Caterina Fieschi Adorno was born in Genoa on 5 April 1447, the youngest of five children of Jacopo (Giacomo) Fieschi and Francesca di Negro. Orphaned of her father while still very young, she received a solid Christian formation from her mother; her elder sister Limbania entered religious life as an Augustinian nun. At about thirteen Catherine herself wished to become a nun, but the community refused her on account of her youth. After her father's death she was married at sixteen, in 1463, to the Genoese nobleman Giuliano Adorno, who had returned from commercial and military ventures in the Middle East. The marriage, arranged in part to heal a family feud, proved childless and deeply unhappy. Giuliano was violent-tempered, faithless, a gambler and spendthrift. For five years Catherine endured in silent melancholy; for another five she sought consolation in the worldly society of Genoa, yet found only emptiness and bitterness.
On 20 March 1473 (some accounts say 22 March), while kneeling to confess in the church of San Benedetto near the monastery of Our Lady of Grace, she suddenly received, in her own words, "a wound in the heart of an immense love of God," together with a piercing vision of her own misery and of God's goodness, so intense that she nearly fainted. She fled the confessional unfinished, returned home, locked herself in a hidden room, and wept long. Interiorly instructed in prayer, she became conscious of God's boundless love for her as a sinner. In that same hour Jesus appeared to her burdened with the Cross—an image later familiar in her iconography. A few days later she completed a good confession and began a life of purification marked by continual sorrow for sin, severe penances, and sacrifices offered out of love.
From that conversion onward she advanced into the unitive life. For roughly twenty-five years, she later wrote, she lived "without the mediation of any creature, instructed and governed by God alone," sustained by constant prayer and by Holy Communion received every day—an extraordinary practice for a lay person of her time. Only much later did the Lord give her a priest, Cattaneo Marabotto, as spiritual guide. Profound humility made her reluctant to speak of her mystical graces; she did so only for God's glory and the good of souls. The place of her ascent was the great Genoese hospital of Pammatone, of which she became director, treasurer, and animating spirit. Around her gathered disciples and collaborators captivated by her faith and charity. Her husband himself was converted, abandoned his dissipated life, became a Franciscan tertiary, and moved into the hospital to assist her; he died penitent in 1497. Catherine never entered a religious order, yet spent virtually her entire remaining life within the hospital walls, serving the sick and abandoned, especially during the plagues that struck Genoa in 1497 and 1501.
Two poles filled her existence: mystical union with God, experienced as a spousal bond, and tireless service of neighbor. In her final years a long and grievous illness perfected that union. Worn out in body and purified in soul, she died in Genoa on 15 September 1510. Forty-one years later her Life, Treatise on Purgatory, and Dialogue were published; the Holy Office judged her doctrine itself proof of sanctity. She was beatified in 1675 by Clement X and canonized in 1737 by Clement XII. Pope Pius XII declared her patroness of the hospitals of Italy.
May Saint Catherine of Genoa obtain for us a heart wounded by divine love, that we may turn from every worldly attachment and serve Christ in the sick and the poor.
