“Urban asks Catherine to come to Rome, so she came to Rome at the end of 1378 to help Urban with the reform,” Droste explained.
“And Catherine, in the last months of her life, even though she was very sickly, would walk daily from here [her residence in Rome] to the Vatican. … She would go there daily and pray for the pope,” she said.
“You can see today right as you walk into the Vatican before you go into the main church in the narthex — if you turn around, above the entrance there is a mosaic of Christ and the boat with the apostles in it — that was from the original basilica. It was in a different spot, but it is reported that that is where Catherine prayed daily for [the successor of] Peter.”
After Catherine died in the spring of 1380, the walls of the room where she died were moved to a small chapel inside the Basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. (This chapel can also be visited by passing through the basilica’s sacristy, which is a historic location in itself for hosting two papal conclaves in the 15th century.)
Pope Pius IX named St. Catherine a co-patroness of Rome in April 1866. Pope Pius XII named Catherine a co-patron saint of Italy in 1939, along with St. Francis of Assisi.
“Catherine has influenced me a great deal in my love of the Church, in my love of the papacy,” reflected Droste, who received the name Catherine when she made her vows as a religious sister.
“One of the most important messages of Catherine she learned from Christ,” she added.
“Christ asked her one day, ‘Do you know who you are and who I am?’ And he said to her, ‘You are she who is not. I am he who is.’ Now that is a challenging phrase because many people would think that means ‘I am nothing.’ Well, I am nothing before God because he created me and gave me everything. But in his eyes, I am everything because I am a human being that he loves.”
“And so, Catherine would say, Christ is crazy in love with you. He’s madly in love with you. He’s drunk in love with you. So Catherine’s first message is understanding what it means to be a human being, to be loved by God. And that’s important for every one of us.”
Courtney Mares is a Rome Correspondent for Catholic News Agency. A graduate of Harvard University, she has reported from news bureaus on three continents and was awarded the Gardner Fellowship for her work with North Korean refugees.
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