Bernini’s pachyderm made it look effortless to carry a 2,600-year-old obelisk on one’s back, even after more than 350 years of bearing the weight. Its home, the Piazza della Minerva, was only blocks from Rome’s Largo Argentina, where I had lived as a student 25 years earlier. I had passed through the square many times. Now a middle-aged adult, flanked by two preadolescent children and a husband midway through our final day in Rome, I paused to note the elephant and its obelisk, then accepted an unspoken invitation to take refuge from the elements in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
Inside, the smell was mildly cavernous: cool stone, yet no water. The scene was slightly less so. Overarching shadows contrasted with the shafts of light filtering through the rose window above the doors, with the flickering candles and a spotlight on the altar. Despite the luminescent marble and the domed and gilded ceiling, the impression was dark more than holy, as if this was a space built to protect secrets.
There was a secret of sorts, ahead in the sanctuary: the headless body of Saint Catherine of Siena entombed within the altar.
Saint Catherine was part of the reason I was in Italy. Thrice in the month leading up to our trip — during weeks of interminable discernment — words attributed to her had made their way to me: “Be who God made you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
A believer might fancy that the Holy Spirit had delivered these words. I didn’t know what I believed anymore, but I hadn’t yet given up.
A few days before meeting Bernini’s elephant in Rome, the kids had lit a candle and I’d knelt before the masked skull of Saint Catherine in the Basilica di San Domenico, a vast, largely unadorned church on a hilltop overlooking Siena’s centro. Throngs of pilgrims — most not much older than our kids — danced and drummed outside the church’s doors, presumably making a brief stop on their way to the 2025 Jubilee of Youth in Rome. I envied their zeal and joy.
“Have you ever read any of Saint Catherine’s work?” a friend would later ask me when I handed her a prayer card I’d picked up for her there. “She was anorexic and a little crazy.”
I never fact-checked that claim and don’t know much about Saint Catherine’s life other than the headlines: She was convicted in her beliefs. She put fire to the world — so much so that parts of her body were enshrined in two basilicas in Italy, both noted jubilee-year stops. So much so that she was quoted by two people on separate occasions in the weeks before my own unofficial pilgrimage. Her words turned up again at a prayer service I’d attended. A church I’d gone to for years in my hometown — which had closed that June as part of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s campaign to save itself — bore her name. Saint Catherine of Siena was the name of the high school (also closed) that my mother attended.
Driving home from work one day before the pilgrimage, I’d called her to check in. She was recovering from a heart attack. My father was recovering from a stroke.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
“Washington Boulevard, near Pulaski.”
She said she once got frostbite on that corner while waiting for a bus on her way to school. She’d also told me once that as a teenager she used to pray to Saint Catherine that life would work out for her. I guess it did. She found and married my father. They had spent nearly 55 years of their lives doing the tireless work of loving each other without leaving room to question whether practicing that kind of monotonous, unyielding love was optional.
Saint Catherine may have been anorexic and crazy. Still — or maybe because of that — she kept finding me. I kept finding her.
At Rome’s Santa Maria sopra Minerva, I knelt in front of her white tomb. I prayed for my parents, that they would get better. Then I stood and walked behind the altar. A bench there, filled with people. A small table and kneeler. A pad of paper and cup of pens. People scribbled notes and slipped them into a glass tower filled with intentions meant for the saint. I returned to the nave, found my children and led them behind the altar. I pointed to the paper slips, whispered that they could, if they liked, write a prayer and hand it over to Saint Catherine.
Once I started writing my own prayer, I couldn’t stop. Prayers kept pouring forth: for peace; for health; for an end to poverty, hunger and suffering; for the dead; for the sick; for the leaders of the world to practice wisdom and love; for my children; for my parents (again); for my marriage; for clarity. I prayed for all the people who needed it most.
Behind those well-intentioned prayers stood the same singular, selfish prayer that had secretly consumed me the previous year — or maybe decade. In fact, it had likely been there all along, even since the heady days 25 years earlier when I’d obliviously swept past that pachyderm and past Saint Catherine’s corpus. I was begging her — begging anyone, really — to intervene and point the way, to make clear to me with the same conviction that had consumed Saint Catherine’s brief, crazy life what I was meant to do, who I was meant to be, how God intended for me to set the world on fire. Catherine died at age 33. A definitive plan, a defining purpose still, at age 44, felt very much a mystery to me. I felt lost. I was uncertain, all the time, about everything. This was my obelisk, a weight I was struggling to bear: this dark, hidden secret, driving me to dark, hidden places. I had no idea.
My tiny written prayers wrapped the paper’s edges, squeezed the blankness from every space. I was asking too much. I was asking everything. It seemed like the right place and time. I didn’t want to leave anything out.
I folded the paper, added mine to the pile of others behind the altar, and wondered whose job it was to collect all those slips, where they ended up. In a bin somewhere? On fire?
I took my daughter’s hand. We stood and found her brother and my husband staring up at Cristo della Minerva, a statue of a muscular Christ leaning against a slender cross, sculpted by Michelangelo when he was about my age. We left the church conscious of thirst and the sun’s radiance and understood that gelato must be our very next stop.
Walking through those crowded, cobbled streets, the backdrop to millennia of lives and stories, I considered what I had left of myself in that cavernous space with mysterious Saint Cate: some fears, some hopes, my truest prayers, my holiest secret.
Emily Dagostino lives and writes in Oak Park, Illinois.