The Public Life of St Catherine of Siena

No one can expect to find the history of the Church free from vicissitude; as it has its bright and glorious periods, so also it has its times of gloom and darkness, when a superficial observer might almost interpret the disastrous character of the more salient facts that meet his eye, as the evidence of a suspension of the vital activity and healthy vigor of the whole body. But the life of the Church is essentially internal, and depends on the free action of divine grace, penetrating and animating the whole community-an action that is perpetually kept up by the most common and unobtrusive ministrations of sacramental strength, which are going on in full frequency and efficacy, while the political fortunes of the hierarchy, or of the supreme power, are crushed by oppression or persecution; or even while scandals are seen in high places-when bishops become courtiers, when cardinals are truckling to kings and emperors, and popes are in captivity or exile. And it often happens that these dark times are most prolific of the noblest fruits of the interior life; and that at such seasons the choicest treasures of the Church-the souls on whom great and special graces have been bestowed-are providentially brought out into unusual prominence, so as to exercise great influence and give a character to the period, or a direction to some of its most important transactions. Even if it be not so, at all events we have only to go a little below the surface in order to find plentiful indications of the rich veins that are contained in no soil but one. Thus, in Italy, at the time in which this paper treats, there were a number of saintly souls, whose names have since taken rank in the calendar of the Church. The secular historian sees little more than a set of quarrelsome states, restless in their mutual discord and aggressive ambition, and distracted, ever and anon, by the most furious domestic strife, which would slake itself with nothing but blood. St. Andrew Corsini once showed his audience, as he was preaching in the Piazza of Fiesole, looking down on Florence, an immense flight of hawks, kites, and other ravenous birds, battling with one another over the city. They represented, he told them, the number of evil spirits that were engaged in stirring up the inhabitants to intestine discord. Florence was not worse, but rather better, and more thoroughly Catholic, than its neighbors; yet when we take up such a life, for instance, as that of St. Giovanni Colombini, of Siena, the founder of the Gesuati, we find ourselves at once in an atmosphere of calm and fresh simplicity, of happy peace, fervent devotion, and loving faith; and it is only by the chance mention of public calamities-the sufferings of the peasants, whose fruit trees had been cut down by the German "company"' of marauders, and the like-that we are reminded of the Italy of the day, with its endless disturbances and hopeless insecurity. We have not merely the beautiful picture of Giovanni himself, and his immediate followers and friends; of his good wife, for instance, who begged him to read her pious book while she kept him waiting a few minutes for his dinner, and who, though he had at first thrown it on the floor in a fit of impatient anger, could not persuade him to leave it, when all was ready, till he had read to the end the story of St. Mary of Egypt.