Vigils Reading – St Catherine of Alexandria

ST CATHERINE OF ALEXANDRIA

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints2

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Since about the tenth century, veneration of St Catherine of Alexandria

has been marked in the East, but from the time of the Crusades until the 18th

century her popularity was even greater in the West. Numerous churches were

dedicated in her honor, including the parish church of Gethsemani Abbey at

New Haven, KY. She was venerated as patroness of maidens and women

students of philosophers, preachers and apologists. Adam of St Victor wrote a

poem in her honor; hers was one of the heavenly voices heard by St Joan of Arc.

But not a single fact about her life or death has been established.

It is said in her Acts that she belonged to a patrician family of Alexandria

and devoted herself to learned studies, in the course of which she learned about

Christianity. She was converted by a vision of Our Lady and the Holy Child.

When Maxentius began persecuting Christians, Catherine went to him and

rebuked him for his tyranny. He could not answer her arguments against his

gods, so summoned fifty philosophers to oppose her. These confessed

themselves convinced by the learning of this Christian girl, and were therefore

burned to death by the infuriated emperor. Then he tried to seduce Catherine

with an offer of a consort’s crown, and went off to inspect a camp. On his return

he discovered that his wife and an officer had gone to see Catherine out of

curiosity and had both been converted, together with two hundred soldiers of

the guard. They accordingly were all slain and Catherine was sentenced to be

killed on a spiked wheel. When she was placed on it, her bonds were

miraculously loosed and the wheel broke, its spikes flying off and killing many

of the onlookers. Then she was beheaded.

All the texts of the “acts” of Catherine state that her body was carried by

angels to Mount Sinai, where a church and monastery were afterwards built. In

527 the Emperor Justinian built a monastery for hermits of the place, and the

body of Catherine was said to have been taken there in the 8th or 9th century.

The monastery has borne her name since then. The great monastery of Mount

Sinai still claim the alleged relics of St Catherine, in the care of the monks of the

Eastern Orthodox Church. Archbishop Falconio of Santa Severina said that the

meaning of the “angels” is that her body was carried by the monks of Sinai to

their monastery. Tradition has referred to the monastic life as “the angelic life”.

This is still a current expression in Eastern monasticism.