The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
“After she had lain, very weak, and, as it were, in a state of
contracture, for eleven years, it happened that, about the ninth hour
of one Good Friday, the natural bodily heat and colour forsook her;
she seemed nowise to breathe; her wounds bled more than usual; she
appeared to be dead. And her fellow-Sisters wept greatly. Yet about
Vesper-time she opened her eyes and began to move; and her companions
were wondrously consoled. And then in the Easter night, about the hour
of Christ’s Resurrection, as, with the other sick Sisters, she lay in
her bed placed so as to be able to hear the Divine Office, she felt
all her limbs to be as it were suffused with a most refreshing dew.
And straightway she saw stretched down to her from Heaven a hand, as
it were of the Blessed Virgin, which stroked her wounds and all the
painful places, the ligaments and joints of her members, gently and
compassionately. After which she straightway felt how that all her
members, which before had for so long been severely contracted, and how
the knots, formed by the ligaments (_nervi_), were being efficaciously
resolved and equally distended, so that she considered herself freed
from her hard bondage. She arose unaided from her couch, proceeded to
the near-by entrance to the Choir, and prostrated herself there, in
fervent orison, with her arms outstretched in cross-form, for a very
long hour. And then, commanded by the Abbess to rise, she readily arose
without help, stood with pleasure, and walked whithersoever she would.”
“At all times she ever suffered more from the cold than any of her
companions.”[56]
“As, during those eleven years that she lay like one paralyzed, she was
wont, on every Friday, to lie with her arms expanded as though on the
Cross, and her feet one on the top of the other; so, after the Lord had
so wonderfully raised her on that Paschal day, she, on every Friday
and every Lenten day, would stand erect with her arms outstretched,
crosswise, and, without any support, on one foot only, with the
other foot planted upon its fellow, from the hour of noon to that of
Vespers.”--“Whilst she was still uncured, and required some delicate
refection which the Convent could not afford, there came to her,” one
day, “the most loving Infant, bearing in His Hand the leg of a chicken,
newly roasted, and begging her to eat it for His sake.” She did so,
and was wonderfully strengthened. Apparently late on in her life “they
procured, with much labour and diligence, all kinds of drinkables from
different and even from distant places for her. But she, having tasted
any one of them, would straightway shake her head, close her lips, and
then declare that she could not drink it up.” “However delicious in
itself, it seemed to be so much gall and wormwood when applied to her
mouth.”[57]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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