The Exorcist Files - The Power of Holiness: St. Catherine of Siena

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

St. Catherine of Siena has captivated the hearts and minds of Christians all over the world and is one of the most beloved saints in history. In a fascinating journey through her life, Fr. Martins shares some of the most profound lessons from her relatively short time on earthThank you to our sponsorsshopremi.com/EXFILES and use code EXFILES  at checkout for 50% off.Osea of Malibu- Amazing skin care. Check them out and use our promo code EXFILES for 10% off. Go to Oseamalibu.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome back to The Exorcist Files, the show where we tell demons where to go. Joining me as always, well, not always, but for most of the best episodes, is the one and the only Father Carlos Barton's. Father, thanks for joining us today. Yeah, absolutely, Ryan. Good to be here. Good to be here with everyone else. Absolutely. Father, we're talking today about a subject I know you love, saints, which we're all, that's the goal, right? We're all trying to be saints in one sense. Absolutely. That's the name of the game. Yep, you're failing at life. you're not trying to be a saint.

The root of saint is sanctus, which means holy. So to be a saint means you're holy, which itself means set apart, which means different, which means exceptional. And that is that for which you were created. And if you're not doing that, then you are failing.

And Father, we've done a few episodes on a couple different saints, but for some of our listeners who wonder, this is the Exorcist files. And I thought it's just cases of things that go bump in the night and spinning heads and climbing on roofs and spitting at the priest. Father, why is it so important for us to talk about people like St. Catherine of Siena or St. Maria Garelli? What's the broader theme here as it pertains to exorcism?

Well, in each of these persons, as with every saint, there's an exceptional amount of excellence within them. And what that means is that Jesus Christ was able to be incarnate within them. When he implants his grace, when he sows his grace within us, what that means is he's sewing himself. It's his own very life. So it's not something distinct from God, but it is a commingling of God in the human person. And that makes the devil crazy. He despises that. So the devil wants to come about and bring an end to that because it literally is the end of his kingdom.

It's the end of his reign if he permits that to happen. So he's going to be vehemently against that. And so when we look at this excellence within the saints that has become incarnate, it does so many things. So first of all, it educates us about grace, about that relationship with God. It educates us about the heights to which we can rise, right? the heights to which we can imitate Christ and rise above the circumstances of natural life, of just plain old human life, you know, broken humans, living in a broken world, living in a hostile universe. And so in learning about these things, we can not only anticipate what God

might want to do with us, what he can do with us, but in fact what he wants to do with us, Because when we learn about the lives of the saints, we're learning about God in the manner in which he likes to crown human beings. He's got a crown for every one of us. Not every one of us will get the crown, but he hasn't prepared. And the choice of whether we get or not lies entirely with us. He's got the crown manufactured. It's made. It's sized for you.

it is made to highlight you and the crown in a stupendous way. So everything is coordinated with the shape of your head, the color of your eyes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he's got the party booked, the food ordered, all the beverages and so forth on hand, ready to go, you just have to show up having merited the crown. And so in reading about others who received the crown, reading about the saints like St. Mary Grety, St. Catherine of Siena, we can fall in love with that. We can gain a strength and an inspiration to further us along that journey.

There was one Holy Thursday towards the end of his reign where Pope Benedict XVIth gave a teaching on that Holy Thursday. And what he talked about was the saints. and he described them as translations of the word. That each saint is a translation in a sense, in a limited sense, according to the times and the circumstances of that particular saint, of Jesus Christ himself. And so he said the advantage of this is that the model of Jesus,

he's a perfect model. He is the perfect model. There's no better model. But precisely because he is perfect, it makes him difficult for some people. And so the saints as translations of the word can be good and effective starting points for some people because they are less than perfect. They have reached perfection, but through a great and onerous ordeal, which Jesus began as perfect.

He didn't have to go through the kind of struggles of character working through a nature that is broken. He had no broken nature. He came to redeem broken nature, but he himself didn't share in that nature. But the saints do, and they had their own imperfections. They had their own character, aside from the genius aspect that they had, aside from the holiness, aside from the gifts that were incarnate within them, they had their own imperfections that they had to struggle through.

That observation, the study of that, can give people an awful lot of strength in their own journey. So do you want to be in that number when the saints go marching in, Father? You bet. Absolutely. I want everybody to be in that number. Let's get down to it. Today we are talking about St. Catherine of Sienna, who has had a few honorable mentions in the Exorcist files. And she has interestingly talked a lot about in the context of spiritual warfare. But as we will learn today, there's actually not a ton of firsthand accounts from her on her involvement

with spiritual warfare. And it doesn't seem to be a topic that she spent too much time on, which makes her remarkable gifting in this area even more interesting. So, Father, could you set the stage a little bit and just tell us who was St. Catherine of Siena? When was she around and what was going on during that time? Catherine of Sietta was one of the church's whole. holiest mystics, mystic being somebody in whom God communicates himself, his person, and is teaching, his presence in a way that this mystic is able to perceive it and then has the task to try to explain to us this perception, this teaching that is sublime. Catherine is one of the greatest mystics in the church. She is venerated as such, and she is one of the most popular saints in

the Catholic Church. So Catherine Siena was born in Italy. and was born to a family that was not destitute, but they weren't in the upper echelons of society in the sense that they had to work for a living. I'm not sure how many children her mother had in total, her parents had in total, but I know it was at least 25. It may have been 26, 27, or more.

I know that they had at least 25 children. Catherine was one of two twins born at the same time, and her sibling died not long after birth. Already from the time that she was young, she was different than other kids in the sense that, you know, girls, they all wanted to marry, they wanted a cute husband, husband that was a good worker and that would provide for them and so forth. These are all things that girls want. These are good and noble goals. But she wanted to dedicate her life to God. And as time went on, her parents wanted her to marry. At one point, her sister died, and her parents wanted her to marry her sister's widower so that she could raise her sister's children and continue with this marriage and so forth.

It would be kind of a happy arrangement, but she wanted nothing to do with it. So she, in fact, she cut her hair to make herself uglier. and started a fasting so that she would drop weight and take on an ashen tone and kind of look sickly to make her unappealing in that area. And her brother-in-law understood, like, look, you don't want to get married? That's fine. You know, I won't marry you. That's okay.

And Catherine had her sights set on giving herself in an undivided way to God. And it didn't stop her parents from wanting her to marry, but eventually they gave up. You know, she was very, very strong-willed. Now, she did also, and this is really interesting, she did not want to be a nun either. To be a nun back then meant that you would go into a convent, which meant a cloister. You are cut off from the world and the world is cut off from you. You enter into a monastery and you never leave until you are taken out in a box for your burial. Right.

That's what it meant to be a nun. There was only one kind, and that was in a cloister. You spend your entire life within the confines of this monastery. Now, they may have a courtyard that you go out to. They may have an enclosed yard kind of thing, but you are not stepping foot outside of that monastery, and no one else is stepping foot inside it, who is not one of the nuns. But she didn't want to be a nun. What she wanted was to be a woman whose heart,

and work was totally devoted to God who would go about doing good. Now, this kind of thing didn't exist in the church. There was no such thing as a religious sister apart from being a nun. That simply didn't exist. Now, eventually, she joined a group of women, most of them were old women, who went about doing apostolic work, who went about doing ministry, helping to feed the poor, helping to educate the uneducated, helping to relieve suffering from those who were suffering. And so these women that Catherine had joined, this style of arrangement would become,

and this is after Catherine's death, what we now call the Third Order Dominicans. You're neither the First Order the Priest nor the Second Order the Nuns. You're the third order. You are lay men, lay women who live in the world, and you incarnate the Dominican spirituality and ideals within the world according to your state in life while observing some observances that are particular to the order, a prayer life and so forth and other responsibilities. So Catherine was doing this before it was a thing to do.

And she wanted to be an active presence in the world, not because she wanted any faith. fame or anything, but because she saw God moving through her as she did these things. And my God, did he ever move through her? So this woman was able to capture the attention of the most important people in society, among whom was the Pope of the day. The papacy had moved from Rome to Avenion, France. You know, this was an incredibly traumatic period in the church. because the papacy had always been associated with Rome.

This is where Peter died. Now, Peter was Pope, even when he was Bishop of Antioch, prior to his coming to Rome. But once he had settled to Rome, his death kind of sealed the deal in the mind of the church, that Rome became the seat of the papacy. Well, at a certain point, because Italy was so war-torn, so subject to conquers, conquering and so forth. The papacy was moved west to France, and it took on a very secular character at that point. Well, Catherine implored the Pope to move it back to Rome, and guess what happened? That's exactly what he did. It had been in Avignon for decades upon

decades by that point, and Catherine, her words, spoke to his heart. And, and that, And then when he went to Rome, he had her as a confidon, and his successor did as well. Look how significant this is. Catherine was illiterate. Later on, in a mystical way, Christ taught her how to read and write. This is late in her life. But at this point, she had no education. She did dictate treatises to secretaries, but she herself could not read her right.

And because of these dictations that she did, she has been proclaimed and was the second woman in history to be so, proclaimed a doctor of the church by the pope, doctor in the classical sense, which means teacher. So this woman, being illiterate, yet it has a doctrine within side her that's so sublime that she has beat out tens and tens of thousands of theologians who has never been proclaimed a doctor of the church. And all of this, you know, Catherine is engaging with the papacy, with leaders in society. She is taking on warring factions, families that are split and reconciling them and working with the poor and tending to the sick and so forth. And then all of a sudden,

she dies at 33 years old. That's how old she was. And this is a woman who has. And this is a woman who has, in whom the gifts of God were so incarnate that she has altered the history of humankind, that the history of the world is different because of Catherine of Sienna. Amen. Father Martin's here. I want to do a quick plug for one of the most powerful tools I've seen for breaking free and growing closer to Christ. Exodus 90.

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slash EX Files to join tens of thousands of men from all over the world for Exodus 90. Again, it begins Monday, January 20th. God bless you. Now, Father, why does her name come up so often when it comes to spiritual warfare, considering she didn't write that much about it herself? Well, she wrote in a time where people really didn't write about personal battles, so much in a time when you didn't talk about yourself so much in your writings. Well, she did. She spoke about how the devil came and would tempt her and would tempt her to hopelessness,

to despair about herself, but also giving her sexual temptations, which she found very violent. That was her word for it, that they were visceral, deep, and they lasted for days. And she fought and fought to the point of being exhausted. And finally, the devil was so fed up with her resistance that he upped and left. And the Lord came to her and said, well done. And she asked him, and she was even a little bit perturbed, I will say, like, you know, well, where were you? He said, I was in your heart. I was in your heart.

I was the one strengthening you as you went through this. So although the Lord was there, she couldn't perceive him. nevertheless, she survived it. And she wrote about these encounters as a way to describe the action of God. And when you read her writings, she mentions herself only to the extent that it is necessary to explain what God did. She never spent any time talking about herself and viewed herself as completely unimportant and irrelevant and who has relevance only to the extent that she is, following God's plan for her. And so in her writings, there isn't a lot of content about the devil, a relative to other saints. What she does demarc very well is the devil is going to come at you

to derail you. And all he wants to do is move you one degree out of 360 available to him. That's it. Eventually, he came to her saying, look, why don't you just pray for a husband? Pray for a good husband that will take care of you, that will take care of your children, pray that you have a decent house where you can all grow food and raise healthy children. There's nothing wrong with this. If she did pray for it, there'd be nothing wrong with it. But what was wrong was the fact that the devil was coming at her to tempt her with it because none of those things were for her.

God had already communicated to her a different plan for her. And so she wanted nothing to do with anything else because it just wasn't what God wanted. And so therefore, she wanted nothing to do with it. The battle came not like it did with Padirapio with beatings and this kind of stuff didn't happen with Catherine. It was much more internal. It was much more trying to veer her off course, but only 1%. That's enough. Because if you're off course by 1%, keep on traveling two or three days' journey,

you're going to be a continent from your target destination. And father, I guess I'm just curious in the general sense, if on one spectrum you have extreme Calvinism where everything is basically just under puppet status, and then on the other side, God is sort of disinterested, sort of blind watchmaker. What is the Catholic perspective on people missing out on God's will for their lives if they're generally seeking God? I'm curious because it sounds like the enemy will come after us and try and get us to compromise a little bit.

And you mentioned, in this case, it wasn't even a bad thing. It was there's a lot of people that want to have a quiet, nice, relaxing life and, you know, raise a family, all good things. Would the Catholics say that if God has something for you, it's hard? hard to miss out on that if you're seeking him? The position of the church on such a thing would be, well, look, the highest good for you is what God wants. Now, there's kind of his general will for all human beings, and he wants you to flourish

and me to flourish. He created you as a human. And for human beings, certain things are necessary. It's necessary for you to feed yourself, clothe yourself, take care of yourself, medically, and so forth. It's necessary for you to work. It's necessary for you to live in a community, a society. It's necessary for you to help people and so forth.

But that's God's plan for Ryan as a human in general. But that can be superseded by God's plan for Ryan in particular, his special plan for Ryan. And so he may want you to live as a hermit and puts it on your heart and gives you life through that. Now, when God does these things, you know, there's a peace in God's will. It's meant to give peace, even if initially it causes pain and anxiety. But nobody who has ever submitted to God's will has ever been in torment for their lives. There might be a period of adjustment. There might be a period where they have to catch up to God's will at the level of their heart and mind and understanding.

So with regard to saying no to God's plan for use, his special plan, once he has convinced you of, it. Well, by definition, you will have less happiness than if you followed that plan. Think about it. Who are we? Who are you as a creature to say no to Almighty God? God reveals his plan, which is essentially a gift, and do you have the audacity to say, no, I want something else? How could one expect to be happy if that is the case? You are presuming to know more than God. Yeah. And I think this brings up the question, obviously, when we're talking about temptations, and it sounds like St. Catherine's battle was in the mind. And I do think of, you know, if you have a holy woman like this, the enemy's probably not going to be able to take her down and get her to switch sides.

So his only recourse is to minimize her impact, right? Yes. But her impact was so great. There just really was a profound charism where somebody could meet her. and they were completely moved by her. They were moved by her sincerity, her character, her goodness. When they talked to her, they heard God. And so this power was within her, even to the extent that people who were possessed by demons would come to her and she would exercise them just through her words.

So there's a special gift here. There's a gifting that is not in the average person. It's certainly not in me. And I hate to break it to you, right? I haven't discovered it in you yet either. But Catherine certainly had it. There was this mesmerizing ability of hers, Vince people, of her sincerity and her agency within God.

And that, the devil, couldn't take it on. He couldn't break it. He couldn't even come close to defeating it. So he went at her in a different way internally, getting her to think and fantasize about normalcy. Wouldn't you like to have this? Wouldn't you like to have that? At a certain point, she would say, you know, no, I wouldn't.

I've never wanted that. Why in heaven's name would I want that now? So she would kind of break herself out of that tempting bondage that was being created, which is strange because, you know, for her, that kind of thing was ordinarily not a temptation. And yet here the devil has a way. He has a certain magic that he can spin on things, that he can make ordinarily really ugly things to you,

things that have no attractive power whatsoever. He can make them very attractive to you. And I guess obviously this brings up an interesting question because the enemy doesn't know God's specific plans for a person, but I'm assuming that they're reacting to someone who is on a trajectory towards holiness, and they can sense that, and they'll try and step in to derail.

that person in any way, right? Oh, absolutely, for sure. I mean, St. Ignatius Loyola is a prime example of this. So God had convinced him of many things, and Ignatius responded to it. Then the devil started telling what you really should do is live your life heroically, move into a cave, let your hair grow out, your fingernails grow out, don't bathe, and live as if you're dead to the world. This is what you oh God, after what he's done for you. And that's what he began to do. And then it was an insight in a moment of clarity where I realized, what the hell am I doing in this cave? This is not that for which God called me. I know it's not. So I decided to do this. Why? And he started to examine the experience. He realized this was a temptation. The devil got me to choose second best. Now, he wasn't sinning.

in the sense that, you know, there was no moral law that he was breaking. But he picked second best. It wasn't what God wanted. And so, you know, Ignatius cleaned himself up and got back to work at building the religious order that he did, which forever left its mark on the church. Now, Father, in your own use of relics and intercession of saints and exorcism, has St. Catherine ever joined you in the room? I've used her relics to great effect.

The demons hated it. They were not shy about their displeasure. Catherine is a great saint, so it just wasn't surprising. What relics specifically do you have a first? I have bone. I think I'm always curious, too. Where do they come from? How do you get your hands on all these relics? We get so many emails, too, but obviously there's no relics are us. What is the procurement process?

Because I work with the Vatican in this ministry, that's how I am able to obtain them. but they are not available to individuals normally. The Vatican does not assign relics to individual persons, not even bishops or cardinals. It assigns relics to parish churches and chapels for the purpose of public veneration. So individuals need not apply, need not make a request. I get a million emails myself.

How can I get a relic of this? How can I get a relic of so-and-so? And I just have to leave those kinds of emails unanswered, because there wouldn't be enough of me in a day to type out all the responses to this. So no Amazon priming relics, right? Correct. Awesome. Now, Father, we know St. Catherine had some very intense mystical experiences.

There is the story about her sustaining only on the Eucharist. Could you tell us a little bit about that account? For sure. So Catherine, towards the end of her life, she took on great mortifications, and there was a woman that she was treating that had cancer of the breast and she had open sores. And there was a way in which this woman really repulsed her. The grossness of it all, it just really grossed her out. But she felt such a contrition of having that reaction that she did something profoundly strange.

Now, don't try this at home. We have to view this detail that I'm about to say in light of what I'm a lot of, happened afterwards to conclude that this was a prompting by God. So this was not something that she created. This is not something that anyone should take on his or her own account. What she did was she went and cleaned the woman and cleaned the pus that was coming out of her breasts and she consumed that pus as a way to defy the disgust, the grossest, the grossest, that she felt towards this woman. And the Lord appeared to her after, and he offered her his heart. He had come prior and said, you know, I took your heart away days ago, and now I give you mine.

And from that point, she survived only on the Eucharist. Now, this may have lasted only several months, but it was months, which is impossible. On a human level, you cannot survive and get your nutritional needs, your caloric needs from a Eucharist wafer, even if you consume the Eucharist every day. And yet she survived. And when she did die, she died. She had a stroke, which paralyzed her from the waist down, and then a week later died. And how some have described, some modern authors have described her. And I don't automatically disagree with them. They described her as having died of exhaustion and malnutrition. But that exhaustion and malnutrition was divinely induced. So this is not like a regular person who is malnourished because he or she was just underfed, was a street person who

was not taken care of, or who was overrun with mental illness. So he or she did not feed himself or herself, this is something really different. This is an action of God because there is no way that she could have survived on just the Eucharist. So it was not a failure of her taking care of herself. She did not starve herself to death. She didn't. This is a prompting by God. If there was self-starvation, she wouldn't have lasted a fraction of the time that she did while she was on this regime. But sometimes God asks us to do something that is extremely. extraordinary. And he does say in his word that the wisdom of God is foolishness to men and the wisdom of man is foolishness to God. And so he may ask us to do something that appears off the wall in every way.

But this is God who is asking it. And so we obey. So is the implication here that she felt God led her to fast and only consume the Eucharist? That's correct. She actually could not eat. Her body refused to consume food. We have a letter that she wrote to her spiritual director, Raymond of Capua. Incidentally, he has been beatified himself, Blessed Raymond of Capua, where he had told her, you need to eat and you need to force yourself to eat. She says, I'm trying all the time, and I cannot. I'm praying for God to give me that will, and I cannot.

So it was not in her will to do this. Wow. So, Father, this brings up an interesting question. if people are feeling that God is calling them, you mentioned the, obviously, the classic dilemma, which is the wisdom of God is the foolishness of man. What is the general best practices here for followers of Christ who are sensing God calling them to do something unorthodox? And I guess this lends itself to a broader discussion of how we make decisions, especially with something that might involve mortification or something a little out there.

When she received it, she asked that no one else be able to. able to see it. She told him not to convince him of it, but because he's her spiritual director and he deserves to know that she has chosen him to be her spiritual guide. And so he needs to know about her. I think she would rather not have had him known because it was not visible to anybody else. It was something personal for her. If she had not disclosed it to him, then nobody in history would ever know about it. But neither was there any physical evidence that she had it. And this is what I mean by Catherine being a mystic.

Catherine is experiencing realities in her dialogueing with God, in her perception of divine things and of the world, of her own consciousness as she begins to set up, about doing God's plan. She is perceiving two worlds at hand, the human and the divine. And they're both unfolding. And she has to then turn and attempt to describe these things, using our limited language to do so. She describes at one point undergoing a mystical marriage with Jesus, that Jesus comes to her and asks her to be his bride. And indeed, for nuns, this is the reality that the experience, I mean, you're entering the convent and taking on final vows is a marriage day.

And this is why nuns wear veils. It represents a marriage veil. And you are married to Christ. But she had an experience in this mystical marriage that was unusual even for a mystical marriage, where she said Christ came and put a ring. on her finger. And it was a ring of flesh. So a ring of flesh. This was not a ring that people could see, but it was something that she experienced. Now, so this is Catherine describing this. And of course, as I said this right now, in your mind, you had an image of a woman's hand and a ring of flesh being put on. And like, what was up in the air is, well, gosh, what would this

flesh look like. Would there be blood? Would there be skin? Would there be this? It did not necessarily happen in this manner. So she is having to put into words experiences which are sublime and inner. So it may not have been a ring that goes on the finger at all, but could have been, for example, no, she doesn't say this. So this is entirely my conjecture. Could it have been the Eucharist? And the Eucharist itself is presented symbolically as a ring in this kind of vision. I don't know, but I'll tell you this, and this gets my goat. Even on the Wikipedia page, there's a modern author who describes, and Catherine does not, but this modern author describes the ring of flesh that Jesus put on Catherine's finger is his own foreskin,

which is just the craziest, most absurd, most disingenuous, inauthentic, intellectually dishonest thing that you could say about this experience. And this is somebody who does not understand mystical experience. Now, that is not surprising because it is very difficult to understand and make sense of that world because you're in the world of sign and symbol and you've got to make sense of sign and symbol. but also she is going over and above what Catherine said. And so you have to have some kind of arrogance to 600 years after somebody lived. No one has ever conjectured that this is what really happened.

Or this is what it means when she said she received a ring of flesh from Jesus. To describe it in such a way, it's just absurd. So to quote St. Johnny Cash, though, it was not a ring of fire. It was not a ring of fire. I know we kind of covers it a little bit farther. Maybe a couple of quick thoughts in some of these. You know, some skeptics might look at her kind of extreme penances and think, you know, this is, quote, pathology, not holiness. How do you respond to that kind of from a lens of discernment and spiritual maturity?

That is certainly a fair criticism of anyone, including saints, that the extremity of the penances were wrong. Could that have been the case with Catherine? Could they have been against the will of God? Yes, totally. I know, for example, Bernard of Claervaux, he drank kerosene. kerosene oil as a kind of penance. Well, guess what? It burned an ulcer through his stomach. And he came to regret it. And every time in chapel when he had to chant the Psalms, he would cough because of the ulcer in his stomach. There was a sense in a certain period of the church where extreme penances were

seen as good things as a measure of your love for God. I don't know enough to accuse Catherine of such a thing. She was under the care of a spiritual director. She was obedient to the director. She was also receiving messages directly from God. I can't sit here and say that she sent and did wrong by doing what she did. The only thing I can say is, you know, Catherine loved God. And at the same time, it is entirely possible that she made a mistake. And I'll tell you this. she had a vision of our lady, an alleged vision, where our lady told her, I was not conceived without sin, which was later disproved by the dogma of the immaculate conception. So if Catherine did have such a vision, one of two things happened. Either she really didn't have a vision and was mistaken to having a vision, or the vision she had was of the devil and not.

of God, and she was tricked. Yes, Father, what would be the lasting legacy of St. Catherine of CNN today? Why do you think she has endured in popularity so much? And what is the take-home message? If we're calling them the Saints translations, if you will, what are we gleaning from this translation? Well, that God can use someone like Catherine, who was illiterate, who was different and weird, in sense that she wasn't like other people during her day.

she didn't seek out the things that they were seeking. She just had her mind singularly bent on religion. And yet she had such a confidence in God that it emboldened her to go and take on these profoundly exceptional tasks like approaching the Pope and saying to him, look, you need to move the papacy back to Rome. That's what God wants you to do. She would go to towns that are warring against each other. and make peace with them, bring them to peace.

She got herself so close to warring factions at one time that she was almost killed in the midst of it. And yet, she never gave up. So there is a holy boldness in her that she was ready to completely define herself according to the way God wanted to make her, that God wanted to identify her. and she was prepared to completely live out of that identity. And because of that, because of her docility to what God wanted to do with her, she changed the world in her day and has left a lasting mark on the world.

You know, she died in April 29th, and the day of your death is traditionally the feast day. It's your heavenly birthday, so it is named the feast day. But St. Peter of Verona was already on that day. and he was a saint very popular in Italy. So 200 years later, in the 1600s, they moved her date to the 29th and removed St. Peter Verona because Verona had fallen out of popularity and was nowhere near as popular as Catherine of Siena was. Now, that tells you a heck of a lot. And they were both Dominican saints.

They were both members of the Dominican order. and yet this newcomer came and superseded the mighty Peter Verona. Now, there's a mark of holiness. Now, God did something really special in her, and here we are. Amen, indeed. All right. Well, we will have to see Anna later, folks, because we got to go. And Father, really appreciate you sharing about St. Catherine.

May we all be as holy as St. Catherine. and even if it's apocryphal, wink and have demons flee. Yeah? Amen. Amen. All right, folks, thanks for listening to the Exorcist Files. We will see you very, very soon. God bless y'all.