Catherine Benincasa was born in Siena on March 25, 1347, the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. She refused marriage, joined the Dominican lay women known as the Mantellate, and spent three years in near-total seclusion in a room of her family's house before emerging to nurse plague victims and prisoners and to gather a circle of followers around her.
Between 1374 and 1380 she dictated nearly four hundred letters and the Dialogue, a conversation with God the Father. In 1376 she travelled to Avignon and urged Gregory XI to return to Rome, which he did in January 1377. She died in Rome on April 29, 1380, worn out by the schism that followed, aged thirty-three.
Pius II canonized her in 1461. Her body lies beneath the high altar of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, behind the Pantheon, and her head is venerated in the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena. She is a patroness of Italy with St. Francis (1939), a Doctor of the Church (1970), and a co-patroness of Europe (1999).
