Catherine of Siena

Catherine Benincasa was the twenty-third or twenty-fourth child of a wool dyer in Siena, Italy. From childhood she devoted herself to prayer, and she refused her parents' plans for her marriage, at one point cutting off her hair. At about sixteen she joined the Dominican lay sisters known as Mantellate, living at home but in great self-denial. After three years of near seclusion, she went out to care for the poor and the sick, including plague victims, and visited prisoners; she accompanied a young man condemned to death to his execution. Though she learned to write only late, if at all, she dictated nearly four hundred letters to popes, kings, cities and ordinary people. At the time the popes had lived in Avignon in France for nearly seventy years; Catherine went to Avignon in 1376 and urged Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome, which he did the next year. Her book The Dialogue records her conversations with God. She died in Rome in 1380, aged thirty-three, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

Faith: Italian mystic and Dominican tertiary, revered as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica