BRIDES OF CHRIST

 

Devout women dedicated to chastity, spirituality, and service to God and their fellow man were not all suited to the apostolic lives of Beguines and other sisters. For some, asceticism was a magnetic attraction because, carried to extremes and combined with proofs of divine favor, it could lead to sainthood. For the religious celibate who was exceedingly ambitious, this spiritual route had infinitely more appeal than that of compliant motherhood in an obedient marriage.

Some determined women indulged in marathon bouts of asceticism, fast¬ ing to starvation, mortifying their flesh, depriving their senses, even devising humiliations so repulsive that they could be assured few could replicate them. No Beguine or ordinary nun would dream of drinking cancerous pus or the wash water of rotting, leprous limbs.

Achieving sainthood was a serious business. Only 3,276 people who died from the beginning of Christianity to 1500 became saints, with only 87 suc¬ cessful candidates from 1350 to 1500. On the plus side for women, in that same period the male-to-female ratio of saints went from five to one to about two and a half to one. From 1350 to 1500—and this statistic is the most per¬ tinent here—laywomen saints overtook males, though the greater number of clerical males gave male saints a clear lead over women in orders. For aspiring female saints, this was the most promising era ever.

Sainthood was that eras great challenge, akin to aspiring to the Olympics or a Nobel Prize today. For women severely limited in vocations other than drudging labor or motherhood, the stretch to being the very best practitioner of religion was appealing, especially to highly intelligent perfectionists such as Catherine of Siena, whose brief, bursting life won her the eternity ofsainthood.

Catherine of Siena

Catherine was born Caterina Benincasa in 1347, the twenty-second of the twenty-five children of Lapa Piacenti and her husband, Giacomo, an enter¬ prising dyer. She was also the twin sister of the ailing infant Giovanna, whom Lapa sent out to a wet nurse while she breast-fed the sturdier Catherine at home. Giovanna soon died, while Catherine fattened on her mother’s milk. For a whole year Lapa nursed her, longer than any of her other children, until she again conceived and ceased to lactate.

The year Catherine was weaned, 1348, the bubonic plague struck Italy full force. Her family was spared, but the terror and panic that prevailed affected everyone. Did Catherine suffer especially? Probably not, though she was always sensitive about Lapa’s constant reminders that she was a special child, chosen to live while Giovanna died. As a youngster, she fasted normally for a devout little girl. She enjoyed her childhood, laughing and playing, often outside. By the age of five, she would genuflect and say a Hail Mary on each step of the staircase up to her bedroom. She hero-worshiped Euphrosyne, a legendary virgin who escaped marriage by disguising herself as a man and entering a monastery.

At six or seven, Catherine had a vision ofJesus and several saints. For years, she meditated on what this might mean. She and her little friends started a sort of club in which they flagellated themselves with knotted ropes. Cather¬ ine’s role in instigating this was an indication of the depth of her religiosity, but in that pious age, it caused little comment.

When Catherine was an adolescent, Lapa began to tutor her in the ways of impending womanhood. She had to scrub her face, apply makeup, dye her hair blond, and curl it. All this, of course, was in preparation for her inevitable marriage. Then, at fourteen, Catherine envisioned a mystical marriage to Christ, a glorious ceremony attended by the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist, Saints Paul and Dominic, and even King David, who carried the Psalter. Jesus was his own ring-bearer and tenderly slipped the pearl-and-diamond- studded gold ring onto her finger. “Now I betroth you to me in a faith that will survive from this hour forward forever immutable, until the glorious heavenly marriage, in perfect conjunction with me in the second eternal wedding,” he intoned, “when face-to-face you will be allowed to see me and enjoy me.” Overwhelmed, the new, fourteen-year-old Bride of Christ instantly pledged her virginity to her husband.

At fifteen, Catherine’s world was shattered. Her idolized older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth. Soon after, so did Giovanna, the sister named for Catherine’s dead twin. She blamed herself—once again, she had been chosen to live while others died. Her religious convictions shifted from devout to obsessive. Then began the asceticism that would kill her when she, like Christ, was thirty-three. One manifestation was that she ceased eating anything but bread, uncooked vegetables, and water. Meanwhile, Lapa and Giacomo focused their attention onto their sole surviving daughter, all the others having died. Catherine’s mission, as they saw it, was to contract a mar¬ riage that would help consolidate the family business. What better choice than Bonaventura’s widower?

Catherine disliked her brother-in-law, a coarse and ribald man, and loathed the idea of marriage. Defiantly, she invoked her pledge of virginity and mystical marriage to Christ. Furious struggles with her parents only strengthened her determination to resist wedding a mortal man. She found an ally, a sympathetic priest who suggested she prove her sincerity by lopping off her blond hair. Enthusiastically, Catherine hacked it off, so her plain face was unadorned.

Her family was livid. “Vilest girl, you cut off your hair, but do you think perhaps that you are not going to do what we wish?” her mother taunted. “Your hair will grow back and even if your heart should break, you will be forced to take a husband.”

The family took away Catherine’s privileges. Her most serious loss was the bedroom that had permitted hours of secret flagellation, nightly vigils, intense prayer and meditation. Now she had to share her brothers’ bedroom and, until she came to her senses, do the family’s domestic chores.

Catherine accepted this calmly and served her family as if it were Christ’s, pretending her parents were Mary and Joseph, the clamorous horde of her male siblings the holy apostles. This visualization enabled her to continue her devotions unimpeded. After several months, she made a startling announce¬ ment. I shall never marry, she said, and you are wasting your time trying to force me to do so. “There is no way I intend to accommodate you. I must obey God and not men.”

“God watch over you, sweet daughter,” Giacomo finally uttered. “Do as you please and as the Holy Spirit instructs you.”

Lapa restored the private bedroom, where Catherine imposed harsher aus¬ terities than ever before. She flagellated herself three times daily, one and a half hours each session, and tortured her flesh with an iron chain bound tightly around her hips. She spoke only to confess, slept only half an hour every second night, and that on a short, wooden board. She gave up bread and soon lost half her body weight.

“Daughter, I see you already dead,” Lapa wailed, her anguish at Cather¬ ine’s deterioration driving her close to madness. “Without a doubt you will kill yourself Woe is me! Who has robbed me ofmy daughter?”

But Catherine still had years before she starved herself to death, and she resolved to spend them as a sister in a Dominican tertiary order. Members of third orders make promises that echo the vows of the full-fledged sisters, but they remain uncloistered and not subject to the strict regimen of a convent community. But they are religious and not secular and by their vocation renounce any possibility of marriage.

Poor Lapa! She carted Catherine off to a spa in the forlorn hope the heal¬ ing waters would cure her. Instead the inventive girl managed to sneak into a forbidden part of the pool and scald herself with the boiling sulfuric water that, diluted and cooled, healed everyone else.

Back in Siena, Catherine nagged until Lapa finally agreed to take her to the sisters. To Lapa’s delight, they refused Catherine—a too young virgin who might easily stray from the path of chaste righteousness would be an “inopportune” novice, and they preferred mature widows. Catherine was devas¬ tated. She developed a high fever and disfiguring boils. Lapa was terrified, and Catherine, manipulative as ever, seized the opportunity to renew her demand for admission to the Sisters of Penance. Otherwise, she threatened, God and St. Dominic, who wanted her for their holy work, would make sure something drastic happened to her.

Lapa raced to the convent and begged, this time sincerely, with her whole heart. The sisters listened, then warned her that if Catherine was too pretty, she might provoke some kind of sexual scandal. But Catherine was not pretty at all, and for once Lapa was thankful. Come and see for yourselves, she implored the nuns. A jury ofwise, widowed sisters accompanied the frantic mother back to her daughters bedside, where they judged Catherine suitably plain and devout. They relented and accepted her. In days, Catherine recovered and donned the white-and-black habit.

Catherine might never have met the higher standards at a convent, the repository for well-bred women, but her more modest birth had nothing to do with her decision to join a third order. She did not wish to be cloistered and subject to the discipline of an overseeing mother superior. This was not because she feared the rigors of religious community life. To the contrary, the regimen she had in store for herself was so radical she must have guessed no convent would have tolerated it. Uncloistered, she was free to execute her most fanatical ideas.

Now Catherine went all out in subduing what little flesh still hung on her bony frame. She relied mainly on the Holy Host for sustenance and usually swallowed only cold water and chewed bitter herbs, rarely food. Food literally sickened her, convulsing her shriveled stomach and causing her such pain that, as her confessor wrote, “anything she ingested needed to exit by the same way it entered.” Catherine’s chew-and-spit technique sometimes failed and a morsel—for instance a single bean—descended into her stomach. Then she vomited back up whatever she had eaten. She was unable to do this at will, however, and so developed the agonizing habit of inserting stalks of fen¬ nel and other plants into her stomach to cause the necessary spasms. (The great St. Teresa ofAvila used an olive twig for the same purpose.)

Today, Catherine would be hospitalized and force-fed, though she would almost certainly still die. In the fourteenth century, she was widely criticized, slandered as a secret eater and condemned as a witch. At the same time, her confessors and acolytes “understood” and revered her as a holy woman obedi¬ ent to God’s command, however mysterious.

One day, tending a wretched and bitter woman dying of breast cancer, Catherine was revolted by the stench of the rotting flesh. So great was her revulsion that she saw it as a moral dilemma she had to resolve. Hunger and lust were long gone, but how, she wondered, could she conquer even this sort of bodily sensation? In answer, she ladled a cupful of the reeking pus and gulped it all down.

That night, Christ appeared to her. When he showed her his gouged side, Catherine was consumed by her longing to place her lips on the sacred wound. God did not let Catherine off scot-free—His consoling succor cost her an acute chronic pain in her breast. However, from then on she no longer needed food because she could not digest it.

No hint of sexual scandal tainted her, despite, or because of, the constant presence of her confessor. Father Raymond of Capua, personally selected by the pope to monitor and guide her. Catherine never wanted to marry, and a young woman of her social standing would scarcely think of sex in any other context. Lapas eternal pregnancies, Bonaventuras death in childbirth, and the death ofso many siblings must also have affected Catherine’s view of mar¬ riage—sex could kill much faster than starvation, and with no benefits what¬ soever for the victim. As well, Catherine’s holy anorexia eliminated any stray twinges of sexuality, transforming her into a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven, a purposefully impotent celibate who joyfully sacrificed sex for the glorious rewards of the infinitely better next world.

Not only did Catherine’s extravagant asceticism kill any sexual desire in her famished body, it very nearly killed her outright. Several times her weak¬ ened heart temporarily stopped beating. Once when this happened, she imagined that she saw Christ save her life by exchanging his own sacred heart for hers. She later exulted that He had often scooped her body up from the earth and she had felt her soul in perfect union with God’s. Any eroticism remaining in her ravaged body was surrendered, in sublime sublimation, to Christ.

Catherine’s burning ambition was to preach as a man would, and she so defeminized herself that she actually succeeded. God had primed her, assur¬ ing her it was as easy for Him to create angels as insects. With an energy incredible in one so malnourished, she flung herself into lobbying for her causes: peace and reform in the Church, the pope’s return to Rome, and a crusade against the Muslims.

Catherine was a dynamic and fearless speaker and lobbyist, lecturing and scolding leaders on every level—religious, municipal, and state—about needed reforms. She even chided the pope—Babbo or Daddy, she called him—urging him to end churchly inequities or else resign and let someone else do the job. Catherine’s reputation grew until she was internationally renowned as a polit¬ ical and ecclesiastical authority, arguably Italy’s leading fourteenth-century statesman.

Catherine was not merely a high-profile public figure. She had her private work as well, as “mamma” to the disciples she called “sons,” as nurse to dying patients in public hospitals, and as spiritual mentor to prisoners awaiting exe¬ cution. As one of them was dispatched and died murmuring, “Jesus, Cather¬ ine,” she stood so close, his blood spattered onto her robe. Later, she rejoiced that his soul was at rest and could not bear to wash off his fragrant blood.

Catherine maintained her lethal regimen until, at thirty-three, she was ready for glorious death and union with her Husband, who had also died at thirty-three. She had known for years she would die and had planned and longed for the moment as the consummation of her personal mission. Her terrible austerities had lifted her above mortal experience, so that she was rarely gripped by carnal hunger for food and even less for sex. She managed a fine balance between anesthetizing her senses and almost, but not quite, extinguishing them. She wished to time her death precisely and linger on in life until she could die at the same age as Christ her Husband.

After she died ofstarvation, Catherine s admirers set out on canonization for her almost at once. She had achieved what she had striven for—to be the holi¬ est of holy women, to live as a Bride of Christ in strict chastity, to deny her body physical sustenance, and to scourge it into submission to her fiery will.

Intelligent, resourceful, courageous, outrageous, and driven, Catherine was the quintessence of a successful Bride of Christ. The competition was stiff. Colomba da Rieti so mutilated herselfwith spiked chains bound across her hips and breasts, already scraped raw and blistered from her hair shirts, that a gang ofwould-be rapists who stripped her were too awed to consummate the deed. Angela of Foligno quaffed water in which she had just bathed a leper’s putre¬ fying flesh. And Bridget of Sweden, whom Christ had wed after her human husband’s death, equaled and in fact cooperated with Catherine as a diplomat, reproached her king, and nagged the pope. Ultimately, Bridget gained her own particular goal: the Bridgettine order of nuns, a feminist fantasy, directed by a woman and regulated by a simple, Spartan, and sensible rule.

These women and their contemporaries were the stars of the Middle Ages. Through superhuman effort and careful strategy, they achieved success, power, and influence unimaginable to most women irredeemably destined for mar¬ riage and motherhood. In most cases, the common denominators were extreme asceticism and celibacy glorified through mystical marriages with Christ. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, 30 percent of Italian holy women indulged in near-starvation regimens. Their emaciated, sexless bodies ensured their earthly chastity, while they sublimated any lingering eroticism in fantastic visions of union—physical as well as spiritual—with Christ their husband. Their celibacy, so arduously preserved, was the essential precondition on which all of these triumphantly ascetic women built their stunningly successful careers.

Written by Elizabeth Abbott in "A History of Celibacy", Scribner, New York, 2000,excerpts pp.121-126. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.