"Women in the early to late Middle Ages who starved themselves were later worshiped as saints." Your ignorance of the Catholic faith is showing, Hadley. God alone is "worshiped." Saints are not "worshiped"; they are venerated and honored for having lived lives of heroic virtue. Even Mary is not "worshiped" -- although, as the Mother of G…
"Women in the early to late Middle Ages who starved themselves were later worshiped as saints." Your ignorance of the Catholic faith is showing, Hadley. God alone is "worshiped." Saints are not "worshiped"; they are venerated and honored for having lived lives of heroic virtue. Even Mary is not "worshiped" -- although, as the Mother of God, she is recognized and praised as the greatest of the saints.
Moreover, male saints through the centuries have often been at least as abstemious as female saints. St. John the Baptist, whom Christ himself declared "the greatest man born of woman" (unlike Christ, John was solely human, not both fully human and fully divine), lived on locusts and honey.
Add to the above the fact that people in the Middle Ages lived much shorter lives than people today, and were therefore often betrothed in infancy and married in early adolescence, and it is not at all surprising that girls who entered the religious life instead of marriage would adopt the rigors of that life, including strenuous fasting.
Were there anorexics throughout history? Perhaps. But that hardly renders spiritually motivated self-denial "starvation," let alone "starvation as spectacle," or mental illness manifesting itself in child-versus-parent power plays that end in the former's slow but inexorable suicide. Catherine of Siena was no "thinfluencer."
"Women in the early to late Middle Ages who starved themselves were later worshiped as saints." Your ignorance of the Catholic faith is showing, Hadley. God alone is "worshiped." Saints are not "worshiped"; they are venerated and honored for having lived lives of heroic virtue. Even Mary is not "worshiped" -- although, as the Mother of God, she is recognized and praised as the greatest of the saints.
Moreover, male saints through the centuries have often been at least as abstemious as female saints. St. John the Baptist, whom Christ himself declared "the greatest man born of woman" (unlike Christ, John was solely human, not both fully human and fully divine), lived on locusts and honey.
Add to the above the fact that people in the Middle Ages lived much shorter lives than people today, and were therefore often betrothed in infancy and married in early adolescence, and it is not at all surprising that girls who entered the religious life instead of marriage would adopt the rigors of that life, including strenuous fasting.
Were there anorexics throughout history? Perhaps. But that hardly renders spiritually motivated self-denial "starvation," let alone "starvation as spectacle," or mental illness manifesting itself in child-versus-parent power plays that end in the former's slow but inexorable suicide. Catherine of Siena was no "thinfluencer."