Saint Catherine was a young Christian woman of noble birth and thus quite well-educated, when at the age of eighteen she presented herself to Emperor Maximinus  who was carrying out a persecution of the Christians. She admonished him for his cruelty and demanded that he cease the persecutions.

Astounded and insulted at the young woman's audacity, but lacking the skills necessary to debate with her, Maxminus detained her in his palace and called for his scholars to try to trip her up in her beliefs either to make her apostatize against Christianity or commit a heresy against the Roman religion so that she could be put to death.

Contrary to what Maximinus expected, she managed to convert many of his scholars with her eloquence and knowledge of both religion and science. Maximinus was so outraged he had them put to death and Catherine scourged and put in prison. His empress however, heard of the extraordinary young woman and stole secretly into the prison in the company of the general Porphyry. They listened to Catherine, were converted and baptized, but were executed by Maximinus when he discovered what had happened.

Maximinus ordered Catherine to be broken on the wheel, yet at her touch it was miraculously destroyed. Seeing no alternative, Maximinus ordered her beheaded. According to legend, her body was carried to the highest mountain peak in Sinai by angels where the monastery and church were later built by the order of the Emperor Justinian. .

Saint Catherine has been ranked with Saints Margaret and Barbara as one of the "fourteen most helpful saints in Heaven." In several dioceses in France her feast day was regarded as a Holy Day of Obligation up until the seventeenth century. Numerous churches are dedicated to her, and at one time her statue decorated almost every church in Europe and Africa.

As Saint Nicholas of Myra was the patron of young men and students, Saint Catherine became the female counterpart, the patron of young women. The spiked wheel that she destroyed with a touch became her symbol and as such mechanics and wheelwrights have called her their patron. Because she triumphed also in the sciences, confounding even the philosophers of Maximinus, her intercession is sought by theologians, orators, and philosophers. It is even thought that she was the saint that had appeared to Joan of Arc