Note 58 — Chapter III · CATHERINE FIESCA ADORNA’S LIFE, UP TO HER CONVERSION; AND THE CHIEF PECULIARITIES PREDOMINANT THROUGHOUT HER CONVERT YEARS

I take the above to have been the actual course of events, for the following reasons. (1) The text just given talks of “the desire for Holy Communion” having been given to her on that day in 1473, and of this desire “never failing her throughout the remainder of her life”; but it does not say, that the desire for daily Communion was given to her then, or that such a desire was continuously satisfied from the first. (2) On page 18b we have: “For about two years she had this desire for death, and this desire continued within her, up to when she began to communicate daily.” This passage, (which does not occur, here or with this Communion notation, in the MSS.,) originally without doubt referred to her later desire for death, carefully described by Vernazza (pp. 98a, b; 99b, c) as occurring in 1507—a description in the midst of which now occurs an account of certain death-like swoons which attacked her in 1509 (pp. 98c, and 133b; this latter experience is given in the MSS. as occurring in November 1509). Still this passage points to a tradition, or early inference, that the beginning of the daily communions did not synchronize with her conversion nor indeed with any other very marked date, but took place not many years after her return to fervour. (3) It is impossible to assume that she did not communicate at all during these first fourteen months, since there is no evidence that, even before her conversion, she had ever abstained from Holy Communion altogether, and since two Eastertides with their strict obligation recurred twice within this period. And if she did communicate repeatedly within this time, then this Lady-Day, three days after her conversion, would be a most natural occasion for one of these communions. And the desire and not its gratification would be mentioned, because the writer characteristically wants her conversion to be followed by something absolutely unintermittent, and such unintermittence attached, for the present, not to her communions themselves, but only to her desire for them.