_That saw Saint Catherine bodily_.
Her pilgrimage to Avignon to recall the Pope into Italy as its redeemer
from the distractions of the time is of course the central act of St.
Catherine’s life, the great abiding sign of the greatness of spirit and
genius of heroism which distinguished this daughter of the people, and
should yet keep her name fresh above the holy horde of saints, in other
records than the calendar; but there is no less significance in the story
which tells how she succeeded in humanizing a criminal under sentence of
death, and given over by the priests as a soul doomed and desperate; how
the man thus raised and melted out of his fierce and brutal despair
besought her to sustain him to the last by her presence; how, having
accompanied him with comfort and support to the very scaffold, and seen
his head fall, she took it up, and turning to the spectators who stood
doubtful whether the poor wretch could be “saved,” kissed it in sign of
her faith that his sins were forgiven him. The high and fixed passion of
her heroic temperament gives her a right to remembrance and honour of
which the miracle-mongers have done their best to deprive her. Cleared
of all the refuse rubbish of thaumaturgy, her life would deserve a
chronicler who should do justice at once to the ardour of her religious
imagination and to a thing far rarer and more precious—the strength and
breadth of patriotic thought and devotion which sent this girl across the
Alps to seek the living symbol of Italian hope and unity, and bring it
back by force of simple appeal in the name of God and of the country. By
the light of those solid and actual qualities which ensure to her no
ignoble place on the noble roll of Italian women who have deserved well
of Italy, the record of her visions and ecstasies may be read without
contemptuous intolerance of hysterical disease. The rapturous visionary
and passionate ascetic was in plain matters of this earth as pure and
practical a heroine as Joan of Arc.