There is a particular kind of courage in loving something enough to tell it the truth. St. Catherine of Siena had that courage in abundance — and she aimed it, again and again, at the Chair of Peter itself.
Of the roughly 380 letters that survive from her pen (dictated, since for most of her life she could not write), a striking number were addressed not to nuns or nobles but to the two popes of her lifetime: Gregory XI and Urban VI.
She was a laywoman, a Third Order Dominican tertiary with no formal education, writing to the most powerful man in Christendom — and calling him, in the same breath, "Most holy and most reverend my father" and, in nearly the next line, her pet name for him: "Babbo." Dearest Daddy.
That tenderness is the key to everything else she wrote. It's worth sitting with, especially now, in a Church that once again feels fractured, exhausted, and unsure of its own house.
A Church in Crisis, Not So Different From Our Own
To understand why Catherine wrote what she wrote, it helps to remember where the Church actually stood in the 1370s.
The papacy had been living in Avignon, France, for nearly seventy years — not Rome. The popes had grown politically entangled with the French crown, the papal court was seen as decadent and worldly, and the city that was supposed to be the spiritual heart of Christendom had been left, in a real sense, abandoned. By 1378, the crisis deepened further into outright schism: two men, then eventually three, simultaneously claiming to be the true pope. Cardinals warred with cardinals. Nations picked sides. Ordinary Catholics didn't know which altar to trust.
Corruption in the clergy, confusion in the laity, a papacy that seemed more concerned with self-preservation than with souls, a fractured and warring Christendom — it is not hard to see why so many people, reading her letters today, find them unsettlingly current.
Catherine did not respond to any of this with cynicism or with quiet withdrawal. She responded with letters — hundreds of them — and with a directness that still startles readers six and a half centuries later.
"Up, Father, Like a Man!" — Her Words to Gregory XI
Catherine's most consequential letters went to Pope Gregory XI, and they weren't written from a comfortable distance. In 1376 she traveled to Avignon herself, sent as a peace envoy in a dispute between the Pope and Florence, and used the visit to press in person the case she'd already been making on paper for years: come home to Rome.
Her opening lines to him are formal and humble — she introduces herself as his "poor unworthy daughter, servant and slave of the servants of Christ" — but the humility never softens into timidity. In the same letter she tells him plainly that "the wolf is carrying away your sheep" while no one moves to stop it, and she does not let him hide behind caution. "Up, father," she writes, according to one widely cited translation of her letters, "like a man!" — urging him toward the courage she believed his office demanded of him.
Elsewhere, in the letter historians number as Letter 74, her tone turns almost breathless with longing for reconciliation. "Peace, peace, peace, my dear babbo, and no more war!" she writes, before circling back, a few lines later, to steady him for what she knows the fight for reform will cost him: "Take courage, take courage, father!"
She was not shy about naming what she believed the Church's leaders lacked. Writing of the bishops and prelates of her day, she argued that the Church didn't need gentler men so much as braver ones — she famously told Gregory that what was missing was courage, insisting nothing was lacking to him but virtue and a hunger for the salvation of souls. Church commentators have long summarized her diagnosis in blunter terms still: what the Church needed was a fearless physician willing to use the iron of holy and righteous justice rather than the soft ointment of avoidance.
And yet, in letter after letter, she circles back to affection. The correction is never separated from the relationship. She signs off, in one letter, simply trusting him with the rest in person rather than on paper, because — as she puts it — "this is all I can do now." It's a small, almost weary line, and it captures something true about every honest letter she ever sent a pope: she said everything she could say, and then she let it rest in his hands, and in God's.
Fierce Love, Not Rebellion
What makes this correspondence so remarkable is that it never once slides into the thing it most resembles on the surface: rebellion against the Church's authority.
Catherine held, with total consistency, that the authority of the pope's office was untouchable even when the man himself was gravely at fault. A modern reflection on her letters put the paradox well: she called the Pope a coward because she loved him enough to. She never confused the man with the office, and she never let her frustration with either curdle into contempt for the papacy itself. Disrespect shown to the pope, in her theology, was disrespect shown to Christ, whom the pope visibly represented on earth.
This is the tension that makes Catherine so instructive: she modeled fierce, unflinching honesty toward Church leadership and unwavering reverence for the office those leaders held.
The Return to Rome — and the Schism That Followed
Historians still debate how much credit Catherine deserves for what happened next, but the timeline is hard to ignore: in January 1377, Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome, ending nearly seven decades of the Avignon exile. Catherine had not commanded this. She had loved her way, patiently and repeatedly, toward it.
When Gregory died the following year and the Western Schism erupted — with rival claimants to the papacy dividing all of Europe — Catherine's letter-writing shifted in tone but not in substance. She became one of Pope Urban VI's fiercest defenders, writing to cardinals, princes, and civic leaders across Europe to argue for his legitimacy and hold a fracturing Church together by force of conviction. She was summoned to Rome by Urban himself and spent the last months of her life there, working through letters, personal appeals, prayer, and fasting for the unity of a Church that seemed, from the outside, to be tearing itself apart. She died in April 1380, at thirty-three, having spent herself completely on behalf of a Church she refused to abandon even at its most broken.
Why This Still Matters
It would be easy to read Catherine's letters as a historical curiosity — a medieval mystic scolding medieval popes about a medieval scandal. But the pattern she left behind is not bound to the fourteenth century.
Every generation of the Church seems to rediscover the same temptation in times of crisis: either excuse the failures of Church leadership into silence, or let disillusionment harden into separation from the Church herself. Catherine refused both. She offered a third way that is rarer, and harder, than either — love that tells the truth, and truth that never stops loving.
For Catholics watching scandal, division, or confusion in the Church today, her example is not a call to cynicism, and it is not a call to blind silence either. It's a call to the same costly middle path: to care enough about the Church's holiness to say so, and to stay close enough to her to actually be heard.
Catherine never wrote as an outsider lobbing criticism over a wall. She wrote as a daughter, deeply inside the household, unwilling to let the house she loved fall into ruin without a fight. "Babbo" was not softness — it was the whole argument in a single word. You do not write like that to someone you've given up on.
That, perhaps, is the truest inheritance she left the Church: not a set of political maneuvers that worked in her own time, but a way of loving an imperfect, human, still-holy institution without either pretending its wounds aren't real or walking away from its altar.
A note on the excerpts above: Catherine dictated her letters in Tuscan, and multiple English translations exist, from the early twentieth-century Scudder and Thorold editions to Sister Suzanne Noffke's modern scholarly translation. Slight wording differences between quoted passages here reflect these different translators, not different letters.
St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church, pray for us.
Feast day: April 29
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