202 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
of grace, and we love Ilim of duty because we are bound to do so; and to show our love to Him we ought to serve and love every rational creature and extend our love to good and bad, to all kinds of people, as much to one who does us ill as to one who serves us, for God is no respecter of persons, and His charity extends to just men and sinners. Peter's love before Pentecost was sweet but not strong. After Pentecost he loved as a son, bearing all tribulations with patience. So we, too, if we remain in vigil and continual prayer and tarry ten days, shall receive the plenitude of the Spirit. More than once in her letters to Gregory, she bursts out into a eulogy of love as the remedy for all evils. " The soul cannot live without love," she wrote in the Dialogue, " but must always love something, for it was created through love. Affection moves the understanding, as it were, saying, ' I want to love, for the food wherewith I am fed is love. ' " ^
Such directions as these render Catherine's letters a valuable manual of religious devotion, especially to those who are on their guard against being carried away by the underlying quietistic tone. Not only do they have a liigh place as the revelation of a pious woman's soul. They deal with unconcealed boldness and candor with the low conditions into which the Church was fallen. Popes are called upon to institute reforms in the appointment of clergymen and to correct abuses in other directions. As for the pacification of the Tuscan cities, a cause which lay so close to Catherine's heart, she urged the pontiff to use tlie measures of peace and not of war, to deal as a father would deal with a rebellious son, — to put into practice clemency, not the pride of authority. Then the very wolves would nestle in his bosom like lambs. ^
As for the pope's return to Rome, she urged it as a duty he owed to God who had made him His vicar. In view of the opposition on the Rhone, almost holding him as by ])hysical force, she called upon him " to play the man," " to be a manly man, free from fear and fleshly love towards himself or towards any creature related to him by kin," " to be stable
1 Scudder, Letters, pp. 81, 84, 126 sq. ; Gardner, Life, p. 377. - Letters, p. 133.
§ 21. CATHERINE OF SIENA, THE SAINT. 203
in his resolution and to believe and trust in Christ in spite of all predictions of the evil to follow his return to Rome." ^ To this impassioned Tuscan woman, the appointment of unworthy shepherds and bad rectors was responsible for the rebellion against papal authority, shepherds who, consumed by self-love, far from dragging Christ's sheep away from the wolves, devoured the very sheep themselves. It was because they did not follow the true Shepherd who has given His life for the sheep. Likening the Church to a garden, she invoked the pope to uproot the malodorous plants full of avarice, impurity and pride, to throw them away that the bad priests and rulers who poison the garden might no longer have rule. To Urban VI. she addressed burning words of condemnation. " Your sons nourish themselves on the wealth they receive by ministering the blood of Christ, and are not ashamed of being money-changers. In their great avarice they commit simonies, buying benefices with gifts or flatteries or gold." And to the papal legate of Bologna, Cardinal d'Estaing, she wrote, " make the holy father consider the loss of souls more than the loss of cities, for God demands souls."
The stress Catherine laid upon the pope's responsibility to God and her passionate reproof of an unworthy and hireling ministry, inclined some to give her a place among the heralds of the Protestant Reformation. Flacius Illyricus included her in the list of his witnesses for the truth — Catalogus festium veritatis^ With burning warmth she spoke of a thorough-going reformation which was to come upon the Church. " The bride, now all deformed and clothed in rags," she exclaimed, " will then gleam with beauty and jewels, and be crowned with the diadem of all virtues. All believing nations will rejoice to have excellent shepherds, and the unbelieving world, attracted by her glory, will be
1 Letters, pp. 66, 185, 232, etc.
2 Bollinger, Fables and Propli§cies of the Middle Ages, p. 330, calls attention to the failure of Catherine's predictions to reach fulfilment. " How little have these longings of the devout maiden of Siena been transformed into history ! "