Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena told the pope to leave Avignon and go back to Rome, and he went. She was the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth child of a Sienese dyer, refused marriage by cutting off her hair and starving herself, and joined the Dominican tertiaries, a lay order of women who lived at home rather than in a convent. She spent three years in silence in a room in her family's house, then came out and spent the rest of her life in public: nursing plague victims and the diseased poor, gathering a circle of followers who called her mamma though she was younger than most of them, and dictating an enormous correspondence to popes, kings, mercenary captains and condemned prisoners. She could not write for most of her life and dictated to secretaries, sometimes three letters at once on different subjects. Nearly four hundred survive. In 1376 Florence sent her to Avignon to negotiate an end to the war of the Eight Saints; she failed at that and instead spent the audiences pressing Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome, which he did the following January. When the Great Schism opened in 1378 she moved to Rome to support Urban VI and wrote to the cardinals who had elected and then repudiated him in terms of considerable violence. Her Dialogue of Divine Providence is one of the foundational texts of Italian religious prose. She died at thirty-three, having eaten almost nothing for months, in a pattern modern writers have discussed as a form of religious anorexia. She was canonised in 1461, made a Doctor of the Church in 1970, and is a patron saint of Italy and of Europe.

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