Catherine of Siena

Catherine, a dyer's daughter and Dominican tertiary, never learned to write fluently, yet dictated The Dialogue and hundreds of letters, counseled popes, and helped bring the papacy back from Avignon to Rome. She is one of the first two women named a Doctor of the Church.

Her great teaching is the “interior cell of self-knowledge”: build two homes, she said — one in your room, and one you carry within. There, self-knowledge keeps you humble, and the knowledge of God's goodness keeps you from despair.

Out of that inner cell came astonishing fire. “If you are what you ought to be,” she wrote, “you will set fire to all Italy.” Contemplation and action, in her, were never opposed: one fed the other.