Santa Catarina

St. Catherine

  St. Catherine of Alexandria  

St. Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr whose feast day is November 25th. She is the patroness of philosophers and preachers.  Her biography is more legend than fact and comes mainly from the Golden Legend.

St. Catherine is believed to have been born in Alexandria of a noble family. Converted to Christianity through a vision, she denounced Maxentius for persecuting Christians. Fifty of her converts were then burned to death by Maxentius.

Maxentius offered Catherine a royal marriage if she would deny the Faith. Her refusal landed her in prison. While in prison, and while Maxentius was away, Catherine converted Maxentius' wife and two hundred of his soldiers. He had them all put to death.

Catherine was likewise condemned to death. She was put on a spiked wheel, and when the wheel broke, she was beheaded. She is venerated as the patroness of philosophers and preachers. St. Catherine's was one of the voices heard by St. Joan of Arc.  (Adapted from Catholic Online Saints Index. For more information see links below.    

Almost all of the names of saints of the Beira and the Minho regions are of Eastern origin.  There are many other saints in the Catholic hagiologies that are from Rome or the surrounding area, but they are not popular in this region.  There are several Catarinas on the Christian lists, but the Catarina of the villages of Portugal is from Alexandria (d.307 CE).   

In Europe, south of the Pyrenees, they made her “advocate of single girls” and of seamstresses.  In Portuguese popular culture she is (or was) “protector against tyrants” or one who fought “against the arbitrary power of kings.”  This was a noble function for a woman.   

In erudite circles she was patroness of philosophers and intellectuals.  According to the author of the Golden Legend, her name signifies “total destruction” of enemies (from the Hebrew Qatar, “split from top to bottom”); she is shown with a wheel of knives, the instrument of her torture, and a crowned head at her feet, as if she had decapitated a king.   

She is at the same time a symbol of the resistance of the Alexandrian Christians against the Eastern Roman Empire and of the struggle against the philosophy of the school of Alexandria.  According to her myth, she defeated the arguments of fifty philosophers of the best school of her time, converted them to Christianity, and because of this, was killed on the Emperor’s orders, despite her aristocratic origin.  From the wounds of her martyred body gushed forth blood and milk.  Then the angels carried her to Mount Sinai.   

She was highly venerated among the Portuguese aristocratic class of the Renaissance (she was patron saint for John III), who mustn’t have known why the common people venerated her too.  It is highly possible that, from the point of view of that class, the philosopher saint who defeated the arguments of the Neoplatonists of Alexandria was a remedy against the humanist and liberating ideas of the period.  Afonso de Albuquerque made her patron saint of India, “that she would protect us from the heights of Mount Sinai.”   

She was also popular in the seventeenth century because she could be a remedy against liberal ideas.  Padre Antonio Vieira dedicated two sermons to her, in one of which he says that she defeated “fifty men, more than the Horaces, but she didn’t divide them to beat them; she convinced them and confused them all, so clearly that there was not one among them who dared to answer her.  They started as philosophers but ended up as the theologians (because the saint had converted them).  The fifty were not chosen by her, but by the Emperor, so she could have defeated five thousand.”  

Links to Saint Catherine of Alexandria