Neither Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, nor Therese of Lisieux were in any sense academics, nor could they have been under the circumstances prevailing in their own times. Their mode of theologizing was mystical or spiritual, and their elevation to the rarefied ranks of the great doctors is a strong statement by the Church that the highest kind of theology is living truth and the ultimate criterion of this truth is the degree to which it leads to deeper union with God.

The same is true with respect to the three great women doctors as potential feminist symbols. If they were transported forward to today’s world, they would be condescendingly dismissed by feminists, especially academic feminists, as mere pious ladies lacking the courage and the understanding to break out of existing religious boundaries. This is not even to raise the obvious point that all three would be horrified to learn that being an authentically Catholic woman somehow requires flirting with pagan deities. All three could easily be dismissed as “christofascists.”

Catherine of Siena has occasionally served as a feminist icon because of the best-known fact about her life — that she spoke boldly to the pope about his duties and responsibilities and did not scruple to rebuke him when she believed he had failed. But this fact can only serve religious dissent if the form of her activities alone is noticed, not the substance of what she had to say.

Modern dissenters looking for historical role models fall into the same fallacy as those who point triumphantly to what they consider embarrassing passages in the Bible which they think discredit Church teaching. If the Church throughout its history has really been a kind of conspiracy of hierarchical power, why did that same Church admit into its canon of Scripture precisely those writings which were embarrassing? If nothing else this is testimony to the honesty and sincerity of its leaders. Similarly, Catherine would never have been canonized, much less proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, if an anti-female bias really did govern its councils, or if Catherine really had been a rebel against Church authority.

In her ecclesiastical role Catherine functioned primarily as a prophet, a person who spoke unwelcome truths to those in power. But as such she was the precise opposite of a dissenter. The authentic prophet always recalls the community to its roots, to the truths on which its very existence rests, whereas false prophets are those who seek to lead the community in inauthentic directions.

Catherine played a role which was quite rare for a woman in any period of history prior to the present century, and against which there were many things which might have been said. But like Joan of Arc a generation or two later, Catherine — of humble background, not well-educated, not even a nun but a Dominican tertiary who lived at home — was not summarily and contemptuously dismissed, much less silenced and punished, but treated with the utmost respect. Even in the midst the often sordid politics, both civil and ecclesiastical, of Renaissance Italy, men could recognize genuine holiness when they encountered it, and they acknowledged their obligation to hear the voice of God as expressed through His lowly handmaiden.

Catherine is also an embarrassment to those who would de-romanize the Church, since the idea of the papal primacy was at the very heart of her mission, and in her mind the root cause of all other evils in the Church was the popes’ expedient withdrawal to Avignon. In l377 she finally persuaded Gregory XI to return to Rome.

But if Catherine was God’s chosen instrument for the reform of the Church, the subsequent history of that episode is a depressing reminder that human beings do posses free will and can temporarily thwart God’s designs. Gregory’s successor, Urban VI, was a harsh man whose harshness Catherine tried to moderate. But when cardinals began leaving the papal court, and then elected a rival pope, she was unstinting in her denunciations, seeing it as wickedness almost without parallel and going so far as to call the schismatic cardinals “devils incarnate.” For her the evil lay not in the pope’s having exceeded his authority but in his failure to exercise it.

Thus Catherine’s activities were a visible success only in a very limited sense. The Church over the next century and a half would experience some of the greatest disasters in its long history, disasters which might have been averted or alleviated had the prelates of Catherine’s day, including successive popes, heeded her call for courageous, holy, uncompromising leadership of the Church, a program of authentic reform stemming from the profound understanding of the Gospel which this great doctor herself exemplified and taught.

James Hitchcock is professor of history at St. Louis University and a regular columnist for Catholic Dossier.

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