FROM THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION

St Catherine of Genoa 1447-1510

Catherine was a member of wealthy aristocratic family.  At the age of 13 she felt drawn to the religious life in a convent, but was refused, being later forced into a marriage which was full of unhappiness.  In 1474 she was given an overwhelming experience of divine love and later she founded the Oratory of Divine Love, one of the great renewal movements of the Catholic counter-reformation.  Her visionary experiences took practical expression in her leadership of a hospital for incurably ill people.  Her experiences are reflected in the following extract from her Sayings:

I see clearly that God loves all creatures He has created with pure love, and there is nothing He hates but sin, so that it is impossible to measure or imagine His aversion to it.  He loves His creatures with such perfection that there never was and never will be a mind that can understand the tiniest spark of it.  If God wished a soul to be able to understand it, He would first have to make the body immortal, for in its own nature it could never understand it.

Stephen