Santa Caterina da Siena, doctora of the church
Reflections by Loris Cozzolino* Author of the Facebook pageEvery holy day
On April 29, the church celebrates Santa Caterina da Siena, patron of Italy and compatronement to Europe. Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa, this is her name in the world, was born in Siena in 1347. The fourteenth century is a complex and difficult period: passage of civilizations, between wars and pestilences, the foundations for the great Renaissance season are laid.
Caterina is a girl in a context in which being girls and females does not leave many hopes but Caterina is not what she seems, Caterina is extraordinary and she knows very well. At six he has the first appearance of Christ who marries her mystically: she is his and he is his.
The mother Lapa, unaware and perhaps not very attentive to the girl (at her discolpa it must be said that she gave birth to 24 children!), Organizes what is necessary for her daughter: an advantageous marriage. Caterina has other floors and cuts all her hair causing a labor of bile to her mother and family members.
After exhausting struggles, he is his father Jacopo who, seeing her in prayer, leaves the daughter free to do what she wants and Caterina enters the Dominican third order.
Are you wondering now will he find peace? But at all! Caterina wants to be in the world and wants to command the world for the love of Jesus and even a bit for her pride.
An illiterate but very intelligent, called his letters intended for popes, kings and queens, men of church and theologians. The portentous thing is that everyone fear it and listen to them. The Pope arrives who do not decide to return to Rome after the long exile in Avignon and so much so that he does it almost!
You see, Caterina's life and personality are extraordinary, even more because she lives in a period in which women are denied any possibility of action; Caterina is instead absolute protagonist and lady of herself and her era.
It is so important for the history of the Church that it is one of the few women to receive the appellation of doctor of the Church, that is, a sort of milestone of faith and theology.
In the title I wanted to joke a little with the current quarrels relating to words and their kind and well ... Caterina would have gone even further and, as a good obsessed with manias of protagonism, he would have demanded a genre for her.
In one of his numerous ecstasies he sees Jesus who tears his heart to her and then donate her, in an absolute exchange of love.
He died on April 29, 1380, at 33 years like his Christ, perhaps the only one to have escaped the reproaches of this wonderful and only woman.
* Loris Cozzolino, born in 1986, early Christian archaeologist, immoderate passion for hagiography, biblical exegesis and gender theology. Not resigned to an image of the legalistic and repaintant church, in marginality and in the "waste" sees the face of the Christ of God. His blog of hagiographies can be found at the linkhttps://www.gionata.org/tag/ogni-santo-giorno/
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