Letters of Catherine BenincasaCatherine, of Siena, Saint
Religion
Letters of Catherine Benincasa
Catherine, of Siena, Saint
Catherine, of Siena, Saint, 1347-1380 -- Correspondence; Christian women saints -- Italy -- Siena -- Correspondence
No more thus for the love of Christ crucified! You are in every way
calling down the divine judgment. I grieve for it. If you do not hinder
the ruin that is coming upon you, you cannot escape from the hands of God.
Either by justice or by mercy, you are in His hands. Correct your life,
that you may escape the hands of justice, and remain in those of mercy.
And do not wait for the time, for an hour comes when you shall wish and
cannot. O sheep, return to your fold; let you be governed by the Shepherd:
else the wolf of hell shall devour you! Take back for your guards the
servants of God, who love you in truth more than you yourself, and good,
mature and discreet counsellors. For the counsel of incarnate demons, with
the inordinate fear into which they have thrown you through terror of
losing your temporal state--(which passes like the wind with no
permanence, for either it leaves us, or we it through death)--has brought
you where you are. You shall yet weep, if you change not your ways,
saying: "Alas, alas! I am one who has robbed herself, on account of the
fear into which I was thrown by villainous counsellors!" But there is yet
time, dearest mother, to avert the judgment of God. Return to the
obedience of Holy Church: know the ill that you have wrought: humble you
under the mighty hand of God; and God, who has regard to the humility of
His handmaid, shall show mercy upon us: He will placate His wrath over
your faults; through the mediation of the Blood of Christ, you shall be
grafted and bound in Him with the chain of that charity in which you shall
know and love the truth. The truth shall set you free from lie: it shall
scatter all shadows, giving you light and knowledge in the mercy of God.
In this truth you shall be freed; in other wise, never.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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