Apr 29: One Word Spoken to All

Giovanni di Paolo (1403-83): St. Catherine of Siena
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Memorial of Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and doctor of the Church

Gospel: Jn 15:12-17

“I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father (NRSV, Jn 15:15b).”

Father, today we remember St. Catherine of Siena, a simple, uneducated woman, a lay Dominican, who dazzled the Catholic world with her understanding of divine truth and her writings.

Father, the answer is simple.

Through the Word living within each human being, the very Word now made flesh in our Lord Jesus Christ, your truth is spoken to us once and for all in every moment. We are hindered from a full understanding of that truth by the temporal and spatial situation in which we find ourselves, by the amassed sin of the world which oppresses and distracts us, and by our own personal sinfulness.

St. Catherine is one of the great and holy people, like the prophets, who broke through the limitations which hold us down and came to a fuller grasp of the one Word spoken to us all in every time and place.

You speak your one Word to every one of us. May we be open to that word as was St. Catherine, and grow in it always as we also grow in the life that you share with us.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.