Fra Bartolomeo
The Marriage of St. Catherine of Siena

More of St. Catherine of Siena

The relevant passage from the Life is as follows:

From now on Catherine’s soul increased in grace daily. She flew rather than walked along the way of virtue, and a holy desire developed within her soul to attain to perfect faith, so that, utterly subject to her Bridegroom, she might be utterly pleasing to Him. She began to pray to the Lord as the disciples had done, to increase her faith and make it perfect and as solid as a rock. The Lord spoke to her and said, “I will espouse you to me in faith.” Catherine went on praying and praying and the Lord kept giving her the same answer.

Near Lent (when the faithful abstain from meat and fats) in the days when men celebrate the vain feast of the stomach, the virgin was to be found alone in her little room seeking through prayer and fasting the face of her eternal Bridegroom, praying endlessly for the same thing. Then the Lord said to her, “Since for love of me you have forsaken vanities and despised the pleasure of the flesh and fastened all the delights of your heart on me, now, when the rest of the household are feasting and enjoying themselves, I have determined to celebrate the wedding feast of your soul and to espouse you to me in faith as I promised.”

Before He had finished speaking His most glorious Virgin Mother appeared with the most blessed St. John the Evangelist, the glorious Apostle Paul, St. Dominic (the founder of the Order) and the prophet David with his harp. While David played sweet strains on the harp the Mother of God took Catherine’s hand in her own most holy hand and presenting her to her Son courteously asked Him to marry her to Himself in faith. The Son of God, graciously agreeing, held out a gold ring with four pearls set in a

circle in it and a wonderful diamond in the middle and with His most holy right hand He slipped it on to the virgin’s second finger, saying, “There! I marry you to me in faith, to me, your Creator and Saviour. Keep this faith unspotted until you come to me in heaven and celebrate the marriage that has no end. From this time forward, daughter, act firmly and decisively in everything that in my Providence I shall ask you to do. Armed as you are with the strength of faith, you will overcome all your enemies and be happy.”

The vision disappeared, but the ring always remained on Catherine’s finger and though no one else could see it it was always before her eyes. In fact she frequently confessed to me in all humility that she could always see it on her finger and that there was never a moment when it was out of her sight.

Reader, you may know of another Catherine, a martyr and queen, who, as we read, was similarly married to the Lord after she was baptized. Well, here you have a second, most happy Catherine being solemnly married to the same Lord after achieving great victories over the flesh and the Enemy.

If you consider the properties of the ring she was given you will see how it agrees with the thing it symbolized or signified. Our virgin asked for a strong faith. What is stronger than diamond? As diamond can resist, overcome, break anything, how­ever hard, and can itself only be broken by being sprinkled with the blood of a goat, so has a faithful heart the power to overcome all adversities and is itself only softened and broken by the blood of Christ. Then the four pearls symbolize the four different kinds of purity that Catherine had—purity of intention, purity of thought, purity of word, and purity of deed, as can be seen from what has already been said and will be proved again by what follows.

I believe that this marriage was meant to confirm the divine grace, and that the sign of this confirmation was the ring which she alone could see, so that when she went on to her task of rescuing souls from the swamps of this world she would never be downcast but always trust in God’s grace as she bore them to the firm ground of salvation.

According to the Holy Doctors, one of the main reasons why Almighty God lets some people know that they will always be in His grace is because He plans to send them out into this per­verse world to battle for the honour of His name and to save souls. This happened to the Apostles at Pentecost, when they received a visible sign of the grace they had been given, and also to St. Paul, who heard the words: “My grace is sufficient for thee.” Other signs of a like kind have been given for the sake of mankind. Now in defiance of all convention our virgin too was to take part in public life for the honour of God and the good of souls (as with God’s help I hope to describe later), and so she had the Grace in her confirmed by a visible sign, so that she might be bold and firm in doing the things heaven enjoined her to do. But in her case there was something special, for whereas the signs given to others had been fleeting ones, with her the sign was permanent and she could see it all the time. I believe the Lord willed this because of her sex and the novelty of what she did and the slack condition of our times, all of which seemed likely to raise obstacles to the mission entrusted her by heaven, so that she needed special and continuous assistance.

In Lamb's translation, this is chapter 12, pages 99-101