Renaissance (15th–16th century)
Feast: September 15
A Genoese noblewoman trapped in a miserable marriage who found God in a flash and spent the rest of her life running a plague hospital.
For ten years, Catherine Fieschi Adorno tried to be happy. Her marriage to Giuliano Adorno — arranged for political reasons when she was sixteen — was loveless. He was a spendthrift and unfaithful. She tried worldly pleasures for a while, then withdrew into depression. On March 22, 1473, during confession, something broke open. She described it as a sudden, overwhelming vision of her own sins and God's love at the same time. She could not speak for days. From that moment, she was different. She devoted herself to caring for the sick at the Pammatone Hospital in Genoa, eventually becoming its director. When plague struck the city in 1493, she ran the hospital through the worst of it, personally nursing patients and contracting the disease herself — she survived. Her husband, stunned by her transformation, had his own conversion and joined her at the hospital until his death. Catherine's writings on purgatory — she described it not as punishment but as the painful joy of a soul burning away everything that separates it from God — influenced theology for centuries. She died in 1510 after years of mysterious illness, still at the hospital.