Catherine experiences a "Mystical Marriage" with Jesus
1368 AD visioned
At the age of twenty-one, Catherine experiences what she describes in her letters as a "Mystical Marriage" with Jesus.
Caroline Walker Bynum explains one surprising and controversial aspect of this marriage that occurs both in artistic representations of the event and in some early accounts of her life: "Underlining the extent to which the marriage was a fusion with Christ's physicality [...] Catherine received, not the ring of gold and jewels that her biographer reports in his bowdlerized version, but the ring of Christ's foreskin."
Catherine herself mentions the foreskin-as-wedding ring motif in one of her letters (#221), equating the wedding ring of a virgin with a foreskin; she typically claimed that her own wedding ring to Christ was simply invisible.
She wrote in a letter (to encourage a nun who seems to have been undergoing a prolonged period of spiritual trial and torment): "Bathe in the blood of Christ crucified. See that you don't look for or want anything but the crucified, as a true bride ransomed by the blood of Christ crucified-for that is my wish. You see very well that you are a bride and that he has espoused you-you and everyone else-and not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his own flesh. Look at the tender little child who on the eighth day, when he was circumcised, gave up just so much flesh as to make a tiny circlet of a ring!"
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Raymond of Capua also records that she was told by Christ to leave her withdrawn life and enter the public life of the world.
Catherine rejoined her family and began helping the ill and the poor, where she took care of them in hospitals or homes. Her early pious activities in Siena attracted a group of followers, women and men, who gathered around her.
Subjects Who or What visioned?
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Catherine of Siena (Caterina di Giacomo di Benincasa) Dominican mystic, activi...
Timelines (that include this event)
Attachments
The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine By unknown Southern Netherlandish artist - anagoria, 1515/20
Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena Clemente de Torres, c. 1700
Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine with Saint Sebastian Antonio da Correggio,, c. 1527 in the Louvre
Marriage of St. Catherine Filippino Lippi, 1503. In the Isolani Chapel of the Basilica di San Domenico, a church of the Dominican Order in Bologna
Events in 1368 MORE
