Wednesday is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, and parishes across the country are leaning into the day in a way they have not for years. She was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970, the first woman to receive that title alongside Teresa of Avila that same year. She is also one of two patron saints of Italy and a co-patron of Europe. None of those facts are new. What is new is how many people in their twenties and thirties are finding her on their own.
Catherine was born in 1347, the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. She refused marriage at sixteen, joined the Dominican third order as a laywoman, and spent her short life writing letters to popes, brokering peace between Italian city-states, and caring for plague victims in Siena. She died at thirty-three. The Dialogue, her best known spiritual work, was dictated while she was in ecstasy and runs about 380 pages in modern editions. Her letters number around 380 as well, and most of them were addressed to people in power.
The renewed attention this year is coming from a few specific places. Hallow added a Catherine of Siena novena to its featured devotions starting last week, and the app's editors said early download numbers placed it among the strongest spring releases. Word on Fire is running a four-part video series on her life through Tuesday, hosted by Dr. Elizabeth Klein. EWTN is airing a new documentary Wednesday evening that features the relics in the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena, where her head has been preserved since 1383.
Parishes named for Catherine of Siena are using the feast to push catechesis. St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie, Louisiana, scheduled an all-day Eucharistic adoration with a 7 p.m. Mass and a talk on her letters by a Dominican from the Province of St. Joseph. The St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center at Vanderbilt is hosting a holy hour at 9 p.m. with a reflection on her famous line about being who you were created to be and setting the world on fire. That line, often quoted on coffee mugs and Pinterest, is actually a paraphrase of a passage from a letter she wrote to Stefano Maconi in 1376.
What sets the current interest apart is the substance behind it. Younger Catholics are not just collecting feast days. They are reading the actual texts. Sophia Institute Press reported that sales of The Dialogue grew 47% last year, and a fresh translation by Suzanne Noffke, the Dominican scholar who spent forty years on Catherine, is back in print after going out of stock for most of 2024. Ignatius Press said its edition of the letters is selling at the strongest pace since the early 2000s.
Some of the appeal is the contrast with the rest of the moment. Catherine was an unmarried laywoman who told the Pope to leave Avignon and return to Rome, which he did. She fasted to a degree that modern doctors would call dangerous and that some scholars have framed as anorexia. Her mysticism was direct and physical, including the stigmata she received in Pisa in 1375. None of this fits cleanly into the categories of self-help or wellness or modern spirituality. That is part of why people are paying attention.
For pastors and ministers planning Wednesday, the practical question is what to do with a Wednesday feast that does not fall on a Sunday and does not get the same attention as Christmas or Easter. The simplest move is reading from the letters at daily Mass and adding a short reflection in the homily. The Office of Readings for the day pulls from her Dialogue, specifically the section on the bridge of Christ. A pastor at St. Henry's in Nashville told us he is keeping the homily under five minutes and using the rest of the time for silence and adoration.
The feast also lands during a stretch of the liturgical year that often goes quiet. Easter is past, Pentecost is more than a month away, and the Sundays between can blur together for casual Mass-goers. Saints whose feasts fall in this window, including Catherine, can carry a parish through the season if pastors take them seriously. Joseph the Worker on Friday continues that pattern.
If you are not Catholic and are reading this from outside the tradition, the practical takeaway is that one woman with no formal authority, no political office, and no platform other than her writing changed the geography of the Catholic Church in her lifetime. She did it by writing letters. She wrote them to people who could ignore her, and many did. Some did not. The letters are still in print 645 years later. That is worth thinking about regardless of where you stand on the religious questions.