The Medieval Popularity

The height of Catherine’s medieval cult and its later fortunes: one of the most venerated and depicted saints of the late Middle Ages, then removed from the Roman Catholic universal calendar in 1969 on grounds of historical doubt and restored as an optional memorial in 2002. This file sets out the cult at its zenith and the modern Catholic handling of it, with the dated calendar facts treated per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great-Martyr)

At the Height of the Cult

By the close of the Middle Ages, Catherine of Alexandria was among the most venerated saints in all of Western Christendom — by some measures the single most important of the virgin-martyrs, and one of the most important saints of any kind in the religious culture of the later medieval West (so the modern scholarship summarizes: see Lewis, The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England, 2000, and Walsh, The Cult of St Katherine, 2007). The signs of her standing are everywhere in the period: she was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and one of the three great virgins (virgines capitales) with Barbara and Margaret (see The Spread of the Cult); patron of the universities and of a long list of trades and guilds (see Patron of Philosophers and Students); one of the most frequently depicted of all female saints; dedicatee of innumerable churches, altars, and hospitals; and, in the fifteenth century, one of the three heavenly voices of St Joan of Arc. Her name was among the commonest given to girls; her image was in every great church; her legend was among the best-known stories of the age. For some four centuries — from the eleventh-century flowering of the relic-cult to the Reformation — Catherine was simply one of the central figures of Western popular Christianity.

The modern scholarship has worked to explain this extraordinary reach, and its answer is the adaptability of the figure (treated more fully in Modern Scholarship). Catherine could be many things to many people: a model of ideal lay femininity to ordinary women, a model household manager to elite women, a marriage-broker to the unmarried, a patron of learning to the schools, a demanding healer to the sick, a champion of righteous resistance to tyranny in the politics of the papal reform. The cult’s strength lay precisely in its versatility — there was, as the editors of the standard collection put it, “no one, solely defined medieval cult” of Catherine but many cults adapted to many needs (Jenkins and Lewis, eds., St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts, Brepols, 2003).

The Reformation and After

The Reformation broke much of this. In the Protestant lands the cult of the saints was curtailed or abolished, and Catherine — a saint whose legend was both unhistorical and richly miraculous, an easy target for reformers’ criticism of medieval hagiography — lost the public veneration she had enjoyed. In Catholic Europe her cult continued, sustained by the relics, the iconography, and the devotions (the Catherinettes survived into the twentieth century, see Patron of Philosophers and Students), but the high medieval intensity gradually waned. The Eastern Church, untouched by the Reformation, kept her veneration as the Great-Martyr unbroken, centered on Sinai (see Feast and Relics).

The 1969 Removal

The most striking modern episode in Catherine’s reception is the Roman Catholic Church’s own twentieth-century reckoning with the historicity problem — a worked example of a Church trying to honor the very distinction this collection’s flagships draw between cult and documented history (see The Absence of Early Evidence).

In the liturgical reform that followed the Second Vatican Council, Catherine was removed from the General Roman Calendar.

[Disputed/attestation: Catherine was removed from the General Roman Calendar in the revision promulgated by the motu proprio Mysterii Paschalis of Pope Paul VI, dated 14 February 1969 (the new calendar effective 1 January 1970); she was among roughly two hundred saints removed or reduced, alongside others (such as Christopher and Valentine) whose historicity or documentation was doubtful. No official reason for her removal was published; the documented scholarly consensus on the why is the historical doubt about her existence — “there is no contemporary evidence of her existence and no biography of her until the tenth century” (Foley, New Liturgical Movement, 2021; the Vatican text of Mysterii Paschalis, 1969; en.wikipedia.org, “General Roman Calendar of 1969”).]

The removal was not a declaration that Catherine had not existed, still less a withdrawal of her sainthood; it was a decision to drop from the universal calendar a feast whose subject could not be historically verified, while leaving veneration of the saint permitted. It is, in effect, the Catholic Church acting on the same source-critical honesty that governs this collection — refusing to give the universal liturgy’s full warrant to an unverifiable legend, without denying the cult.

The 2002 Restoration

Thirty-three years later the decision was partly reversed.

[Disputed/attestation: Catherine was restored to the General Roman Calendar as an optional memorial on 25 November in the third typical edition of the Roman Missal (Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia), announced in 2002 under Pope John Paul II. As with the removal, no official reason was published; the two leading explanations offered (Foley, New Liturgical Movement, 2021) are that the restoration was an ecumenical gesture toward the Orthodox, who keep Catherine as a Great-Martyr, and that John Paul II — a trained philosopher — wished to restore the patron of philosophers. The restored feast is optional, not obligatory (Foley, 2021; EWTN on the editio typica tertia).]

The 1969 removal and the 2002 restoration together make a telling pair. They show a Church holding, with some difficulty, the same two truths this collection holds: that the legend of Catherine cannot be asserted as history, and that the saint is genuinely venerated and worth honoring. The optional memorial is the liturgical form of that balance — Catherine restored, but with the modesty appropriate to a saint whose history is a legend; honored, but not on the universal calendar’s strongest footing. It is, in its way, the most honest possible liturgical posture toward a saint like Catherine, and it mirrors the posture this collection takes in prose.

See Also

• Modern Scholarship — Walsh, Lewis, Jenkins, and the Golden Legend on the cult’s reach and adaptability
• The Spread of the Cult — how the cult reached its medieval height
• The Absence of Early Evidence — the historicity problem the 1969 removal acted on
• Feast and Relics — the feast removed and restored; the unbroken Eastern observance
• Patron of Philosophers and Students — the patronage invoked in the 2002 restoration

References

• Mysterii Paschalis (motu proprio of Pope Paul VI), 14 February 1969, and the Calendarium Romanum (1969). (The removal of Catherine from the General Roman Calendar.)
• Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia (2002, under Pope John Paul II). (The restoration of Catherine as an optional memorial on 25 November.)
• Foley, Michael P. “The Life and Afterlife of St. Catherine of Alexandria.” New Liturgical Movement, 24 November 2021. (The removal on grounds of historical doubt; the two explanations of the 2002 restoration.)
• Lewis, Katherine J. The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. (The breadth and intensity of the late-medieval English cult.)
• Walsh, Christine. The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. (The cult’s standing among the virgin-martyrs.)
• Jenkins, Jacqueline, and Katherine J. Lewis, eds. St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. (“No one, solely defined medieval cult”; the adaptability thesis.)