
previously, she had made to the whole family, showing us the way of salvation
and perfection, and laying upon each of us the particular task which he was to
perform after her death. She now did the same to these others, begging most
humbly pardon of all for the slight care which she seemed to have had of our
salvation. Then she said certain things to Lucio and to another, and finally to
me, and then turned herself straightway to prayer.
Oh! had you seen with what humility and reverence she
begged and received many times the blessing of her most sorrowful mother, all
that I can say is that it was a bitter sweet to her. How full of tender
affection was the spectacle of the mother, recommending herself to her blessed
child, and begging her to obtain a particular grace from God — namely, that in
these melancholy circumstances she might not offend Him. But all these things
did not distract the holy virgin from the fervor of her prayer; and,
approaching her end, she began to pray especially for the Catholic Church, for
which she declared she was giving her life. She prayed again for Pope Urban VI,
whom she resolutely confessed to be the true Pontiff, and strengthened her sons
never to hesitate to give their life for that truth. Then, with the greatest
fervor, she besought all her beloved children whom the Lord had given her, to
love Him alone, repeating many of the words which our Savior used, when He
recommended the disciples to the Father, praying with such affection, that, at
hearing her, not only our hearts, but the very stones might have been broken.
Finally, making the sign of the cross, she blessed us all, and thus continued
in prayer to the end of her life for which she had so longed, saying: “You, oh
Lord, call me, and I come to You, not through my merits, but through Your mercy
alone, which I ask of You, in virtue of Your Blood!” and many times she called
out: “Blood, Blood!” Finally, after the example of the Savior, she said:
“Father, into Your Hands I commend my soul and my spirit,” and thus sweetly,
with a face all shining and angelical, she bent her head, and gave up the
ghost.
Her transit occurred on the Sunday at the hour of
Sext, but we kept her unburied until the hour of Compline on Tuesday, without
any odor being perceptible, her body remaining so pure, intact, and fragrant,
that her arms, her neck and her legs remained as flexible as if she were still
alive. During those three days the body was visited by crowds of people, and
lucky he thought himself who was able to touch it. Almighty God also worked
many miracles in that time, which in my hurry I omit. Her tomb is visited
devoutly by the faithful, like those of the other holy bodies which are in
Rome, and Almighty God is granting many graces in the name of His blessed
spouse, and I doubt not that there will be many more, and we are made great by
hearing of them. I say no more. Recommend me to the Prioress and all the
sisters, for I have, at present, the greatest need of the help of prayer. May
Almighty God preserve you and help you to grow in His grace.
– Ser Barduccio di Piero Canigiani
Santa Caterina Fieschi Adorno da Genova Vedova
Nasce nel 1447 in una delle principali famiglie genovesi. A sedici anni viene data in moglie a Giuliano Adorno, appartenente ad una importante famiglia ghibellina. Vive una vita frivola e mondana ma dopo un incontro con la sorella suora, decide di cambiare vita e condivide le sue esperienze mistiche e caritative con un piccolo gruppo di figli spirituali. Muore il 15 settembre 1510. Dopo la conversione, la vita di Caterina ha il proprio centro nel rapporto con Cristo. Non si dedica però solo alla contemplazione, ma anche all'azione, rivolgendo il suo impegno concreto soprattutto agli ammalati. Opera nella Compagnia delle dame della Misericordia e inizia a visitare il lebbrosario di san Lazzaro, svolge le mansioni più umili; cura pure i bambini abbandonati e fronteggia varie epidemie di peste. Nel 1497 fonda la prima «Compagnia del divino amore», che sarà il modello per analoghe istituzioni di altre città italiane nel quadro di quella che è stata chiamata la Riforma cattolica. Il suo corpo è conservato nella chiesa genovese della Santissima Annunziata in Portoria. (Avvenire)
Etimologia: Caterina = donna pura, dal greco
Martirologio Romano: A Genova, santa Caterina Fieschi, vedova, insigne per il disprezzo del mondo, i frequenti digiuni, l’amore per Dio e la carità verso i bisognosi e gli infermi.
Autore: Domenico Agasso
SOURCE : http://www.santiebeati.it/dettaglio/54375
CATERINA Fieschi Adorno, santa
di Sosio Pezzella - Dizionario Biografico degli
Italiani - Volume 22 (1979)
CATERINA Fieschi Adorno (Caterina da
Genova), santa. - Discendente da famiglia aristocratica - tra i suoi antenati
vi furono due pontefici, Innocenzo IV e Adriano V - C. nacque a Genova nei
primi del giugno del 1447 da Giacomo e da Francesca de' Negri. Ultima di cinque
fratelli, ricevette un'istruzione confacente al suo rango sociale: docile di
carattere e con buone predisposizioni intellettuali, acquisì sufficienti
rudimenti di lingua latina e una discreta cultura letteraria completando poi,
come era del resto costume delle fanciulle nobili del tempo, tale educazione
con l'apprendimento del disegno e del ricamo. In tal modo giunse in possesso di
conoscenze abbastanza ampie anche se per nulla sorrette da profondi interessi
culturali.
Le sue tendenze erano d'altra parte rivolte altrove.
Appena tredicenne C. manifestò già una spiccata inclinazione per la vita
religiosa, che la spinse al tentativo di farsi accogliere nel convento delle
canonichesse del Laterano presso S. Maria delle Grazie dove si trovava già la
sorella Limbiana. La sua richiesta fu respinta a causa della giovane età; in
realtà i suoi genitori, per motivi di politica municipale, avevano diversamente
deciso del suo futuro destinandola in sposa a Giuliano Adorno, un nobile di
carattere violento e di costumi immorali, ma membro di una ricca e potente
famiglia ghilbellina. Il matrimonio ebbe luogo il 13 genn. 1463 e C. dopo
alcuni anni trascorsi, come tramanda la tradizione agiografica, "in grande
tristezza",fu coinvolta nella vita allegra e spensierata a cui era
assuefatto il marito, tra feste, ricevimenti e spettacoli - questo periodo lo
chiamerà più tardi di "dissipazione" - fino a quando non precipitò
nel 1473 in una profonda crisi religiosa, che la condurrà a un radicale
cambiamento, da una duplice visione che ella affermò di avere avuto: una ferita
d'amore, mentre si stava confessando e in virtù della quale le si rivelarono i
segni evidenti dei suoi peccati, della sua miseria morale e della bontà di Dio;
e l'apparizione del Cristo crocifisso nella sua stanza inondatasi di sangue.
Da quel momento C. si sottopose a una dura disciplina
ascetica, a penitenze rigorose, a digiuni prolungati, al cilicio, al silenzio e
ad astinenze, mentre dava inizio alla sua opera di assistenza degli ammalati,
che sarebbe poi durata per tutta la sua vita, nell'ospedale di Pammatone che
proprio nel 1471 si era ingrandito, essendo confluiti in esso, per disposizione
del governo cittadino, tutti gli altri ospedali della città. Il suo esempio
determinò la ferma risoluzione del marito, che abbandonò anche lui il genere di
vita condotto fino ad allora, di associarsi al lavoro della moglie insieme alla
quale prenderà anche la decisione (1476) di osservare nel futuro una perfetta
castità matrimoniale. Ma C. abbandonò anche la casa in cui viveva con il marito
trasferendosi in una piccola abitazione contigua all'ospedale di Pammatone, di
cui nel 1489 assunse la direzione della sezione riservata alle donne con
specifici compiti di sorveglianza del personale e di cura dei bambini abbandonati.
A causa di questa sua vasta attività sociale, che la
portava tra l'altro a intrecciare relazioni con vari ambienti anche religiosi
della città e con altri luoghi di cura - visitò così l'ospedale di S. Lazzaro
per i lebbrosi e l'ospedale degli Incurabili - C. divenne un necessario punto
di riferimento per quanti operavano ugualmente a favore dell'assistenza e della
carità pubbliche. Presso di lei si venne perciò formando come un piccolo
cenacolo spirituale i cui componenti furono i sacerdoti Giacomo Carenzio e
Tommaso Doria, entrambi rettori di Pammatone; suora Tommasina Fieschi,
Bernardino da Feltre, Cattaneo Marabotto che diventerà direttore spirituale di
C., e, tra i più significativi, Ettore Vernazza che direttamente ispirato da C.
fonderà insieme ai suoi compagni la Compagnia del Divino Amore (1497) e la
Compagnia del Mandiletto i cui aderenti erano impegnati, conservando
l'anonimato, a portare aiuti alle famiglie che versavano nell'indigenza; e,
infine, Angelo da Chivasso. Costui, avendo preso dimora a Genova nel convento
dell'Annunziata di Portoria attiguo all'ospedale di Pammatone, ebbe modo di
frequentare a lungo C., delle cui idee ed esperienze finì col diventare un
devotissimo ammiratore. Su questi discepoli C. ebbe quindi una profonda influenza
e, non avendo l'abitudine di scrivere - quasi certamente non redasse nessuna
delle opere che vanno sotto il titolo di Opus Catharinianum (Libro de
la Vita mirabile et Dottrina santa de la Beata Caterinetta da Genova. Nel
quale si contiene una utile et catholica dimostratione et dichiaratione del
Purgatorio, Genova 1551, composto da Vita et Dottrina, dal Dialogo
tra anima, corpo, amor propri o, spirito, umanità e
Dio e dal Trattato del Purgatorio) -comunicava di volta in volta ad
essi le proprie esperienze mistiche e la dottrina spirituale che ella veniva
elaborando. Tale dottrina si inserisce nel filone del misticismo italiano, che
da s. Angela da Foligno discende attraverso s. Caterina da Siena, s. Bernardino
da Siena, s. Lorenzo Giustiniani, s. Caterina da Bologna, ed è fondamentalmente
incentrata sul principio del puro amore di Dio, che comincia ad operare dal
momento in cui l'anima, caduta in potere del corpo e dell'amor proprio
alleatisi insieme a suo danno, gioisce a causa degli allettamenti mondani e si
volge ai beni caduchi e transitori. Il primo atto di illuminazione dell'amor
divino ha allora l'immediato effetto di farle scoprire la realtà del peccato di
cui è nello stesso tempo vittima e preda, e a provocare un suo radicale
mutamento. Allora essa ripudia i propri peccati e insieme il mondo e i suoi
beni, mentre il suo corpo e il suo amor proprio diventano i principali nemici
da domare e da assoggettare a sé. La sua decisione, ora che ha conosciuto i
pericoli del peccato e la realtà divina che le è stata rivelata, è quella di
non volersi mai più allontanare dalla strada intrapresa verso la perfezione.
Il primo momento di questo nuovo cammino è
rappresentato dalla lotta ascetica contro la resistenza, le intemperanze, gli
assalti dell'orgoglio, della vanagloria, della seduzione dei sensi, della
volontà che cerca di resistere al suo completo annullamento. Ma l'anima riesce
alla fine a conseguire la sua completa vittoria, e a trionfare su se stessa,
pronta a più ardue esperienze spirituali.
Questo primo stadio della dottrina di C., descritto
nel libro primo del Dialogo è chiamato "purgativo"; ad esso
segue un secondo, detto "illuminativo",in cui l'anima, invasa
progressivamente dall'amore divino e perciò struggendosi per le miserie morali
e per le macchie che ancora avverte in sé, è governata dalla sola ispirazione
interiore. Le penitenze a cui è sottoposta, e in virtù delle quali si viene
purificando, non derivano quindi dall'osservanza di norme e precetti esterni
imposti dalla dottrina della Chiesa - C. si sottrasse per i primi 21 anni della
sua vita mistica ad ogni direzione sacerdotale - ma sono di carattere
spirituale. Ed è al termine di questo nuovo travaglio - che coincide con la
fine del secondo periodo delle sue esperienze - che l'anima si sente purificata
e rivestita di virtù. Ma le prove dolorose non sono ancora terminate perché lo
Spirito, che è la parte superiore dell'anima, la sottopone ad altri crudeli
tormenti fino a quando essa, passata attraverso lo stadio supremo delle
sofferenze, e avvertita in sé la presenza stessa dell'umanità del Cristo, suo
modello, non giunge ad essere completamente purificata per trasformarsi e
annullarsi in Dio, termine conclusivo di ogni mistica in generale.
Questa terza fase del processo di perfezione
spirituale di C. viene indicata come l'epoca del Purgatorio spirituale e
corrisponde, sul piano biografico che abbraccia gli anni 1499-1510, a due
avvenimenti di rilievo: la decisione di C. di cessare dai digiuni a causa delle
sue pessime condizioni fisiche, e la scelta di un direttore spirituale nella
persona di Cattaneo Marabotto. L'elaborazione dottrinaria corrispondente alle
sue nuove esperienze è riflessa nel Trattato del Purgatorio, luogo che
viene considerato non tanto il regno della sofferenza quanto quello dell'amore.
In esso le anime, dovendo soddisfare le proprie colpe, accolgono infatti le
pene corrispondenti con la certezza di essere guidate sulla via della
purificazione dalla sapienza di Dio. E poiché la pena più grave, il peggior
supplizio che provano ma che non comprendono, è proprio la privazione di Dio,
le sofferenze del Purgatorio hanno allora per C. il preciso significato di
annullare progressivamente quei peccati che impediscono tale visione. Grazie a
questo processo, si ha il confluire di due volontà, quella divina e quella
umana cooperanti insieme ai fini della salvezza eterna.
Gli ultimi anni di C. trascorsero in continue e
crescenti sofferenze fisiche di inaudita violenza. Pochi anni dopo la morte del
marito, avvenuta nel 1497, C. cominciò ad avvertire i segni di una grave
malattia che la tormentò per circa un decennio. Gli agiografi la considereranno
di carattere soprannaturale e perciò impossibile a curare; in realtà si trattò
di un cancro allo stomaco o al duodeno che provocava reazioni fisiche dolorose,
l'impossibilità di bere e di mangiare, continue emorragie. Le conseguenze più
immediate comportavano comunque anche stati di delirio e visioni (ad es. la
scala di fuoco, il mondo che brucia, la tenaglia che lacera la carne, un cuneo
rovente nel cuore) che C. riferiva e che sono descritte nella sua Vita.
C. morì a Genova il 15 sett. 1510.
Fu sepolta nella chiesa dell'Annunziata di Portoria e
sulla sua tomba sorse subito un culto popolare. Clemente X la beatificò il 6
apr. 1675; fu proclamata patrona di Genova nel 1684 e canonizzata da Clemente
XII nel 1737; infine papa Pio XII, nel 1944, la proclamò compatrona degli
ospedali italiani.
Sull'origine, redazione e formazione dell'Opus
Catharinianum esiste una complessa questione critica che F. von Hügel ha
per primo riassunta nel suo volume The Mystical Element of Religion as
studied in Saint Catherine of Genua and her Friends, I-II,London 1908. Egli
giunge qui alla conclusione che la composizione delle opere attribuite a C.
sarebbe il risultato di una lunga elaborazione avvenuta tra il 1495 e il 1551
ad opera dei suoi discepoli; a costoro sì dovrebbe la redazione materiale di
tali scritti composti sulla base di ricordi orali, di testimonianze scritte e
della conoscenza diretta delle idee e fatti avvenuti. Ad Ettore Vernazza si
dovrebbe pertanto la composizione della Vita e del Trattato del
Purgatorio mentre Battistina Vernazza avrebbe scritto il Dialogo e
approntata l'edizione del 1551 sistemando gli scritti anche con interpolazioni
di carattere teologico. Tali ipotesi si trovano però ampiamente confutate in un
saggio di Umile da Genova, L'Opus Catharinianum et ses auteurs: étude
critique sur la biographie et les écrits de s. C. de G., in Revue
d'ascét. et de myst., XVI (1935), pp. 351-70,in cui sono contenute le
nuove conclusioni su cui gli studiosi sostanzialmente concordano e a cui ancora
si attengono. E cioè che l'autore della Vita non sarebbe il Vernazza
bensì Cattaneo Marabotto il quale avrebbe composto anche il Trattato del
Purgatorio ampliando con testimonianze scritte e orali un originario
capitolo della stessa Vita. Il Dialogo sarebbe invece il
risultato di una giustapposizione di due distinti scritti, il primo composto
materialmente da C., il secondo di autore anonimo ma che, escludendo i
Vernazza, potrebbero essere Tommaso Doria o Angelo da Chivasso. L'editore
dell'edizione del 1551, infine, non sarebbe Battistina Vernazza ma un altro
discepolo di C., forse un sacerdote.
Fonti e Bibl.: In alcune biblioteche di Genova si
trovano fonti mss. riguardanti la bibl. di C. e testim. sulla sua opera; nella
Bibl. Urbana di Genova, ms. E 30-8-14.: A. L. Giovio, Elenco delle
scritture da esibirsi nella causa della b. C. e,specialmente, un Compendium
chronol. historiae b. Catherinae Genuensis ab ipsius ortu usque ad
hodiernum diem (1675); Ibid., ms. 32.7.16: G. Giscardi, Diario dei
beati, venerabili e servi di Dio della città e dominio di Genova (1739),
ff. 593-600; Ibid., ms. 31.7.18: Origine delle chiese e dei luoghi pii di Genova,
ff. 391 s.; Biblioteca Brignole, ms. A. 1.12.: A. Schiaffino, Annali
eccles. della Liguria, III, 1510, ff. 957-962; Arch. della Curia
arciepisc., Atti del processo di beatificaz. di s. C. da
Genova ; Bibl. dell'Università, ms. B. VIII. 31: Carte e docum. concernenti
s. C.;G. Parpera, Vita mirabile ossia varietà de successi spirituali
osservati nella vita della b. C. da Genova, Genova 1682; Id., B. C. da
Genova Fieschi negli Adorni illustr., Genova 1682; Acta sanctorum, 15
sept., Venetiis 1770, pp. 123-95; [l'abbé P...], Vie de s. Catherine
de Gênes et Traité du Purgatoire, Clermont 1840; F. Ratte, Die heilige
Katerine von Genua und ihre wunderbaren Kenntnisse von den arme Seelen in
Fegfeuer, Dulmen 1880; P. Fliche, S. Catherine de Gênes, sa vie
et son esprit, Paris 1881; Th. de Bussière, Les oeuvres et la vie de s. Catherine
de Gênes, Paris 1883; F. M. Paradi, La compagnia del Mandiletto in Genova,
La Spezia 1901; L. de Grandmaison, L'élément mystique dans la religion,
in Recherches de sciences religieuses, I (1910), pp. 180-208; G. A.
Cervetto, S. C. F. A. e i Genovesi, Genova 1910;
Gabriele da Pantasina, S. C. da Genova: album storico-artistico,
Genova 1915; P. Paschini, La beneficenza in Italia e le Compagnie del
Divino Amore nei primi decenni del Cinquecento, Roma 1915, pp. 14 s.; H.
Getton, Sainte Catherine de Gênes et l'élément mystique de la religion,
in Rev. de phil., XXI(1921), pp. 461-479, 632-665; V. Hostachy, Le
Purgatoire de s. Catherine de Gênes, in Rev. des jeunes,
XXXVIII(1924), pp. 230 ss.; P. Pourrat, La spiritualité chrétienne, II,
Paris 1924, pp. 441-447; J. Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix et l'experience
mystique, Paris 1924, pp. 142 s.; H. Michel, S. C. von Genua,
Mainz 1925; Vita Cateriniana, Genova 1928-1943; Cassiano da
Languasco, Gli Ospedali degli Incurabili, Genova 1929, pp. 61-65, 135 s.,
175, 187, 190; Gabriele da Pantasina, Vita di C. F. A., Genova
1929; Teodosio da Voltri. S. C. da Genova...,Genova 1929;
Valeriano da Finale, Trattato del Purgat. di s. C. da
Genova, Genova 1929; Teodosio da Voltri, S. C. da Genova e il
mov. dell'amor divino, in Vita Caterin.,IV(1931), pp. 10-19; V
(1932), pp. 92-103; VI(1933), pp. 131-142; Valeriano da Finale, La cronist. del
processo di beatificaz. e di canonizz., ibid., IV(1931), pp. 5864; F.
Steno, La santa di Genova, ibid., pp. 3-9; Tino da Ottone, Il
principio della mistica di s. C., ibid.,VI(1933), pp. 173-183; N. M.
Lugaro, La dottoressa del Purgatorio, ibid., pp. 143-147; M.
Viller-G. Joppin, Les sources ital. de l'Abrégé de la Perfection. La
vie de s. Catherine de Gênes, in Rev. d'ascét. …,XV(1934), pp.
381-402; Tino da Ottone, La dottrina della catarsi, in Vita Cater.,
VII (1934), pp. 208-229; P. Paschini, Amour (Compagnie du divin),
in Dict. de Spirit.,I, Paris 1937, pp. 531 ss.; P. Debongnie, Le
Purgatoire de s. Catherine de Gênes, in Etud. carmelit.,XXIII
(1938), pp. 92 ss.; L. Sertorius, Katharina von Genua: Lebensbild und
geistige Gestalten ihrer Werke, München 1939; L. de Lapérouse, La vie de s. Catherine
de Gênes, Tournai-Paris 1948; P. Debongnie, Catherine de Gênes, in Dict. d'Hist. et
de Geogr. Eccl., XI, Paris 1949, coll. 1506-15; Umile da Genova, Catherine
de Gênes, in Dict. de Spirit.,II, Paris 1953, coll. 290-325; P.
Debongnie, La grande dame du pur amour s. Catherine de Gênes, Bruges
1960; Umile da Genova, S. C. F. A., Genova 1960-62; G. D.
Gordini, C. da Genova, in Bibl. Sanct.,III, coll. 984-989.
SOURCE : https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/caterina-fieschi-adorno-santa_(Dizionario-Biografico)/
Katharina von Genua
Name bedeutet: die Reine (griech.)
Tomasina Fieschi: Gemälde, um 1510
Katharina war Tochter der adligen Familie Fieschi, aus
der auch die beiden Päpste Innozenz IV. und Hadrian V. stammten; ihr Vater war
Vizekönig von Neapel.
Mit 16 Jahren heiratete sie gezwungenermaßen den Genueser Edelmann Giuliano
Adorno. Nach zehnjähriger schlechter Ehe, während der sie oft zurückgezogen im
Gebet, zeitweise auch aushäusig in Vergnügungen lebte, besuchte sie ihre
Schwester in einem Franziskanerordenkonvent
in Genua.
Dort erfuhr sie 1474 die erste Erleuchtung und Erscheinung des
gekreuzigten Christus;
sie lebte nun in Enthaltsamkeit und Askese, geißelte sich, pflegte Arme und
Kranke und schloss sich 1479 als Tertiarin dem
Franziskanerorden an.
Katharina kümmerte sich v. a. um die Kranken im Spital
Pammatone in Genua,
wo sie 1489 Vorsteherin der Frauenabteilung wurde. Während zweier Pestepidemien
arbeitete sie unermüdlich für die Kranken und Sterbenden. Unter ihrem Einfluss
enstand die Gemeinschaft der Göttlichen Liebe mit Aufgaben in der
Krankenpflege. Sie selbst kasteite sich, während der Fastenzeit ernährte
sie sich nur von der Kommunion, ihr wurden mystische Gnadengaben zuteil.
Nachdem er seinen ganzen Besitz verloren hatte, folgte
auch ihr Mann in seinen letzten Lebensjahren Katharinas Beispiel, bis er 1497
starb. Nun begann ihr Seelenführer mit der Aufzeichnung ihrer Lebensgeschichte
mit den spirituellen Erfahrungen und Lehren: 1551 erschien dieses Libro de
la Vita mirabile e dottrina santa di S. Caterina Fieschi, das Buch des
wunderbaren Lebens und der heiligen Lehre der Heiligen Katharina Fieschi. Ihre
Offenbarungen geben die beiden Bücher Dialogo del Divino
Amore, Dialog von der göttlichen Liebe, sowie Trattato del
purgatorio, Abhandlung über das Fegefeuer wieder. Das Fegefeuer ist
für sie zwar ein Ort des Leidens, aber die Seelen sind dort von Freude erfüllt,
weil sie sich von Gott geleitet wissen, deshalb verstärken sich zwar der
Schmerz, aber auch die Freude, je näher der Zeitpunkt ihrer Erlösung
heranrückt.
Worte der Heiligen
Der Herr: Du fragst mich da um etwas so Großes, dass du gar nicht fähig bist, es zu verstehen. Doch um deinen schwachen, armen Verstand zu befriedigen, werde ich dir bloß einen Funken dieser Wahrheit erstrahlen lassen. Sähest du diesen Funken der Wahrheit deutlich, so könntest du nicht mehr leben, wenn ich dich nicht gnädig stützte. Wisse vorerst, dass ich unveränderlicher Gott bin.
Ich liebte den Menschen, noch ehe ich ihn erschaffen hatte, mit unendlicher, reiner, einfacher und aufrichtiger Liebe ohne irgendeine Ursache. Es ist mir unmöglich, etwas nicht zu lieben, was ich geschaffen und zu meiner Verherrlichung bestimmt habe. Außerdem habe ich den Menschen sehr reichlich ausgestattet mit allen Mitteln, die ihm dienlich sind, sein Ziel zu erreichen. Es sind dies die natürlichen Gaben und übernatürlichen Gnaden, die ihm, soweit es von mir abhängt, nie fehlen. Ja, meine unendliche Liebe umgibt ihn auf verschiedenerlei Weise und geht ihm nach auf verschiedenartigen Wegen, um ihn unter meinen Schutz zurückzurufen. Ich finde auch nichts in ihm, was mir widerspräche, außer der freien Selbstentscheidung, die ich ihm gegeben habe. Mit dieser kämpfe ich beständig aus Liebe, bis er sie mir übergibt und mir daraus ein Geschenk macht. Und nachdem ich sie angenommen habe, schaffe ich sie langsam um durch mein verborgenes Wirken und meine liebevolle Sorgfalt. Nie und nimmer verlasse ich den Menschen, bis ich ihn zu dem ihm bestimmten Ziel geführt habe.
Du fragst mich, warum ich den mir so widerstrebenden Menschen liebe, der so übersät ist mit Erbärmlichkeiten, dass sie ihren üblen Geruch von der Erde zum Himmel verbreiten. Ich antworte dir, dass ich aus meiner unendlichen Güte und meiner reinen Liebe, mit der ich diesen Menschen liebe, seiner Mängel nicht achten noch es unterlassen kann, mein Werk zu vollbringen, das darin besteht, ihm immer Gutes zu erweisen. Durch mein Licht, das ich ihm leuchten lasse, erkennt er seine Fehler. Und da er sie erkennt, beweint er sie. Und da er sie beweint, reinigt er sich davon. Wisse, dass ich nicht anders vom Menschen beleidigt werden kann, als wenn er dem Werke Hindernisse setzt, das meiner Anordnung gemäß ihn zu seinem Ziel bringen soll, d. h., dass er mich nicht meiner Liebe gemäß so wirken lässt, als er dessen bedürftig wäre. Nur allein die Todsünde [die ein Mensch absichtlich und willentlich begeht, wodurch die Verbindung zu Gott zerstört wird] ist es, die mich hindert.
Die drei Weisen der menschlichen Gottesliebe:
Man sagt, die Werke werden für die Liebe vollbracht, wenn der Mensch alles, was er tut, aus Liebe zu Gott tut, aus jener Liebe, die ihm von Gott gegeben ist mit dem Verlangen, für sein und seines Nächsten Heil zu wirken. In diesem ersten Stadium der Liebe lässt Gott den Menschen viele und verschiedenartige, nützliche und notwendige Werke vollbringen, und zwar werden sie mit einem Gefühl frommer Zuneigung und erbarmender Güte gewirkt.
Die Werke des zweiten Stadiums der Liebe werden in Gott vollbracht. Das sind jene Werke, die ohne Ausblick auf irgendeinen eigenen oder eines Nächsten Nutzen getan werden, die aber in Gott verbleiben ohne irgendeinen anderen Zweck desjenigen, der sie gewirkt hat. [Und wegen der Gewohnheit, die sich der Mensch erworben hat, Gutes zu wirken, verharrt er im Wirken, obwohl ihm Gott seinen eigenen Teil dabei entzogen hat, der ihm früher half und ihn erfreute. Aus diesem Grund ist ein solches Werk vollkommener als die ersteren Werke, weil der Mensch im ersten Stadium noch viele Zwecke verfolgte, die Leib und Seele befriedigten. Die Befriedigung an den eigenen guten Taten wird weggenommen.]
Die Werke endlich, die von der Liebe vollbracht
werden, sind noch vollkommener als diejenigen der beiden anderen Arten, denn
sie werden ohne eine Beteiligung des Menschen vollbracht. Die Liebe hat den
Menschen so sehr überwunden und besiegt, dass er sozusagen ganz untergegangen
ist im Meer der Liebe, ohne zu wissen, wo er ist. Er ist in sich selbst ganz
vernichtet und nicht imstande, irgend etwas zu wirken. In diesem Falle ist es
die Liebe, die in dem Menschen wirkt. Ihre Wirkungen sind Werke der
Vollkommenheit, da sie ohne eigenes Dazutun des Menschen vollbracht werden. Es
sind Werke der Gnade, die Gott alle entgegennimmt. Diese süße und reine Liebe
hat den Menschen genommen und vollständig in sich hineingezogen und ihn ganz
von seinem Selbst befreit. Sie hat von ihm vollkommen Besitz ergriffen. [Sie
wirkt fortwährend in diesem Menschen und durch diesen Menschen, nur zu seinem
Wohl und Nutzen, ohne dass er selbst sich einmischt.]
Quelle: Katharina von Genua: Dialog über die göttliche Liebe, Kapitel 1 und 5 - http://www.gottliebtuns.com/katharina_von_genua.htm
zusammengestellt von Abt em. Dr. Emmeram Kränkl OSB,
Benediktinerabtei Schäftlarn,
für die Katholische
SonntagsZeitung
Stadlers
Vollständiges Heiligenlexikon
Katharinas
Abhandlung über das Fegefeuer und ihre Lebensgeschichte gibt es online
zu lesen in den Documenta Catholica Omnia.
SOURCE : https://www.heiligenlexikon.de/BiographienK/Katharina_von_Genua.htm
Catherine de Gênes, Traité du purgatoire, 1571, tr. fr. 1598, tiré
du Vita mirabile e dottrina santa della Beata Caterina de Genova (Corpus
catharinianum) :
http://christus-web.com/traite-du-purgatoire-de-catherine-de-genes/
Catherine de Gênes, Dialogues : http://voiemystique.free.fr/catherine_de_genes_dialogues_01.htm
Vie de Sainte Catherine de Gênes : http://livres-mystiques.com/partieTEXTES/Textes/index.html
Voir aussi : https://web.archive.org/web/20090503015857/http://www.lanternafil.it/Public/SantaCaterina/caterina.htm
