Catherine of Genoa

Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510)

Caterina Fieschi was born in Genoa in 1447, the youngest of five children in one of the most powerful families of the Ligurian republic. The Fieschi had produced two popes and a long line of cardinals and condottieri; her father, Giacomo Fieschi, had served as viceroy of Naples under René of Anjou and died while she was still a child. She grew up in a palazzo in a city that was, in her lifetime, a crowded commercial port riven by factional violence between the great Guelph and Ghibelline clans. At thirteen she asked to enter the Augustinian canonesses of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where her older sister Limbania was already professed. The convent refused her as too young. At sixteen the family decided her future instead: in 1463 she was married to Giuliano Adorno, a young nobleman of the rival Ghibelline house, in a match arranged to seal a political alliance.

The marriage was a disaster. Giuliano was extravagant, hot-tempered and openly unfaithful — he fathered a daughter, Thobia, by another woman — and he was frequently absent. Catherine, pious and reserved, spent roughly five years in a depression so severe that her family grew alarmed, and then another five trying to cure it by throwing herself into the social life of the Genoese nobility. The accounts compiled by those who knew her later make no attempt to soften this decade: she was, by her own judgment, miserable in both halves of it.

On March 22, 1473, at Limbania's suggestion, she went to make her confession at the convent. Kneeling before the priest, before she had said anything, she was overwhelmed by an interior sense of God's love and of her own wretchedness so intense that she could barely speak. The words the early records preserve are "No more world, no more sin." A few days later she had a vision of Christ carrying the cross, and the conversion was complete. There had been no gradual preparation and there was no human director; what followed was driven from within. She began a regime of severe penance, received communion daily — a rare practice for a laywoman of the period — and for the rest of her life kept long fasts during Lent and Advent in which, those around her testified, she took almost no food for weeks at a time and suffered no visible harm. Physicians were baffled by her. She did not regard the fasts as achievements; she said she was simply unable to eat.

Giuliano's affairs collapsed into bankruptcy at about the same time. He underwent a conversion of his own, became a Franciscan tertiary, and the two agreed to live together in continence, moving from the palazzo into a small house near the Pammatone, Genoa's great hospital for the poor. Catherine began working there among the sick, taking on the tasks the nobility did not do. In 1479 the couple moved into the hospital itself, and in 1490 she was appointed its director. She managed its accounts, by the testimony of the auditors, to the last coin. When plague struck Genoa in 1493 and killed perhaps four-fifths of those who stayed in the city, she stayed, organized care in the open air behind the hospital, contracted the disease herself by kissing a dying woman, and recovered. Giuliano died in 1497 after a difficult final illness through which she nursed him; in her will she provided for his daughter Thobia.

For about twenty-five years after her conversion Catherine had no confessor or spiritual director, which was unusual and attracted comment. Only in 1499 did she accept the guidance of Cattaneo Marabotto, the hospital's rector, who together with the lay notary Ettore Vernazza began recording her sayings. Her last decade was marked by mysterious and escalating physical sufferings that the doctors could neither diagnose nor relieve. She died in Genoa on September 15, 1510. Her body, found incorrupt, lies in the church that bears her name; she was beatified in 1675 and canonized in 1737.

Her Writing and Its Influence

Catherine wrote nothing. Everything that circulates under her name was set down by others, chiefly Marabotto and Ettore Vernazza, in the last eleven years of her life, when she was already ill and often, by her own account, barely able to say what was happening inside her. After her death the notes passed to Vernazza's daughter Battista, an Augustinian canoness and a considerable spiritual writer in her own right, who worked them into the form first printed in Genoa in 1551 as the Vita mirabile e dottrina santa. That volume contains the life, the collected sayings, and the two works on which her reputation rests: the Trattato del Purgatorio and the Dialogo spirituale, a dramatized exchange between the Soul, the Body, Self-Love and the Lord. The earliest surviving manuscript dates from the 1520s. Modern critical study, above all the edition prepared by the Capuchin scholar Umile Bonzi da Genova in the 1960s, has sorted the material into layers: the sayings and the purgatory treatise lie closest to her own voice, while the Dialogue, especially its later parts, is largely Battista Vernazza's composition. The reader is therefore always at one remove, hearing Catherine through the memories and theology of her friends. It is a tradition rather than an authorship.

What that tradition preserved is nevertheless one of the most original accounts of purgatory ever produced. Catherine's purgatory is not a prison and not a sentence. The soul that sees God at death sees, in the same instant, the rust of self that still clings to it, and throws itself into the purifying fire of its own free will, because it can no longer bear to stand before pure love impure. The suffering is real and the joy is real and they do not take turns; the soul would not shorten its purgation by a moment if it could. Her governing image is rust burned off metal, and the fire is simply God's love doing what it does to whatever resists it. She came to this not by speculation but by extrapolation: it was, she said, what she had experienced in her own body and will since the morning of March 22, 1473, when love had set about consuming self-love in her, and she assumed that what was begun in this life was finished in the next. The same conviction runs through the sayings. "My Me is God," she said, "nor do I recognize any other Me except my God himself" — a statement that sounds like pantheism and is in fact its opposite, the testimony of a woman who had watched her own will be emptied and refilled.

The immediate effect of her life was institutional before it was literary. Vernazza, formed in her company, founded the Oratory of Divine Love in Genoa in 1497, a confraternity of laymen committed to prayer and service of the sick, and the Oratory spread to Rome, where its members included Gaetano da Thiene and Gian Pietro Carafa, the founders of the Theatines. A good part of the Catholic reform of the sixteenth century thus has Catherine's hospital somewhere in its ancestry. Her teaching on pure love was taken up by Francis de Sales in the Treatise on the Love of God and became, in the seventeenth century, contested ground: Fénelon cited her for the possibility of a love of God wholly indifferent to self, Bossuet read the same passages against him, and the theologians who examined her writings for the beatification cause found nothing in them to censure. In the English-speaking world she was carried into Protestant reading by the purgatory treatise, which was translated repeatedly in the nineteenth century, and then by Friedrich von Hügel, whose two-volume The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends of 1908 made her a test case for the whole question of what mystical experience is and how it relates to the institutional and intellectual sides of faith. Through von Hügel she reached Evelyn Underhill and a generation of Anglican readers who had never expected to learn anything from a doctrine of purgatory.

Who should read Catherine of Genoa: Readers who want to understand how the love of God and the suffering of the soul can be the same event, and who are prepared to find that account coming from a hospital administrator rather than a cloister. She is valuable for Protestants willing to read a doctrine of purgatory as a description of sanctification rather than a point of controversy, and for anyone whose own conversion was sudden and unaccompanied and who wonders whether that is permitted. She is not for readers who need an author's own words; nothing here is hers in that sense. She is not for those seeking method, consolation, or a gradual path. She is for those who suspect that being loved by God may hurt, and want to know why it is worth it.