Saint Catherine Thomas

She was born at Valldemossa, on Mallorca, on May 1, 1531, according to the Dicastery; Pérez Lozano notes that some historians say 1531 and others 1533. ²³ Her parents were Jaime Thomás and Marquesina Gallard. ³ Today, Pérez Lozano observes wryly, visitors to Valldemossa are shown the charterhouse where Chopin and George Sand stayed, and almost nobody mentions her. ³

Her faith, the Dicastery says, was simple, and tried in many small things. ² She was an orphan by seven. ² Pérez Lozano says her father died when she was three and her mother four years later, and tells the story, as tradition, that an angel came to the child to assure her that her father was with God. ³ He is frank about the rest of what is told of her childhood: he calls it "the golden legend that piously accompanies the saints, with candid miracles and strange prodigies" (translated from the Spanish). ³

After her mother's death she went to live with an uncle and aunt and had to look after the animals, which kept her from church. ²³ Pérez Lozano names the farm, Son Gallart, six or seven kilometers from Valldemossa, and says she lived there eleven years, carrying meals to the laborers, washing, sewing and sweeping, and minding a flock when her uncle Bartolomé told her to. ³ On Sundays she could hear Mass at the oratory of the Trinity. ³ On weekdays, the Dicastery says, she made little altars at the foot of the olive trees. ²

One of the stories he repeats has her waking one bright night, taking the moonlight for dawn, and going to the spring for water, until the bell of the charterhouse rang midnight and she found herself lost and crying in the dark; Saint Anthony the Abbot, it is said, came and took her home by the hand. ³ He gives it as tradition and nothing more, and so does this page. ³

The turn in her life, the Dicastery says, was meeting Father Antonio Castañeda, who lived from 1507 to 1583, of the nearby college of Miramar. ² Pérez Lozano describes him as a hermit who lived on alms in the hills and came to the farm begging, and says that after two conversations he was convinced of her vocation. ³ Her uncle and aunt opposed it. ³ Pérez Lozano adds that a young woman from Valldemossa had just left a convent in Palma, so the moment was a poor one to be asking, and that she was pretty and had suitors. ³

Castañeda won the family over, and she went to Palma to wait, working as a servant in the house of Mateo Zaforteza. ³ There, Pérez Lozano says, his daughter Isabel taught her to read, write and embroider. ³ The real obstacle was money. She had no dowry, and the convents of Palma, poor themselves, could not take a sister who brought nothing. ³ Castañeda went from one to the next, Santa Magdalena, San Jerónimo, Santa Margarita, with no success, until all three, by Pérez Lozano's account, agreed at once to waive the dowry. ³ She chose the first, Santa Magdalena. ³

In 1553, the Dicastery says, she was received as a choir sister by the Canonesses Regular of Saint Augustine in Palma, and she made her vows on August 24, 1555. ² Pérez Lozano says she took the white veil in January 1553, two months and twelve days after entering, with half the city, its nobility at the head, in attendance. ³

She tried to stay hidden, and it did not work. Pérez Lozano says the city came to see her, to ask her advice and her prayers; she avoided the parlor, refused gifts, and when she had to accept them gave them to the other sisters. ³ The Dicastery says her prayer became known beyond the convent, so that the bishop of Mallorca often consulted her. ² Pérez Lozano tells of a prioress who once tested her by ordering her to stand in the courtyard in the midsummer sun until told otherwise, and of the hours she stood there without a word. ³

Her ecstasies became more frequent and longer, some lasting days, by Pérez Lozano's account, and the stone she knelt on in her cell is still kept. ²³ He says she knew ten years ahead when she would die. ³ On Passion Sunday, March 28, 1574, she came into the parlor where one of her sisters had a visitor and said she had come to say goodbye, because she was going to heaven. ³

The Dicastery says that her last ecstasy ended on April 4, 1574, and that she died the next day. ² Pérez Lozano tells it differently: after receiving the sacraments, and asking pardon of the prioress and the sisters, she fell into an ecstasy at the end of which she died, on April 5. ³ The doctors, he adds, had not thought her seriously ill. ³

Devotion to her in Mallorca never faded, Pérez Lozano writes, and the cause moved slowly: Pius VI beatified her in 1792, and Pius XI canonized her in 1930. ³ He says her body has been preserved incorrupt. ³

None of the sources used for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ¹²³ Pérez Lozano describes the affection Mallorca keeps for her as its "little servant saint, little shepherd saint, little nun saint" (translated from the Spanish), but that is a devotion, not a patronage. ³

Her feast is April 5, the day she died, which is where the Roman Martyrology enters her: at Palma de Mallorca, the virgin who entered the Canonesses Regular of Saint Augustine and "shone for her disregard of herself and the denial of her own will" (translated from the Italian). ¹³ Pérez Lozano adds that Valldemossa celebrates her over two days, July 27 and 28. ³ She is not on the calendar of the dioceses of the United States. ¹

The Martyrology does not remember her for her ecstasies. It remembers her for forgetting herself. ¹ The record supports it: an orphan who worked other people's land and other people's houses, and who entered a convent only because three of them, in the end, let her in for nothing. ²³

The olive-tree altars are the detail the Dicastery chose to keep from her childhood, a girl kept from church by her work who built a place to pray where the work was. ² It is a small thing, and the kind of thing a life of prayer is usually made of.

Much of what is told of her is legend, and the fullest of the sources here says so itself. ³ What remains when the legend is set aside is still a life: hidden in a convent, sought out by a city, asked for counsel by its bishop, and remembered after four and a half centuries for having wanted nothing for herself. ¹²³