St. Catherine de' Ricci

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9, 1 March 1906, Page 27

St. Catherine de' Ricci

The London ' Saturday Review,' in a recent review of F. M. Capes' recently published book on St. Catherine de' Ricci, has the following interesting observation :—: — ' Italy has given to the world four great St. Catherines— of Siena, of Bologna, , 'of Genoa, and of Florence. All four, too, were great writers. The two Tmscan Catherines have, moreover, formally been proclaimed classics by the fanvous Academy which orders such matters in Tuscany ; but if the Saints of Bologna and Genoa can not approach them in style and purity ol language, the matter o[ their writings is assuredly to the full as remarkable. St. Catherine de' Ricci is unquestionably a charming stylist, absolutely natural and unaffected* her written language has in it the best qualities of the spoken tongue: No greater tribute to the purity of her diction could be found than the fact that the fastidious Academicians of the Crusca have cited her as a model of style nearly 1100 times in their new Vocabolario, which has only ' reached the beginning of the letter M.' Of the letters of St. Catherine de' Ricci, no less than seven hundred of which are accessible in print, the ' Saturday Review ' writes, commenting on the practical nature of many 'of them. 'Lt is little short of marvellous,' says the ' Review,' 'to read all these lucid details of practical and family matters when one remembers that for twelve years of her earlier life St. Catherine was subject to a regular weekly ecstasy which lasted from noon on Thursday to four o'clock on Friday evening, during which she visibly enacted the whole scene of the Passion. No documents we have ever seen so conclusively prove that a Catholic ecstatic can at the same time be a perfectly, level-headed woman of the world.'