CATHERINE OF GENOA: SAINT OF LOVE              Part I, Part II, Part III
by Paul Hourihan

[The following is one of two articles we would like to share on the intriguing lives of two unusual Catholic saints. The other is "Benedict Labre: Saint by Acclamation."]

Part I

If we really believe that God exists, that he is waiting for us, that His love, power and truth will give us all the strength and inspiration we need, why don't we fly to him? If we sense that He alone exists and that our stay on earth is divinely ordained, why don't we immediately renounce everything and, straight and unwaveringly, go to Him? It is the great achievement of Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) that she did exactly that, and with no prior qualifications that were visible.

There have been saints whose lives in their worldly and spiritual chapters have been marked by their divergence, but it is doubtful if any major spiritual figure ever grew out of more unlikely soil as that which made up the first twenty-six years of Catherine Adorna's life. In her early life, there was, above all, no sign of strength in any direction whatever, such as there was in the lives of many saints before their awakening, the strength for wickedness or worldliness perhaps, but still a strength of will and character of some definable kind, which they were able to put to advantage when the direction of their lives was altered.

And yet, few saints have ever experienced such a complete and instantaneous conversion from a life of worldly mediocrity to one of absolute devotion to God; whose transformation was so swift and so total, and out of material traditionally the most unpromising for the making of future saints.

The material in her case was that of a vacillating, colorless woman, who for twenty-six years lived a commonplace and rather desperate existence, married unhappily, weak in will, weak in sinfulness, weak in faith, weak in everything; a woman who never knew her own mind, never discovered what she wanted out of life—a chronic drifter, a pining recluse inclined to mysterious illnesses and moods of self-pity, during which she shut herself away from everyone and emerged from them unchanged. Yet, out of such inauspicious material, a willpower of astounding resolution was forged.

A sketch made of her in middle age suggests what she looked like in her youth. Her face was long and delicately molded, and features aristocratic, the mouth thin and sensitive, yet firm; the general countenance suggesting a reticent and yet ardent nature; a love of beauty, an aura of refinement is markedly evident. She was tall and slender, and had long, dark chestnut hair. She was of an intense temperament, lacking wit or humor—all her life she took everything literally. (This was a serious handicap in her dealings with the worldly, but it became a mighty weapon when she discovered that a divine and omnipresent love dwelled in everyone.)

Her biographers have sought in her childhood for incipient signs of piety, but the fact is that there were none that were outstanding. She was brought up in a rather devout family of five children, three of them boys, Catherine being the youngest child, and some of the religious atmosphere of the home clung to her. But as an individual, she seemed no more pious than the average general Genoese girl of her time. She had an older sister who became a nun; and when she was thirteen, Catherine expressed a desire to follow her calling, but it seems that no one paid serious attention to her, since thousands of girls made this kind of gesture at a similar age.

It was not long before Catherine herself seemed to forget about it, and, indeed, she never reverted to the idea at any stage of her life. Moreover, if her girlhood had been of a genuine spiritual character, as some believe, one is at a loss to account for her gloomy behavior during the ten years of her marriage, a marriage which, paradoxically, gave whatever spirituality was latent in her an ideal opportunity to flourish. Her behavior during those years suggests that prayer and spiritual devotions were secondary in her scheme of things.

At sixteen, she had been married to a young nobleman a few years older than she, the complete antithesis of her in character and taste, one Giuliano Adorna, the scion of a rival family in Genoa. This Giuliano was a gambler, a libertine, and a drinker; an aggressive and spendthrift youth devoid of any sense of scruple or self-control. Their families had arranged this strange match for political reasons, and it never occurred to Catherine to object, brought up as she was in a tradition of obedience to family authority. It was hoped that the marriage would pacify a long-standing feud between the two families, both of whom were still powerful and wealthy, as well as venerable, in the Genoa of that time (Catherine's, the Fieschis, had given warriors and statesmen to the State during its long history, as well as two Popes to the Church.)

Soon after the marriage, Giuliano began to spend his way through his sizable patrimony, passed most of his time away from the mansion he had inherited, and was frank to inform his wife of his affairs with other women. Catherine's retiring tendencies evoked only ridicule from her husband. Often, he was drunk in the house and was in the habit of bringing home companions of both sexes who shared his dissolute tastes.

As time went on, Giuliano was constantly away from the house, which must have gratified Catherine. More than ever, she found herself dwelling alone in the spacious rooms, and if there was any obvious spiritual bent in her nature, now was the chance for it to emerge. But mostly she mooned about the house or lay sick in bed. Frequently, she would call on God in prayer for comfort and understanding; but her prayers were listless, and they brought her no compensation. In the same halfhearted, sporadic manner, she went to confession and received communion.

At the end of five years of marriage, she seems to have lost most of whatever interest in religion she had had at first. This is the assumption one must make from her decision to discontinue her solitary mode of living and to step out in the world. Undoubtedly, she had made some attempt to find solace in prayer and spiritual exercises during this first period, had found none that satisfied her, and so decided to turn to the ‘world’ as an alternative. Giuliano's outright desertion of her at this time, and sudden disappearance from her life altogether, was the particular prompting of her decision.

Her illustrious name and the two mansions she and Giuliano had inherited, as well as an amiable disposition, brought her into contact with all sorts of people, and this mode of living lasted for another five years. Those years are passed over in silence by her biographers, and Catherine herself never alluded to them later. This was due, very likely, less to great sins committed than to the fact that worldly living had simply bored her, that those five years were the most barren and purposeless she had known—though one may also suppose that her worldly efforts were characterized by the vagueness that had marked all her actions hitherto.

Still, the period lasted for five years; and at the end of it, when the experience of the world had proved as unsatisfying as the previous five with her husband, she reached the lowest mental and emotional point of her life, and in desperation when to seek the advice of her sister, the nun. She, quite logically, advised Catherine to go to confession there in the convent.

What tipped the scales of the precarious balance she had maintained was probably a combination of gradual, accumulating strain, her increasing discontent with herself, the vanity of worldly living, and her own inability to cope with life on any level—marital, worldly, or spiritual. One thing is clear: what distressed and terrified her more than anything else was the realization that she had lost, or was on the verge of losing, her religious faith entirely. This realization had plunged her into a profound gloom and remorse, mingled with a train of other harrowing sensations that day after day clung to her—guilt, confusion, and increasing fear of the world, a haunting sense of sin and worthlessness, and a complete lack of self-confidence. In the midst of this desolation, she had prayed to God to make her sick for three months.

After talking with her sister, Catherine went to the convent chapel to make her confession. She knelt down in front of the altar; the priest was called away just then; and as she knelt there, alone for this short priceless interval, plunged in an abyss of hopelessness, and a desolate sense of her own unworthiness, the great moment of her life rushed in upon her overwhelmingly and shattered her: she was illuminated with the sudden, blinding, and utterly convincing vision of God as Love. Simultaneously, she had a terrible understanding of her sins and of the wasted, squandered life she had lived up to then. She fell into an ecstasy, murmuring to herself, over and over: “No more world! No more sin!” The convent priest returned to the chapel just then and saw her there, unconscious of the world, impaled upon a “wound of Unmeasured Love,”—enveloped, he said afterwards, in a circle of light. When she rose to her feet, her face was transfigured with joy and power. Haltingly, she said she could not make her confession, and fled from the room, still murmuring: “No more world! No more sin”... “and she felt that if she had in her possession a thousand worlds she would have cast them all away” ...

Part II

Catherine Adorna lived for thirty-six more years, and there is no evidence that she ever deviated from the knowledge that had come to her that day.  She never hesitated, never doubted; she lived an absolutely dedicated life thereafter.  She who had been a woman of weak and undisciplined character was filled with a sudden, tremendous strength that grew as the years passed.  All she had needed was that single, obliterating moment.  All that had preceded it proved to be nothing.  The power of the world, the burden of her sins, her long habit of weakness and vacillation, and her rooted lack of self-confidence—all were as nothing.  All that followed was simply an unwavering and utterly logical carrying out of the transcendent truth that had been vouchsafed her: God is Love. 

When she returned home, she locked herself away from the servants until she had chartered her course.  With burning tears and sighs, she wept and prayed ceaselessly for three days, crying: “O my Beloved!  Can it be that Thou hast called me with so much love, and revealed to me at one view what no tongue can describe?” During that time, she had a strange, powerful vision of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, after which she saw blood flowing everywhere in the house. This was the first and last Christ-centered experience for Catherine.  Unlike most Catholic women saints, her yearning, and orientation were not so much for Christ as for the supreme Love, the blissful and immanent Godhead that had revealed itself to her that day in the chapel, and to which, ever after, she sought exclusively to attach herself.  It was the Source of Life itself that she sought. 

After the three days of intense prayer, she entered upon a purgative and penitential period that lasted four years. Every morning she went to Holy Communion.  She walked with her eyes on the ground.  She spent six hours a day in prayer.  She wore a hair shirt.  At night she slept on thorns.  She gave up meat and fruit.  She spoke seldom and only when absolutely necessary.  And she began the tremendous fasts during Lent and Advent, which were to continue for the rest of her life during which, it was noted, she enjoyed exceptionally vigorous health. 

Throughout this first period, she was wholly self-taught, unhelped by anyone, and went through the four years practically unknown.  Neither now nor at any time, in fact, did she have the benefit of a teacher.  Who taught her, then?  Her Love taught her, guiding her steps from the beginning. “If I attempted to lean upon anyone, Love immediately caused me such great mental suffering that I was forced to desist, saying, ‘Oh, Love, I understand thee.’” Nor was this inward instruction a vague and uncertain thing. “After her early purgation period,” says her biographer, the priest Don Marabotto, “during which she was haunted by a constant sense of sin, and occupied by incessant mortifications, all thought of such mortifications, was in an instant taken from her mind: in such a manner that, had she even wished to continue them, she would have been unable to.... The sight of her sins was now taken from her mind, so that henceforth she did not catch a glimpse of them: it was as if they had all been cast into the depths of the sea.” 

Coincidentally, Giuliano Adorna had come back from his wanderings the summer after Catherine's convent experience—bankrupt, penitent, without hope or substance, having wasted his own and Catherine's inheritances.  Without a moment's hesitation, she not only welcomed him back, but made a home for the illegitimate daughter he had fathered somewhere.  The impoverished couple were soon forced to leave the family mansion and moved into a small house, in a poor section, near the hospital which was to figure importantly in her life.  They took one devout servant with them, and Giuliano’s child, and lived together henceforth as brother and sister. 

Such was the power which she already exerted that Giuliano agreed, readily enough, to this condition—which, considering his character as it had flourished for ten years, was a truly remarkable performance. (Furthermore, in a year or so this same spendthrift and ruthless young man was accepted into the foremost lay religious order of Genoa, the Third Order of St. Francis, and for years thereafter, until his death in fact, devoted himself to good works in and about the city.)  This phenomenon—the way Catherine possessed the minds and hearts of people—was repeated often in the years that followed.  Her humility and purity seem to have awed everyone, and the love that went out from her enfolded all who came into her life.  In her own lifetime, she was regarded as a saint by great numbers of people in Genoa, and those who made up the mystical lay circle that later gathered around her felt that her most casual remarks were divinely inspired. 

Even during the period of her penances, she had begun to offer her services at the nearby hospital and to seek out indigent people who needed help.  When a plague epidemic swept over Genoa, she threw herself into nursing and tending of the diseased victims.  One incident illuminates her character vividly: A certain aged woman, dying of the plague, lay speechless day after day.  Constantly, Catherine visited her, urging her to “Call Jesus.”  In vain the old woman tried to move her lips, calling him as well as she could; and Catherine, seeing her mouth filled with the name of Jesus, was overcome with compassion, and could not restrain herself, at the last moment of the woman's life, from impulsively kissing her on the lips, thereby contracting the plague fever herself.  But she soon recovered, and was back again at work among the dying....

Part III

During her first years at the hospital, she was in the habit of submitting herself to everyone, including the menials, but the directors of the hospital recognized her services and asked her to superintend the care of the sick in their institution. Catherine accepted, and she and Giuliano took a small house still closer to the hospital, where they passed the rest of their days. Catherine still prayed long hours every day, often experiencing raptures and ecstasies, and gradually her reputation brought to her a number of spiritual seekers, including a few priests, who gathered regularly in her house to listen to her words. But her ministrations to the sick never abated during her active years, nor her frequent visits to the hospital of St. Lazarus, which harbored incurable lepers, horrible to sight and smell, many of them vile-tempered. Cheerfully, Catherine bore their rebukes and tended them with love, bringing their soiled clothing back to her own house to wash and iron them.

Eventually, she was appointed rector of the hospital and invested with unlimited authority. At once, Catherine took up the task of administration as if she had done it all her life. With an important responsibility suddenly thrust upon her, she, like many another mystic, in spite of a naturally contemplative nature, showed a remarkable practical efficiency in worldly affairs.

In this manner, she spent the rest of her active life. Her external activities continued, and her reputation for selfless service spread throughout Genoa, but Catherine herself remained primarily occupied with the increasing purification of her own mind, the steady and relentless purging of every fiber of self-will from her heart and life. The constant meetings with those who came to her seeking strength, the endless giving of her time and words to God-seekers drawn to her, as well as all the services in asylums, hospitals, and impoverished homes, performed with a calm and sureness, a patience and strength of forbearance that caused others to marvel, were a natural expression of the inner current of spirituality and burning, all-consuming love of God, which from the beginning, from that day in the chapel, had been her whole existence, gave meaning and radiance to her every act in the outer world.

“Every day I feel that the motes are being removed, which this Pure Love casts out. Man cannot see these imperfections; indeed since, if he saw these motes, he could not bear the sight, God ever lets him see the work he has achieved, as though no imperfections remained in it. But all the time God does not cease from continuing to remove them.”

“The creature is incapable of knowing anything but what God gives it from day to day. If it could know (beforehand) the successive degrees that God intends to give it, it would never be quieted.... When from time to time I would advert to the matter, it seemed to me that my love was complete; but later... I became aware that I had had many imperfections. I did not recognize them at first, because God-Love was determined to achieve the whole only little by little, for the sake of preserving my physical life, and so as to keep my behavior tolerable for those with whom I lived. For otherwise, with such other sight, so many excessive acts would ensue as to make one insupportable to oneself and to others.’

When her disciples expressed wonder at the long fasts she undertook twice a year, she told them: “This non-eating of mine is an operation of God, independent of my will; hence I can in no wise glory in it; nor should we marvel at it, for to Him such an operation is as nothing.”

Her self-surrender to the Lord was total. “Since Love took over the care of everything, I have not taken care of anything, nor have I been able to work with my intellect, memory, and will, any more than if I had never had them.”

“Let none be astonished when I say that it is impossible for me to live with myself. It is necessary for me... to live separate from the self or Me; that is to say, it is necessary for me to live without any self-originated movement either of the understanding, affections, or will. This is what I must be; and this, by the grace of God, is what I hope I am.”

St. Catherine was one of the “pure” saints—absorbed more in God than in humanity, more in self-transformation to the highest possible degree than in transforming others, longing for a maximum knowledge and love of God in this life without relying on the hope of the next.

“The holy soul desires to possess God as He is; just as He is; pure as He is; and all that He is.”

“If man could but see the care which God takes of the soul, he would be struck with stupor within himself... If he could only understand how deeply he is the object of divine love, he would be overwhelmed with confusion and astonishment.”

“I stood so occupied in contemplating this work of Love that if He had cast me, body and soul, into hell, hell itself would have appeared to me all love and consolation.”

“I am so placed and submerged in His immense love that I seem as though in the sea entirely under water and could on no side touch, see, or feel anything but water.”

She lived to be sixty-three. In her last ten years, she experienced a number of physical sufferings that forced her to discontinue her hospital work and outside activities. During this last period, a Genoese priest, Don Marabotto, became her confessor and closest friend. She welcomed him into her life to provide a source of human strength which, in her failing health, even she needed; but he was never a guide or teacher—in fact, he looked upon everything that happened to her as a divine manifestation, and did not distinguish between her spiritual and physiological seizures, an error which Catherine herself never fell into. Once when they were alone, as she lay in a trance-like condition, he questioned her apprehensively, for often she had spoken of longing for death to take her.

“If only one drop of what I feel were to fall into hell,” she said, “hell itself would be transformed into eternal life.”

Don Marabotto was the one who noted down her words during her last years, collected all the scattered notes made of her earlier discourses, and after her death wrote her biography. Her remarks already quoted, and all her sayings copied down by disciples over a long period (she never wrote anything herself), bear the stamp of one who had experienced what she talked about, who had actually lived the greater part of her life in intimate communion with the divine Being. In spite of her love for humanity, she remained to the end a lonely and mysterious woman, whose only companion was the Lord Himself; and all her love, in a final analysis, was for Him alone.

“There is no creature that understands me,” she prayed. “I find myself alone, unknown, poor, naked, a stranger, and different from all the world.”

On this note, let us leave the remarkable Catherine of Genoa, Saint of Love. The lesson of her story, one of the most extraordinary in the annals of religion, is plain: God seizes the human heart at any time—like a thief in the night He will come to us. And then, and only then, we will have the power to remake our lives, as Catherine so unforgettably did.

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