I have devoted a good thirty years of my life to the study of Catherine de’ Ricci, from the early 60s, when the Collana Ricciana began to appear, up to the two volumes of the Breviario Ricciano which appeared in 1990 to mark the opening of the sixth centenary of the saint’s death. Here I have nothing new to add to all that I have said already, only a brief synthesis of how over the years, I have come to see this extraordinary woman. But any synthesis involves a choice, and any choice involves excisions and gaps and is inevitably wide open to criticism. The risk is real and I have accepted it; I ask for the reader’s understanding. This present essay seeks only to present a simple and clear picture, unburdened by an excess of scholarly apparatus. In it I will try to highlight, often in the saint’s own words, three crucial points in her spirituality: love, which is its source and gives it its scope; obedience to the will of God, which is the golden rule by which this love is lived; and the joyful human and supernatural equilibrium which results from it.

It may seem obvious to the point of banality to say that love, or charity, is the soul and heart and root and fullness of the Christian life, that interior growth is measured by the progressive development of love, that the apostolic life in its entirety derives its fruitfulness from love, that any mystical advance is only the gradual process of union between God and the creature, whose means yet again is always and uniquely love. But no two saints are the same. Each has his or her own proper way, because God’s love for his creatures is not expressed in the abstract or in general. He loves each of us with a love which is quite personal, marked with its own peculiar purpose, and so for each one of us he maps out a path which is particularly our own. So no saint has the same countenance as any other.