Catherine of Siena

You are not one to stay silent when something needs to be said, not even in front of the powerful. Catherine is just like that: a dyer's daughter from Siena, the youngest of twenty-five children. As a Dominican tertiary she stays in the midst of the world; when the plague rages, she nurses the sick everyone else is fleeing. Then she takes up her pen: letters to princes and popes, and to the Pope in Avignon she writes that his place is in Rome. Gregory XI actually returns. She dies at thirty-three, and by then the dyer's daughter has moved the Church of her age. Love for the Church does not mean silence; but Catherine kneels before she writes. And you: do you have the courage to speak, and the humility to kneel first?