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Siena
Photo: Wikimedia Commons · Catherine of Siena

Siena

Catherine writes to the pope · Italy

Catherine was the 24th child of a wool dyer in Siena. She chose a life of prayer at home, nursed the sick during the plague and gathered a circle of followers around her. Although she learned to write only late in life, she dictated hundreds of letters to popes and princes and urged Pope Gregory XI to return from Avignon to Rome, which he did in 1377. Today you can visit her family home, now the Sanctuary of St Catherine, and her head is kept in the Basilica of San Domenico.

Did you know?

She is one of the patron saints of Europe.

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An inspiring story

She held his head

Who stays with you at the very end?

Niccolò di Toldo, a young man sentenced to death in Siena, raged in his cell and wanted nothing to do with God. Catherine visited him, and he grew calm. He asked her only one thing: to be with him at the end. She kept her promise. She waited for him at the scaffold, laid her own head on the block first to show him there was nothing to fear, and held his head in her hands as he died, with the name of Jesus on his lips. Why go that far for a stranger? Because she believed no one should face death alone.

She described that morning in a letter that can still be read today. Sometimes love is simply being there.

I was in prison and you came to visit me.Matthew 25:36

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