The Bench: The Iacocca Standard | thomasroman.com/
She called the Pope a coward.
Not in private. In writing. In a letter addressed to Gregory XI in Avignon, delivered by messenger, read by the man who held the highest institutional authority in the Western Church. She called him Babbo. The Italian word for Papa. Affectionate and direct and utterly without deference to the office when the office was failing the people it existed to protect.
She was twenty-nine years old. She had no title. No institutional standing. No credential the Church was required to recognize. She was a laywoman from a dyer’s family in Siena who had begun writing to the most powerful leaders in Europe because the people downstream from their failures were paying a cost no one with standing was willing to name.
She named it.
Gregory returned to Rome. The papacy has been in Rome ever since.
The Formation in the Hospitals
Catherine grew up the twenty-third of twenty-five children in a busy household in Siena.
She had her first mystical experience at six years old and spent the following years in the specific interior practice of a person who has decided that the questions that matter most are not the ones the world around her is asking. She won the right to live as a Dominican tertiary, bound by religious rule but not cloistered, free to move through the world and serve it.
She served it with her hands first.
Years of caring for the sick in Siena’s hospitals. The people the city had decided were too difficult or too contagious or too far gone to be worth the cost of sustained attention. She went to them. She dressed wounds that other people would not approach. She sat with the dying in the specific way that presence sits with dying, not managing the situation but inhabiting it alongside the person who had no one else.
That formation is what made the letters possible.
Not the theological education she largely lacked. Not the institutional standing she never had. The specific formation of a person who had spent years going to the furthest downstream and absorbing the cost of that going without anyone requiring her to. The formation that produces the interior standing to speak truth to power is not built in proximity to power. It is built in proximity to the people power has abandoned.
She had been building it in Siena’s hospitals for years before she picked up a pen.
Eleven Letters
She began writing in 1376.
Not cautiously. Not diplomatically. With the specific directness of a person whose formation has already answered the question of what the truth requires and is no longer deliberating about whether to say it.
She wrote to Gregory eleven times. She wrote to kings and queens and city-states across Italy. She wrote to people who had every institutional reason to dismiss her and some of them listened anyway.
To Gregory she wrote with a combination of deep affection and complete refusal to soften what needed to be said. She called him sweet Christ on earth in one sentence and told him his weakness was destroying the Church in the next. She did not choose between the love and the truth. She held both simultaneously because the formation had taught her that genuine love for a person requires telling them what they need to hear rather than what will make the encounter comfortable.
That is truth-telling discipline at its complete form. Not the willingness to be honest in theory. The willingness to be honest to the person who has the power to silence you, about the thing they most need to hear, in the language that will actually reach them rather than the language that protects you from the consequences of having spoken.
She wrote eleven letters. Gregory moved the papacy back to Rome in 1377.
What Truth-Telling Discipline Actually Is
Catherine died on April 29, 1380. She was thirty-three years old.
In less than a decade of public activity she had written nearly four hundred letters, negotiated peace settlements between Italian city-states at war, and moved a papacy that had been in France for nearly seventy years back to the city where it belonged.
She never held an institutional position. She never had official standing. She never had the protection of a title or the authority of an office.
She had a formation. Built in the hospitals of Siena. In the years of going to the furthest downstream before anyone was watching. In the daily practice of absorbing cost before passing it on. In the specific interior discipline of a person who had decided that what was true was more important than what was comfortable.
The difficult conversation is coming. The one where the person across from you has more institutional standing than you and needs to hear something they do not want to hear. The one where the easier path is silence or softening or the diplomatic version that gets the meeting over without anyone having to hold anything uncomfortable.
And in that moment the question is not whether you have the courage. The question is whether the formation has built the interior standing to say the true thing in the language that will actually reach the person rather than the language that protects you from the consequences of having spoken.
Catherine wrote Babbo. Not Your Holiness at a safe distance. Babbo. The formation had built the relationship beneath the truth so the truth could travel through the relationship rather than around it.
She called the Pope a coward because she loved him enough to.
The formation made both things possible at the same time.
What are you building that will let you do the same?