The Dialogue

An unlettered laywoman who could barely write her name left the Church one of its greatest books. St. Catherine of Siena - mystic, stigmatic, nurse of the plague-stricken, and the fearless woman who dragged the papacy home from Avignon - dictated The Dialogue in ecstasy: a conversation in which the soul asks, and God the Father answers, unfolding a whole theology of the spiritual life.

The Dialogue walks that book's central image over fourteen days, in the very words she heard, in the beloved public-domain translation of Algar Thorold - Christ the Bridge, thrown across the flood of this dark life, the one road home.

This is a guided retreat, not a reprint:

• Fourteen meditations - Holy Desire, the Cell of Self-Knowledge, "You Are She Who Is Not," Christ the Bridge, the Three Steps, the Blood, the Doctrine of Tears, the Tree of Charity, Providence, Obedience, and the Deep Sea of the Trinity
• Her life, and the words to carry
• A treasury of her own prayers
• Full-color plates - Giovanni di Paolo's Life of St. Catherine (dictating the Dialogue, the Mystic Marriage, the Stigmatization), with Vanni, Beccafumi, Tiepolo, and Velázquez, and her original cover portrait
• A journaling section - pages for your own prayer

All doctrinal content follows the constant teaching of the Catholic Church.

Come, and cross the flood on the one Bridge - and be drawn, with her, into the deep Sea of God.