Catherine of Genoa
Catherine of Genoa is remembered both for her devoted care of the sick during repeated outbreaks of plague and for the writings that grew out of her profound mystical experiences with God. Her works later became widely known through Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s classic study, The Mystical Element of Religion, published in 1908.
Catherine was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1447, the youngest of five children. As a young girl, she desired to enter religious life and become a nun, but her application to the convent was denied. Instead, at the age of sixteen, she was married to Giuliano Adorno in an effort to bring an end to a long-standing feud between their two families.
Their early years together were anything but happy. Giuliano was known for his anger, infidelity, gambling, and reckless spending, eventually losing much of their money. Catherine fell into a deep depression that lasted nearly ten years. At one point, she prayed that God might allow her to become seriously ill so that she could simply remain in bed and withdraw from the life around her.
Everything changed on March 22nd, 1473. While Catherine was in church making her confession to a priest, she was suddenly overwhelmed by an intense awareness of the love of God. The experience was so powerful that she became stunned and disoriented and left the church before even finishing her confession. That moment marked a turning point in her life and the beginning of a much deeper life of prayer and devotion.
Catherine’s spirituality was not limited to contemplation. Her deep prayer life led her outward into service, especially caring for the sick in a local hospital. In time, Giuliano joined her in this ministry, and their marriage itself began to change. Through their shared care for the poor and suffering, the couple grew closer together. Eventually, they moved into the Pannatone, a large hospital in Genoa, where they devoted themselves almost entirely to caring for those who were sick and dying.
It was there that Catherine also dictated a number of works on prayer, divine love, and the soul’s relationship with God. These writings were published about forty years after her death and became an important part of the Christian mystical tradition.
At the heart of Catherine’s spirituality was the belief that God should be loved simply because God is God, and not because of what we hope to receive in return. She expressed this plainly when she wrote, “Pure Love loves God without any for.”
She also described the soul’s experience of divine love in powerful words: “All that I have said is nothing compared to what I feel within, the witnessed correspondence of love between God and the soul; for when God sees the soul, as pure as it was in its origins, he tugs at it with a glance, draws it and binds it to himself with a fiery love that by itself could annihilate the immortal soul.”
Catherine continued caring for the sick until the end of her life. She died on September 15th, 1510, while still serving those in need, and she was buried in the chapel of the hospital where she had spent so many years in prayer, service, and love.
