One of the blessings of Catholicism, as GK Chesterton among others has noted, is that it offers such a wide-screen vision upon the ironies of history, the paradoxes of culture, upon human foibles and upon God’s boundless mercy.
Francesco Vanni’s The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine of Siena (1602) depicts something our “trash culture” vaguely recognises - that a bride and groom stand as a ‘restored’ king and queen, a re-crowned Adam and Eve. It was apt, therefore, that St Catherine’s feast day fell on the same weekend as the Royal Wedding.
Often these dramatic elements fall together in suggestive and mysterious ways, which defeat our mundane assumptions.
Perhaps this week provides an example. Falling within a few days of each other are Pope John Paul II’s beatification, Easter Week, Divine Mercy Sunday, the Feast of the great St Catherine of Siena and, yes, THAT wedding.
Now at one level, the coinciding of the royal wedding and the beatification has spawned a whole swamp full of scornful twitters and tweets. Fervid anti-Catholics have denounced the gracious prayers of English Catholics for the royal couple and morose liberals have denounced the outpouring of royalist or papalist sentiment.
While millions have been drawn to the Royal Wedding and to the Pope’s Beatification, fewer people had noticed the role of St Catherine of Siena - Doctor of the Church, Patroness of Italy and co-patroness of Europe. While the world was watching the Wedding, I was with a group of hospitable Dominicans celebrating St Catherine’s day and musing on her place in both past and present world events.
What is going on, they asked, when a glamorous and highly secularised Anglican woman, who lived a typically secular life thus far, decides very consciously it seems, to plan her wedding on her patron saint’s feast day?
The first Catherine chopped off all her hair as a protest against a prestigious marriage and lived a life of austerity and chastity a universe away from Kate Middleton’s experience.
Was the Duchess of Cambridge only indulging in superficial clip-arting of St Catherine into her wedding invitations, the press releases and the wedding homily?
Or is St Caterina Bernincasa, canonised so many years ago (1461), in some odd way really beginning another one of her courageous maternal missions into the heart of Europe’s leaders?
A community of Dominican Sisters in England for one are backing sanctity over cynicism. The Royal Wedding is an opportunity for them to highlight that all Christians can follow Jesus Christ in
St Catherine’s footsteps in more than royal icing.
One of their postulants has been “tweeting” about St Catherine, the Church’s teaching on marriage and convent life (@SrSadoraBloom England).
These Sisters have seen that St Catherine’s passionate spousal love for Christ, magnificently revealed in her Dialogues (one of the classics in the literature of the late middle ages) opens up a means for love in all Christians, consecrated and married, Sienese or British, commoner or royal.
As the Anglican Bishop of London also pointed out, any Christian marriage is both a royal event and one which opens a crack in our universe for genuine hope and aspiration. This is represented explicitly in the Byzantine tradition, where each couple is “crowned” as they represent sacramentally the spousal covenant of Christ and the Church.
Even in our trash culture – we recognise, vaguely, that a bride and groom stand as “restored” king and queen, a re-crowned Adam and Eve, standing at the dawn of the Christ’s new creation.
Christopher Pearson (The Australian 30 April) was right when he defended the Queen’s protection of the religious ceremonial of the wedding from the trite (and un-funny) antics of the ABC’s “the Chasers”.
Any mother would.
Even a passing knowledge of St Catherine of Siena’s personality and life might suggest an inspiration to a young woman who might suddenly realise the seriousness of Christian life and public duty.
Pope Benedict XVI noted in his audience late last year that St Catherine is not a private spiritual guru but a force to be reckoned with. “… people fascinated by the moral authority of this young woman with a most exalted lifestyle … they put themselves into Catherine’s service … and called her “mother”.
He pointed out that St Catherine had an ecstatic and exuberant love of Christ which inspired others to Christian love and justice.
Some of these people were the rulers of the Europe of her time - including Charles V, Louis the Great and the Pope himself.
She also put herself physically and spiritually into the firing line as a broker of peace and mercy - to prisoners, sick, those to be executed, between feuding factions and between disputantswithin a divided Church.
This is precisely why in his Motu Propio of October 1999, the newly beatified Pope John Paul II saw St Catherine’s remarkable mission not only to reform the face of Italy and the Church as a whole but also her tireless mission to convert the hearts of the nobles and monarchs of Europe and to unify all Christians. “... she insisted that they could not govern as if the realm was their ‘property’”: knowing that they must render to God an account of their exercise of power, they must instead uphold “holy and true justice” and become “fathers of the poor”.
To the King of Hungary, St Catherine urged that the “exercise of sovereignty was not to be separated from the exercise of charity, which is the soul both of one’s personal life and one’s political responsibility.”
How interesting, then, that the holy Catherine should be evoked by a potential king and queen in a Church which first divided itself in the events of a series of royal divorces and re-marriage.
Published in The Record