I have striven hard but in vain to find some scrap of Catherine’s handwriting. The late Mr. Hartwell Grisell of Oxford, and the Cavaliere Azzolini dei Manfredi of Rome, both of them life-long collectors of Saints’ autographs, have kindly assured me that they have never come across a word even purporting to be in her handwriting. The fourteen wills and codicils made in her favour or by herself are all, according to the universal custom of the time and country, written throughout in a rapid, cursive hand by the lawyer himself alone, with certain slight signs (crosses or lines) for further identification of his authorship, but with no signature of any kind. There is no shadow of a true tradition as to any of her sayings or thinkings having ever been written down by herself. And the business books of the Hospital, kept, at least in part, by Catherine from 1490 to 1496, when she was its matron, have long ago been destroyed by fire.
[45] See Opere Spirituale della Ven. B. Vernazza, Genova, 1755, 6 vols., Vol. I, p. 3.
[46] Op. cit. p. 45.
[47] Although the Church and Monastery belonged, as Catherine’s Will of 1509 puts it, to “the Order of St. Benedict of the Congregation of Saint Justina in Padua”—a Congregation founded from Monte Cassino between 861 and 874—yet the community were evidently closely bound up with the Augustinian Canons Regular of the Lateran, or at all events with the foundation of the Convent of Augustinian Canonesses at Santa Maria delle Grazie. For the concession of Pope Nicolas V for the latter Convent is addressed to his “Beloved sons of Saint Theodore of Genoa” (Augustinian Canons) “and of Saint Nicolas in Boschetto.” And this close connection with, and action for, a Church and Convent so dearly loved by Catherine, will have necessarily been one of the causes of her affection for the Benedictine country-side Church.
[48] This evidently most authentic anecdote stands in the Vita, p. 3, in a doubly disconcerting context. Her prayers, always elsewhere recorded together with their effects, are here abruptly left, without any indication of their sequel; and the prayer for a three months’ illness is followed by an attempted explanation of it—that she had gone through three months of mental affliction. I take it that some other continuation has been suppressed, or, at least, that the present explanation owes its “three months” to a quaint determination to find at least a retrospective correspondence between her prayer and the happenings of her life.
[49] Vita, p. 4, first two paragraphs. I hope to show in the Appendix that we owe their getting on to paper to Ettore Vernazza, and that he derived their contents from Catherine herself, some time after 1495.
[50] Ibid. p. 4. § 3.
[51] Vita, p. 4, § 3; p. 5, § 1.
[52] Ibid. p. 5, §§ 2, 3. I have, together with the Bull of Canonization, deliberately omitted the first two sentences of § 3, which (with their representation of Our Lord as appearing not alive with the Cross, but dead on it, and with their repetition here of the exclamation as to “no more sins” of her conversion-moment) form an interesting doublet, with a complex and eventful history attaching to it. See Appendix to this volume.
[53] Vita, p. 5c.