Today November 25

Today is the feast of one of my favorite (and much-maligned) saints: St. Catherine of Alexandria. It makes some people feel oh-so-superior and smart to say she never existed and was some pretty myth, but they're wrong. She may not have done all that her hagiographers say she did -- or in exactly that way -- but, hey, we attribute writings to famous guys who were already long dead and we still honor the words. It's true in the CONTENT, even if the form is not twentieth (or twenty-first) century. Shame on them for not documenting things the way the National Science Foundation would! And while we're at it, shame on them for not voice-recording and digitally photographing everything either! Sheesh!

So while I can't say for sure that her life played out this way (the story follows), I can say for sure she existed. The early Christians had no reasons to invent saints out of whole cloth, so to speak, and many reasons not to: they were a faith which rested almost entirely on historical fact, and they were bitterly persecuted and their detractors only too ready to pounce on them if they were caught in an outright lie.

St. Catherine is said to have been a fair daughter of a patrician family in Alexandria. A pagan, she was converted to Christianity, both by her extensive reading and by a mystical vision she had of the Christ Child and Our Lady. Emperor Maxentius began persecuting the Christians and Catherine, fearless and beautiful, went to him to protest. Maybe she felt her family position would protect her; it didn't. She was thrown into prison and asked to recant. She didn't; she even ended up converting the philosophers sent to "re-educate" her. So far she'd been bodily unharmed, but the stakes were being raised. Maxentius gave her an "out" by offering to let her be a royal concubine, but she refused. She was beaten and left in prison. Maxentius went off to inspect a military installation and in his absence his WIFE went to see her and was converted. This time . . . it's personal! When he came back, he had her sentenced to death on the "wheel" -- a spiked death instrument -- but her bonds were mysteriously, some say miraculously, broken when she was tied to it. Then she was beheaded; that always seems to work.

They say her body was brought to its final resting place at the great monastery of Mount Sinai by angels. But that too has a rational explanation. Alban Butler quotes Archbishop Falconio as saying, "As to what is said, that the body of this saint was conveyed by angels to Mount Sinai, the meaning is that it was carried by the monks of Sinai to their monastery. . . . It is well known that the name of the angelical habit was often used for a monastic habit, and that monks on account of their heavenly purity and functions were anciently called angels." Dear St. Catherine, pray for us.