When I started to work on my doctorate, it was for a very practical reason I started working on St Catherine of Siena: as I was living in Italy, I felt I should chose a topic that would be related to Italy and also to be of service to the Church. A topic that would help me, as well as other people, reflect on service in the Church. So I focused on St Catherine’s Trinitarian experiences, her experience of God as Trinity and her mission in the Church as a result of these experiences. And I think St Catherine, in a lot of ways, speaks to both men and women in the Church, in the sense that she was a woman who lived a very active lifestyle during one of the most painful periods in Church history.

The schism in the Church?

Yes that’s right. Pope Paul VI called her the “saint who most loved the Church”. And St Catherine also had a wonderful sense of communion, that we were interconnected and we all needed one another. She was a laywoman—a lot of people don’t realise that—and she lived her vocation as a laywoman.

I think she speaks to a lot of people today of the importance of finding their place in the Church. That’s a very important dimension of her vocation, Also, she was a women who exercised a non-hierarchical teaching charism.

What would constitute a non-hierarchical teaching charism?

Well, it’s quite interesting actually. In 1968, in the new Catholic Encyclopaedia, there was an article written on the Doctors of the Church. And it talked about the three requirements to be a doctor. First of all, you had to be a saint; secondly, you had to be declared a Doctor of the Church by a Pope or an ecumenical council and thirdly, your teaching had to have a value not only for the local Church but also for the Universal Church. And at the end of the article, it said no women were declared a doctor of the Church and no women will be declared a doctor of the Church because of the link between this title and the teaching office of the Church.

To the surprise of many, in 1970, Pope Paul VI proclaimed St Catherine and St Theresa of Avila as Doctors of the Church! And I think that is very significant: (recognising) these women whose teaching has significance for the Universal Church. And what you see in their teaching is that they have a particularly...

Mystical dimension?

Yeah, a mystical dimension but also what Pope John Paul II would like to call a “feminine genius”.

Their approach is different approach from, say, St Thomas Aquinas who was also a Doctor of the Church. Both St Thomas and St Catherine talked about conversion. In fact, all their writings were essentially about conversion. But St Catherine had a totally different way of talking about it.

For example, when she wrote a letter to Pope Urban VI, encouraging him to allow God to transform his life, what she did was to send him six candied oranges with a recipe on how to turn a bitter orange into a candied orange. And along with the recipe, she also sent him a recipe of how he could be converted and sweetened from a bitter personality to a sweet one by the Holy Spirit, the “divine cook”.

Those where St Catherine’s words? The Divine Cook?

(Laughs) Well, I am not sure if she used (that exact phrase), but it was something similar. What I see when I study women mystics is they come to the same conclusion that the men come to, but their way is different. So I think for spirituality, we need the voices of women, not only for women in the Church, but for men and women. A lot of times in my work, in Rome especially, the majority of the students are men. I very rarely teach women. And I find it is very helpful for them to read the writings of these women mystics as it would help them reflect and think about their own experience of God.

Could you elaborate more about the “feminine genius”?

I think what Pope John Paul II was trying to say was women have a particular contribution to make to the Church and to society. And one of the ways to do that is not to deny your femininity. I find that very helpful in my own work at the Gregorian University, where I contribute as a woman and not try to be like my Jesuit colleagues. I think genuine fruitfulness comes when there is a complementarity of men and women. And that’s why I think it’s important in Church committees, universities, parish councils and diocesan councils that the voices of women are heard. Women and men often see things in different ways and when they talk to each other, it’s for the good of the Church and the good of society. And to the extent that women are heard, the Church is better off.