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 The commencement of the fourteenth century saw the Church surrounded by difficulties, at once the consequence and source of many evils. The wild ambition of Princes, and the lawlessness arising from habitual warfare which then disturbed the heart of Christendom, exercised an unhappy influence on the interests and possessions of the Church. Men of worldly views, either themselves desired, or by the interests of their families were urged to seek, preferment in the Church; and the records of that period but too frequently exhibit the sad and fatal consequences. The spirit of the world had, in many instances, stained the holiness of the Sanctuary: and the virtues of ecclesiastics were diminished or destroyed by the dangerous contact with worldly interests. Amidst the conflict of such opposing elements it is not to be wondered that a wily and ambitions Prince, conceived the idea, and was enabled to carry it into execution, of transferring the venerable See of Peter from Rome to Avignon.

It was during this melancholy and eventful period of the Church, while the seventy years captivity of the Roman Pontiffs was being endured, that a simple daughter of a wool dyer, was practising in the retirement of her father's house, virtues of self-denial and penance that were, one day, to manifest the sublime power of prayer and enlighten even the councils of the Princes of the Church. That St. Catharine was raised up a simple and uneducated female, to confound the wisdom and direct the actions of those to whom God confided higher destinies need not, now, be doubted. Nor does the divine economy require that the guidance of the bark of Peter should not be directed by the holy and required warnings of a saintly woman. Her prudence and persevering energy in reconciling the Florentines with the Sovereign Pontiff", induced the devoted Urban VI., to seek, and in essential political arrangements, to adopt the salutary counsel