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Visit with Pope Urban VIII

In 1625-1626, she petitioned the Spanish Crown for financial reward for her services as a soldier in the New World. She did this in her relación de méritos y servicios (Account of Merits and Services). In addition to seeking reward for her time at war, she also sought compensation for money she lost while spent traveling to Rome. This document includes accounts from "witnesses" or others who knew Erauso. However, many of the accounts are contradictory in nature and some do not know what to make of Erauso's predicament. The reason that their accounts are different is for a few reasons. Firstly, they all knew Erauso by different names and different accomplishments. They may have known Alonso Díaz de Guzmán, for example, but they did not know Catalina.

Scholars are conflicted as to whether or not this visit between Erauso and Pope Urban VIII actually occurred, but her Account of Merits and Services can be found in the Archivo General de Indias and the Real Academia de la Historia de Madrid and it was filed between 1625 and 1626, which would match up with the accounts of her being in Rome at that time.

Questions of Gender and Identity

New scholarship has questioned Erauso's sexual orientation and gender identity. While Erauso never mentions specifically in her memoir being attracted to a man, there are numerous instances of her relationships with other women. There was an encounter with the sister-in-law of a Lima merchant, a quarrel with her brother over his mistress and other occasions of Erauso being betrothed to women in the New World. Those betrothals, however, usually ended after Erauso exploited the situation and rode off with gifts and dowry money.

Other scholars, such as Sherry Velasco, have also written on the subject of gender and sexual identity. In Velasco's case, she argues for Erauso's lesbianism and transgenderism. She argues that, throughout the years since the first printings of Erauso's memoirs, there has been a lot of different retellings and exaggerations. In those retellings of Erauso's story, she says that there has been an effort to "de-lesbianize" Erauso through the invention of different heterosexual relationships as well as downplaying her relationships and behavior with other women.This happened mostly in versions of the story told and published in the nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century, Velasco argues, there was actually a "re-lesbianization" of Erauso. This happened originally in heterosexual, femme-fatale in the 1940s to appeal to younger women as glamorous. Then, later in the 1980s, she appeared as a "melancholy lesbian whose lover dies and a voyeuristic lesbian whose narrative ends with the optimistic image of the protagonist accompanied by the object of her sexual desire."

Other scholars, such as Matthew Goldmark, also argue for Erauso's sexual orientation and identity. However, he takes the approach of examining her Accounts of Merits and Services document. In particular, Goldmark examines the "hábitos" or "habits" section of the document. This section gives accounts from witnesses or other people that knew Erauso and could speak to her demeanor in her petition of the King and the Pope. This section also was an intersection of not only gender, but also class and profession. The accounts in Erauso's document support and show how Erauso and others navigated ideas of gender and identity at that time.

Regardless of how Erauso identified, researchers are still divided into different camps on the reason for Erauso's grand story of her adventures. Some argue that Erauso had to pretend to be attracted to women in order to keep her identity a secret and to blend in with her fellow Spanish soldiers. Others argue that Erauso was actually a lesbian who used her dress as a way to not attract attention from church authorities and to continue to have her attraction toward women. Still others fall into the third camp that Erauso actually did identify as a man. Those in this school of thought therefore conclude that Erauso was merely expressing their sexual identity through transgenderism.