Although you have hidden these things to the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to little ones. The Church honors today the memory of St. Catherine of Siena, a Dominican tertiary and mystic who is renowned as a peacemaker within the Church and renewer of religious life. As a peacemaker, St. Catherine was instrumental in the return of Pope Gregory XI from Avignon to Rome. Imprinted with the sacred stigmata, St. Catherine died in Rome at a young age of thirty-three. She was proclaimed patroness of Italy in 1939. In 1970, Pope Paul VI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church.
Despite her tender age and short life, St. Catherine taught Christendom a lesson in courage when in word and deed, she showed her love for the Church. In today’s Gospel reading, we hear Jesus praising the Father for choosing to reveal God’s wisdom to the little ones (the humble). St. Catherine of Siena was not the most important person in the Church when she tirelessly worked for peace to reign in the Church. She was definitely not the most educated theologian of her day. However, she was able to help in pulling off something that was thought to be beyond her wits. I believe St. Catherine succeeded in helping broker the peace in the Church because she understood that it was not her who was doing it but rather the Lord whose instrument she was. She was able to succeed because she knew it was not about her abilities or knowledge but rather her inability and lack of knowledge.
Like St. Catherine, we get to be filled with the wisdom of God only when we come to the realization that we have a lack, a lack that can only be filled with God. We get to be filled with God’s wisdom when we trust not in our abilities and knowledge but rather in our inability and our unknowing. For it is when we have recognized our inability and unknowing that we set out on a quest for the only being who has knowledge and who is able. This is what St. Catherine did and it is this that allowed her to achieve the much for which we honor her today.