By age 16, Catherine was married, against her will but in obedience to her father, to what the family thought a fine catch for her–a “young nobleman of Genoa.” For ten years, Catherine found herself in an abusive, loveless marriage to a nasty, entitled piece of crap. As was, and is, so often the case with women–and especially from religious homes–Catherine remained in her marriage, thinking it her duty to make the best of a bad situation. Butler glowingly reports:

His [Catherine’s husband] brutish humour afforded a perpetual trial to her patience; his dilapidation of his own patrimony, and of the great fortune she brought him, perfected the disengagement of her heart from the world, and his profligate life was to her a continual subject of tears to God for his conversion. This her prayers, patience, and example at last effected, and he died a penitent . . . .

Her widowhood proved Catherine’s only way out of that misery, and she immediately joined a nunnery. She chose through that a life serving the most damaged persons in the main hospital in Genoa, taking on the most menial services she could, and, herself, “dressing . . . the most loathsome ulcers.” Catherine herself found this work repugnant, and “it cost our saint much difficulty in the beginning, till by perseverance she had gained a complete victory over herself.” Having done so at the hospital, Catherine then went forth, seeking out lepers to personally minister unto.

Catherine’s was a life of sacrifice. Happiness, at least as we might think about it, was never an option for her–certainly not one she could consciously pursue. Against both her will and her inclinations, Catherine first married and endured an abusive husband for a decade, and then served the most damaged human beings she could find–those in the hospital and then those out in the countryside. In all of this, she saw herself as submerging her own will in an effort to please her father/Father.

I’m glad that Catherine found ways to keep from becoming a bitter and hate-filled woman. Yet I grieve that her life involved a series of forcing herself to do that which she did not want, believing that this would make her a more virtuous Christian, a better daughter and wife, a holier person, someone more acceptable to God.

Her situation, I believe, rested on a razor’s edge: Was hers a life well spent? Is hers an example to emulate?

Resurrection is the unshakeable proof of life-giving meaning even in the basest of deaths, yet it can never be and never has been a justification for suffering or death–not even the crucifixion of Jesus.

Butler tells us that Catherine took her personal mantra from the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Yet was it God’s will being done for her to be married to an abuser? To stay for 10 years in that state? To then force herself to do work that she hated? Do the results that the abusive husband later repented and that the very sickest of Genoa found compassion and relief somehow show God’s design for Catherine?