Catherine Benincasa was the twenty-third (or twenty-fifth — accounts vary) of a wool-dyer's twenty-five children. At six or seven, walking with her brother, she had her first vision of Christ enthroned. She made a private vow of virginity at seven, resisted her family's plans to marry her by cutting off her hair, and at sixteen entered the Dominican Third Order — laywomen living a religious life at home.
For three years she shut herself in a small room in her parents' house, leaving only for Mass and confession. The trial ended with a vision of mystical espousal to Christ — she received a ring visible only to herself. She then emerged to a vigorous public life: nursing plague victims and lepers, gathering disciples around her, dictating hundreds of letters to popes, princes, and ordinary souls (she may have been functionally illiterate most of her life), and intervening boldly in Church politics.
Her greatest political work was persuading Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy from Avignon to Rome in 1376 — ending the seventy-year 'Babylonian Captivity' of the popes. After the Western Schism erupted in 1378 she went to Rome to support Pope Urban VI, dictating her great mystical work The Dialogue. She died there in 1380, aged thirty-three.
She was canonised by Pius II in 1461. In 1970, Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church — the second woman so named, with Teresa of Ávila. John Paul II named her a co-patron of Europe in 1999.