Asking and Getting

Get the goods on Catherine of Alexandria from this great blog Ask Sister Mary Martha.

St. Catherine … is preaching Christianity. Her converts are promptly killed and Catherine is thrown into jail. But now she is so famous that the Empress and her enclave visit her in jail and are converted, so they have to be promptly killed. Now Catherine is really in the soup. She is to be put to death on the wheel but when she touches it the wheel breaks. Sometimes it even explodes and kills bystanders. So they chop off her head.

Then the angels carry the body of St. Catherine to Mount Sinai. I guess they took her head as well. In art, she’s in one piece again. I can tell you for a fact this never happened. Somebody would have seen it and made a comment.

St. Catherine’s feast day was a huge big deal for a very long time. It was a Holy Day of Obligation in some places. Her popularity and her superpowers caused her patronages to grow. She is the patron saint of: wheels and wheel rights, students, teachers, unmarried girls, fireworks, people who work with wheels, like spinners and potters, archivists, lawyers, dying people, knife grinders and sharpeners, philosophers, preachers, stenographers, nurses, theologians, millers, mechanics, secretaries, people on juries and scholars.

And apologists … there are a lot of those these days.

Catherine is one of my favorite saints. Ask Sister MM is now one of my favorite blogs.