Sainte Catherine de Sienne [“Saint Catherine of Siena”]
(French edition, 1980, 144 pages)
A three-act play written while Raoul Auclair was working for the O.R.T.F. [French radio and television network]
“1970. For the first time in the history of the Church, two women have just been elevated to the dignity of Doctor of the Church, Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena. Teresa was learned. Catherine was ignorant. Now, this ignorant person would dictate letters, sometimes simultaneously, to all the great ones of Europe, stipulating for them, from God, what their duties were. And princes, governors, kings and pope humbly received her commands.... If I wrote this ‘Catherine of Siena’, it was not because of this current event which has suddenly placed her so high in the hierarchy of the saints, since the text was written before Paul VI’s decision was known, but because of another type of currentness which is the parallel between the difficulties of the Church in our times with that in which it found itself in Catherine’s time.”(Raoul Auclair in the book’s introduction)