Letters of Catherine Benincasa

by Saint of Siena Catherine

We have three chief foes. First, the devil, who is weak if I do not make him strong by consenting to his malice. He loses his strength in the power of the Blood of the humble and spotless Lamb. The world with all its honours and delights, which is our foe, is also weak, save in so far as we strengthen it to hurt us by possessing these things with intemperate love. In the gentleness, humility, poverty, in the shame and disgrace of Christ crucified, this tyrant the world is destroyed. Our third foe, our own frailty, was made weak; but reason strengthens it by the union which God has made with our humanity, arraying the Word with our humanity, and by the death of that sweet and loving Word, Christ crucified. So we are strong, and our foes are weak.

It is very true, then, that we are more cruel to ourselves than our foes are. For without our help they cannot kill nor hurt us, since God has not given them to us that we might be vanquished, but that we might vanquish them. Then our fortitude and constancy are proved. But I do not see that we can avoid such cruelty and become merciful without the light of most holy faith, opening the eye of the mind to behold how displeasing it is to God and harmful to soul and body, and how pleasing to God and useful to our salvation is mercy.

Dearest mother—mother I say in so far as I see you to be a faithful daughter of Holy Church—it seems to me that you have no mercy on yourself. Oh me! oh me! because I love you I grieve over the evil state of your soul and body. I would willingly lay down my life to prevent this cruelty. Many times I have written you in compassion, showing you that what is shown you for truth is a lie; and the rod of divine justice, which is ready for you if you do not flee so great wrong. It is a human thing to sin, but perseverance in sin is a thing of the devil. Oh me! there is none who tells you the truth, nor do you seek among the servants of God those who might tell it you, that you should not stay in a state of condemnation. Oh, how blessed my soul would be could I come into your parts, and lay down my life to restore to you the good of heaven and the good of earth; to take from you the knife of cruelty, with which you have killed yourself, and help to give you that of mercy, which kills vice; so that you should clothe you in the holy fear of God and love of truth, and bind you in His sweet will!

Oh me, do not await the time which you are not sure of having! Do not choose that my eyes should have to shed rivers of tears over your wretched soul and body—a soul which I hold as my own! If I consider that soul, I see that it is dead, because separated from its body; it persecutes, not Pope Urban VI., but our truth and faith. I expected, mother and daughter mine, as you used to write to me, that through you these should be spread among the infidels by means of divine grace, and declared and helped among us, defended when we should see a taint appear, from those who have been or were contaminated. Now I see quite the contrary appear in you, through the evil counsel which has been given you for my sins. You have received it as one merciless toward your salvation; and I see that there will be no human creature who can restore your loss, but you yourself must render this account before the highest Judge. You did not offend through ignorance, not knowing the right, for the truth was shown to you; but you do not know how to turn back from that which you have begun, because the knife of perverse and selfish will destroys knowledge and choice, making you hold that as shame which is your greatest honour. For perseverance in fault and in such an evil is greatest disgrace, and displays one as a sign of shame before the eyes of one's fellow-creatures; but to escape from them is greatest honour; and by honour and the odour of virtue, shame is escaped and the stench of vice extinguished.

And if I consider your condition as to those temporal and transitory goods that pass like the wind—you yourself have deprived yourself of them by right. You have only to receive the last sentence of being deprived of them by deed, and published a heretic. My heart breaks and cannot break, from the fear that I have lest the devil so obscure the eye of your mind that you endure that loss, and such shame and confusion as I should repute greater than the loss that you would suffer. And you cannot hide it with saying, "This would be done to me unjustly, and the thing which is unjustly inflicted casts no shame." That cannot be said; for it would be done justly, both because of the fault you have committed, and because he can do it as highest and true pontiff that he is, chosen by the Truth in truth. For were he not so, you would not have offended. So that it would be just. But he has refrained from doing this through love, as a benignant father who waits for his son to correct himself. Yet I fear that he may do it, constrained by justice, and by your long perseverance in evil. And I do not say this as one who does not know what she is saying.

And if you said to me, "I do not care about this, for I am strong and mighty, and I have other lords who will help me, and I know that he is weak"—I reply to you that he wearies himself in vain who will guard the city with force and with great zeal, if God guard it not. And can you say that you have God with you? We cannot say it, for you have put Him against you for putting yourself against truth; you have put you against Him, and it is truth that sets him free who holds thereto, and none there is who can confound it. Therefore you have reason to fear, and not to trust in your strength and power, had you yet more of them than you have. And he has reason to comfort his weakness in Christ sweet Jesus, whose place he holds, trusting in His strength and aid, who shall send him aid from such a side as we cannot imagine. And you know that if God is for you, none shall be against you.

Then let us fear God, and tremble beneath the rod of His justice. Let us correct us, and advance no further. Be merciful to yourself, and you shall call down the mercy of God upon you. Have compassion on the many souls who are perishing through you; of whom you will have to render account before God at the last extremity of death. There is yet healing for us, and time wherein we can return; and He will receive you with great benignity. I am sure that if you will be merciful and not cruel to your soul and also to your body, you will do this, and will have pity upon your subjects: in otherwise, no. Therefore I said that I desired to see you merciful and not cruel to your soul. And thus I pray you, through the love of Christ crucified, that at least you hold and will to be held, the truth which was announced to you and to the other lords of the world. And if you should say, "It is still doubtful to me," stay neutral till it is made clear to you, and do not do what you should not. Desire illumination and counsel from those whom you see to fear God, and not from members of the devil, who would counsel you ill in that which they do not hold for themselves. Fear, fear God, and place Him before your eyes, and think that God sees you, and His eye is upon you, and His justice wills that every fault be punished and every good rewarded. Be merciful, ah, be merciful to yourself! I say naught else to you. Remain in the holy and sweet grace of God. Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love.

TO BROTHER RAIMONDO OF THE PREACHING ORDER WHEN HE WAS IN GENOA

In more grievous ways than any yet noted, Catherine was to be wounded in the house of her friends. The letters already given have shown us how tenderly intimate, on the human as well as on the spiritual side, were her relations with the father of her soul, "given her by that sweet mother, Mary." One shares her affection for good Father Raimondo as one reads the legend. His figure might well have belonged to the trecento rather than to the more strenuous age that followed. He was the simplest, the most modest of men—albeit by no means lacking in homely shrewdness; he was also one of the least heroic. Catherine, like most uplifted natures, demanded heroism from those dear to her, as a matter of course. Others wish for their beloved ease, delights, the gratification of ambition and desire; Catherine sought for them sorrow, hardships, the opportunity to offer their lives in exalted sacrifice for the sins of the Church and the world. She craved for them only less passionately than for herself, the crowning grace of martyrdom. Now Fra Raimondo had no affinity whatever for martyrdom. His chance at it came, in the fortunes of those stern times, and was promptly rejected. Urban, perhaps at Catherine's instigation, had despatched him to the King of France, and Raimondo had bidden his spiritual daughter and mother a solemn farewell, surmising doubtless that he was to see her face no more. He proceeded to the port of Genoa, planning thence to set sail for France. But the galleys of the antipope sought to debar the passage; and Raimondo, accepting the obstacle (one imagines with much ease), allowed himself to give up the expedition.

Catherine wrote him two letters on the matter. The first is brief, and half-playful in tone: "Oh my naughty father" (cativello padre mio) she says, "How blessed your soul and mine would have been could you have sealed with your blood a stone in Holy Church! I do wish I could see you risen above your childishness—see you shed your milk teeth and eat bread, the mustier the better!" Evidently Raimondo had answered this letter, writing, one imagines, in a deprecating tone, fearing lest Catherine may love him the less for his failure, yet after all assuming—so strong is our expectation of finding our own attitude in our friends—that she will rejoice in his escape. In this her reply she tells her whole heart. Surely, few more pathetic revelations of disappointed yet faithful affection have drifted to us on the tide of the ages. Catherine was at this time far advanced upon her own Via Dolorosa. One of the stations of her sorrow had been the parting with her friend: "And you have left me here, and have gone away with God." Here was another station, marked by a deeper pain: "Faithful obedience would have done more in the sight of God and men than all human prudence; my sins have prevented me from seeing it in you." With a glad suffering she had given Raimondo up to the service of God; with a suffering that was bitterly shamed, she saw him false to his calling. She utters no vain reproaches. In her own way she begins with earnest self-accusations, and proceeds to comfort the weakness of the man who should have been her guide with tender and subtly-reasoned assurances of her unchanged affection. At the same time she does not flinch from uncondoning, scathing statement of his sin and of her disillusion. Considerate, delicate, even courteous to a degree, the letter yet reveals in every line the sense of solitude which the action of Raimondo had caused her. There is no rebellion in her spirit: "I hold me none the less in peace, because I am certain that nothing happens without mystery," she sighs. But we grieve with a new, awestruck perception of the loneliness of her great soul, as we realize that to Raimondo was to be given perforce her deepest confidence in the passion upon which she was even now entering.