The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena: A Study in Civil Religion (review)

Gerald Parsons traces the different ways in which from her death in 1380 through the late-twentieth century, St. Catherine of Siena has featured in Italian "civic religion"—that is, as a focus for shared values and an agent of social and political unity. Parsons begins by describing the role played by Siena in promoting Catherine's cult in the century after her death—a useful corrective to the usual emphasis on the activities of the Dominican Order on Catherine's behalf—and Catherine's prominence as a patron saint of Siena in the early-modern period. But most readers will probably find their main interest in Parsons's discussion of Catherine's emergence as a focus for a Catholic brand of Italian nationalism after the Risorgimento, a fascist hero in the 1920s and 1930s, and a patron of the Italian war effort in the 1940s.

Parsons shows how the some of the main public causes of Catherine's career—the return of the pope to Rome, peace in Italy, and a crusade against the infidels—were seen as particularly relevant to the emerging national identity, especially among those who sought to reconcile Italian fascism with Italian Catholicism. Catherine was cited for her romanità and, in a 1929 article in Studi Cateriniani, compared to Mussolini in her promotion of "the unity of the nation in the unity of faith" (p. 60). Parsons gives many examples to show how individuals and institutions in Siena and elsewhere in Italy appealed to the language and ideology of fascism in urging Catherine's adoption as national patron. Increasingly associated with an assertive Italian nationalism and an aggressively militaristic foreign policy, Catherine's intervention was invoked for the conquest of Ethiopia, and she became a special patron of the Italian armed forces. A collection of excerpts from her writings was published in a small book to be distributed to soldiers, divided into three sections corresponding to Benito Mussolini's slogan credere, obbeddire, combattere (p. 91).

After the war, as Italy sought a new identity within Europe and the world, Catherine was recast as an apostle of peace and justice, proponent of European unity and international cooperation, and even as a model for the participation of Italian women in political life. As Parsons notes, it is an interesting reflection on the cult of saints and on civic religion that devotees of the nationalistic, fascist Catherine and devotees of the internationalist, peace-campaigner Catherine have drawn on largely the same episodes in the saint's career and the same aspects of her writings to tie Catherine to their radically different causes.

Parsons's book is a fascinating case study of the history of a saint's cult and all the more interesting for crossing historical periods. It is also essential background reading for understanding twentieth-century Catherinian scholarship, not only the nature of the anachronistic distortions of her career by fascist apologists but also what it is in Catherine's cult or Catherinian scholarship that others have reacted against from time to time. Parsons includes a 1940 photograph that shows a row of uniformed dignitaries greeting the head of Catherine with the fascist salute as it passes in procession before the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. If the Catherinian scholarship of the last several decades of the twentieth century tended to be less interested in the overtly political nature of Catherine's career, images like this one help explain why.