The Twenty-Something Who Scolded the Pope: Saint Catherine of Siena

In 1376, the Pope doesn't live in Rome. He lives in Avignon, France, a guest, or perhaps a political prisoner of the French crown, in what history will call the Avignon captivity. Nearly 70 years have passed since the Pope's left Rome, and no one seems to have the nerve to bring the Sea of Peter back to where it was born.

No one, that is, except a 29-year-old woman, the daughter of a dyer, one of the youngest of roughly 25 children, who decides to write, or rather dictate, since she never had a formal education, a letter to the Pope himself. Her name is Catherine of Siena, and in that letter, she doesn't mince words. She literally tells him to act like a man, and not a coward.

She tells him plainly that he needs to return to Rome. A pope, the head of Christianity, scolded by a Tuscan woman with no formal schooling. And here's the remarkable part. Her insistence genuinely helps make it happen. Pope Gregory XI, under pressure from her and other political and diplomatic factors of the moment, does return to Rome in 1377, ending nearly 70 years of Avignon residency.

Catherine will die young, at 33, after a life marked by extreme fasting and mystical visions, that today we would probably view with a more critical, clinical eye. But the historical fact remains. A 14th century woman with no formal education and no political power influenced the highest decisions in Christendom through sheer force of words and unshakable conviction. In 1970, she becomes one of the first two women ever proclaimed Doctor of the Church. 1900 years of male theologians, and at a certain point, the church says, wait a minute, she was right all along.