Saint Catherine of Siena and Her Times

A long time ago in a land not so far away, an imperial Pope repeatedly battled rebel forces. Those wars killed thousands, split Christendom, and spawned anti-Popes who joined the rebel alliance, brazenly challenging the authority of God’s Vicar on earth. Into this corrupt, brutal, turbulent world was born Catherine, the daughter of a modest Siennese cloth dyer. Now famed as the great St Catherine of Siena who changed the course of the Church and of European history, this child was early noted for her simple goodness, her great intelligence, and her remarkable courage – even in the face of the dangers and atrocities that characterized those dark times. St. Catherine of Siena and Her Times tells the moving tale of Catherine, whose call to live a cloistered life of prayer and penance was trumped not only by the social needs of her day (poverty, plague) but by the explicit orders of the Pope, who, hearing of her remarkable powers of reconciliation of enemies, called her out of obscuri