Novena to St Catherine - Day 9
It seems very fitting that we celebrate St Catherine’s feast during the Paschal season, when we remember with joy and thanksgiving all that our Saviour has done for us through his Passion, Death,
Resurrection and sending the Holy Spirit and the gift we receive in Baptism when we are grafted onto the True Vine and become his branches with the same life sap coursing through Head and members – as the author of an
ancient homily on Holy Saturday has Christ saying to Adam: “Arise! For you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.” Holiness for Catherine was nothing less than being transformed into Christ – becoming another Himself! As she says in the prologue of the Dialogue: “by continual humble prayer, the soul
is united with God, following in the footsteps of Christ Crucified, and through desire and affection and the union of love he makes of her another himself.” (D 1) Catherine repeats throughout the Dialogue and her letters
the truth that “love transforms us into what we love” and therefore the Lord says to her “those who love me become one thing with me” – “the soul is in God and God in the soul, as the fish
is in the sea and the sea is in the fish.”
Catherine’s words to her followers: “be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire” encourage us today to live in the awareness of our true identity through our Baptism
- which according to St Augustine is “God’s greatest gift to humankind i.e. that he made his Word Head over us and joined us to him as his members so that He might be Son of God and son of man, one God with the
Father, one man with men. So, when we turn to God in prayer, we do not separate the Son from ourselves and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its Head from itself. It is the one Saviour of his body, Our
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, who prays for us, prays in us and is prayed to by us.” (cf Breviary, Wednesday, Lent Week 5) No wonder that Catherine could be so bold in her prayer in asking for mercy for the Church and
world of her day. May she obtain for each of us a similar grace.
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