Kitty Goodhouse’s Birthday Present

Fr. O, our chaplain, had swung by studio to drop off the latest round of graded theology papers. it’d been too long since we’d last chatted and so I approached him with a friendly exclamation of “Happy St. Kate’s Day!” It was April 29. Memorial of St. Catherine of Siena, Virgin. He smiled and chuckled. “Yeah. St. Kate. Kitty. Kitty Goodhouse.” He laughed again. I was momentarily confused and wondered if I’d heard him right.

One simply never knows what Fr. O might say, which is part of his unique charm. In the course of the last year, I’d heard anything and everything from profound homilies on the Eucharist to free-form classroom riffs involving Semi-Arianism and chocolate chips. So, I won’t say I was necessarily surprised, albeit somewhat puzzled. For a few seconds anyway. Catherine of Siena. Born Catherine Benincasa. Bene casa. Good house. Kitty Goodhouse.

We shared a long chortle. Only Fr. O. Only in Rome.

Catherine of Siena. Protectress against fire, against illness, against miscarriage, against bodily ills. Patroness of the diocese of Allentown, of Europe, of fire prevention, of firefighters, of Italy, of nurses and nursing services and people ridiculed for their piety, of sick people and Siena, and, of course, my very own adopted home city of Rome. Catherine of Siena. Kate. Katy. Kitty Goodhouse.

St. Kitty Goodhouse, Doctor of the Church, lives down the street from me. Most of her, anyway. Her body is interred at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, one of Rome’s Dominican churches, while her incorrupt head, a relic that even a seasoned hagiography fan such as myself finds somewhat gruesome, remains preserved in her birthplace of Siena. The church is only five minutes away, while even closer is the chapel where she spent her last hours on earth, the Transito. It’s incongruously imprisoned inside a theater, but Santa Maria is less hard to find.

It’s a familiar church for me. I find it difficult to think of a day when I don’t pass by its stark, daunting facade, on my way to the sooty grandeur of the Galeria Doria Pamphij or the plasticine glitz and starchy nineteenth-century commercialism of the Corso, to Sant’ Ignazio and its scalloped stuccoed piazza.

Before the facade with its triple piercing of rose windows stands Bernini’s whimsical, pudgy little elephant carrying an obelisk on its back. Its sculpted rear faces the old offices of the Inquisition. It’s one of Rome’s few Gothic churches, beyond the blank front its nave standing as a Puginesque exercise in gilt and lazuli-blue garnished with multicolored baroque marginalia along its chapel-lined aisles. Gold and black marble funeral monuments spangle the walls, white marble skulls grinning toothlessly back at you.

I can’t say I know it well, though. I see it enough, wander amid it enough, but for some reason its soothing medievalism and pleasant semidarnkess seldom registers in my mind. It’s one of the few churches in the city that doesn’t take an inconvenient siesta in the middle of the day. Perhaps I can't remeber the details. But it's often enough to pace its columned nave in the filtered silver-grey light of afternoon. Even if I forget the litany of saints that mark its chapels, even if I only venture in for a brief moment at Catherine’s tomb beneath the high altar.

Sometimes it is simply enough to watch the sun on the dappled, austere south wall, pierced irregularly with chapel lunettes. Pantheon Internet Cafe is always a good place to drink in the light, typing away at emails as I gaze through the big fish-bowl window onto the little piazza with its knot of miniature cars and the ranks of clerical boutiques, plate glass bright with liturgical eye-candy.

And Katy, Katy, Katy, Katy, what about you? How is it that I know you, or feel that I know you? Where did we meet?

I always feel a little thrill whenever I recognize her high, Gothic almond-eyed features amid the pale early Renaissance blue of a panel in the Chicago Art Institute or as a chipped marble bust amid the stony worthies of the Pincio Gardens. Not far away stands the work of one of her Dominican brethren, six hundred years after her death, a massive, ornamental and largely inaccurate water-clock, the prize-winning project of a science-minded priest of the ottocento.

St. Catherine’s face is equally marred, not by inaccuracy but by vandalism, the tip of her nose sheared off by vandals. She’d undergone some marginal, unsuccessful plastic surgery when I last visited, her face sporting a dubious proboscoid made of a sort of gravelly stonemasonic spackle. It’s probably not the first time, as traveloguer H.V. Morton mentioned the parks department’s continuing feud with the nose bandits forty years ago. There are, however, worse things to lose, as one glance through the Vatican’s galleries of marble castrati will show you.

But back to Katy. I’ve never read her Dialogue, though I’ve often mulled over the choice as I stood in the crowded little O.P. bookstore at Santa Sabina up on the Aventine. Yet, it’s hard not to like her, not to feel she holds some deep inexplicable appeal locked up in her personality that blended both mysticism and searingly common sense. She had that tenacity, that solid elephantine stubbornness (and Bernini’s elephant means wisdom) that the alleged misogynists of the medieval era succeeded in inculcating in so many of their women. Especially their nuns.

She is an uppity medieval woman, that most delightful of creatures. An uppity holy medieval woman who moved with reckless honesty into the highest corridors of power, wilder than the most manic dreams of Gloria Steinem, more powerful in her way than the most shrill power-suited politicienne of our own era. And yet, she remained as feminine as the stereotypical meek, barefoot wife, even more so. Much more so. And hers was real, not some cartoon straw-woman counterfeit cooked up by angry radicals.

She, and so many abbesses and prioresses in their fluttering gothic veils, embodied the great and terrible natural authority of the mother that can shout down a king, doubly armored all round with the elemental purity of virginity. It is femininity, not masculinity, that is called in the Bible, "terrible as an army with banners." Thus it seemed only natural that she could rebuke popes without a raised eyebrow. And rightly so, for it is Mary, not Peter, who reigns amid the Ofanim and Cherubim of heaven as their sovereign.

And there’s more, there is that easiness she carries herself. There is the unnaturally natural, easy self-unity that gives her the tender audacity (audemus dicere: Pater Noster, qui es in caelis) to call a reigning pope by a delicately silly nickname. Dearest daddy, my sweet babbo, and most surprising, she is simply not just teasing. You would call her magisterial to the point of arrogance, going in swinging with one epistle after another to the self-exiled Avignon pope and yet she goes and calls him something that sounds comically like what Linus called Lucy, and I don’t mean the martyrs in the Canon. And she did this all before dying at age 33, when girls nowadays have barely begun to bloom into maternity.

There’s also the fact she had twenty-four siblings, an astonishing detail to add to an astonishing life.

So, that is why I found myself in the back of Santa Maria that afternoon to pay my respects to the birthday girl. Dies natalis. Birthday girl, deathday girl. Happy birthday to you, in paradisum.

I was in the midst of the last hours of a major project; no time to loose. I might not stay for the whole mass, but I could at least pop in to say hi.

It’s the custom of the Roman civic government up on the Capitoline to present a chalice in St. Catherine’s honor to the friars of Santa Maria every year on her feast day in token of her metropolitan patronage. A couple of politicians, an elegant man in a black topcoat and a wrinkled olive woman in a tricolored sash, stood chatting on the threshold of the church, the great portals wide open. I had never seen them open before in my year in Rome, not even on St. Thomas Aquinas’s day back in January. With them was a portly friar in a billowing preaching habit, his leather cincture pulled up to his sternum Roncalli-fashion.

And then there were the vigili, an honor guard of traffic cops enjoying their brief moment to enter and exit on the civic stage and have a moment of glory on the urban calendar. Two of them hurried a massive, beribboned mound of flowers out of a grilled side-chapel and set it on a table in the back, while a third carried the gleaming red leather cube that encased the chalice. They stood off in a knot to one side, preening unconsciously. One fiddled with his white gloves and his cell-phone, while another practiced holding the folding lids of the chalice-box open like the wings of a tiny polytiptych. They were certainly attired for the occasion, in an Italian blend of comic opera, Keystone Kops and Officer Friendly, with their spotless blue tunics and absurd white bobby helmets, their gleaming gold aigulettes and their dandyish mustaches and Bernini beards.

The church was crowded with worshippers. Votive lights burned steadily around the high altar where Catherine’s recumbent marble figure lay beneath the glassed-in Gothic arches of the predella. A few like me hung to the back, stragglers, tourists, curiosity-seekers, honored guests. The politicians and the friar moved up into the nave proper, and I heard the organ sound.

A procession of priests and clerks slowly appeared, moving from the sacristy, down one side-aisle to the rear of the church amid swirling clouds of incense. Taperers in white tunics and white surplices embroidered with scarlet, priests in white cassocks with white monastic capuces and white albs, some pink and fair, some brown, some olive, some even with the exotic complexion of India. And behind them was a Cardinal in gold and white, an apostle-orphreyed gold mitre on his head. Lace frothed around his ankles over his scarlet robes, his crozier bobbing as he moved past me. He paused and met with the woman in the sash, and the sturdy friar fussed ceremonially over the lappets of his mitre, and they all proceeded to the altar, the chalice and the great mountain of flowers flanked by helmeted vigili.

They moved up and set the chalice in its cube on the epistle side of the old altar, and the policemen paused for a moment facing the congregation, as if in salute, and turned and left as soon as their politicians were seated in the south transept. The Cardinal moved around the altar in clouds of sweet smoke, and then I saw the vigili quickstep towards the rear of the church, their metal braid-ends clanking precisely against their belt-buckles embossed with the Roman she-wolf.

I slipped out as well. Only a few minutes. Earthlier duties called me away, for better or worse. I had paid my respects to this magnificent, audacious nun, who had listened to so many offhand prayers of mine as I meandered through her church month after month, and that was consolation enough for me.