The Dominican Tertiary Who Walked to Avignon and Talked the Pope Into Going Back to Rome
Catherine of Siena was a 14th-century lay Dominican mystic from a Tuscan dyer family. She had no formal education and never learned to write. She wrote (through dictation) several hundred letters to political and religious leaders, walked from Siena to Avignon in 1376, and persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome.
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