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Katarina made the customary promises of stability and the door was sealed. It had a window through which Katarina could hear Mass and another window to which people would occasionally come to ask for prayers or give food. Though she was considered very young for such a calling, her spiritual director had her walled up in a cell built near Saint Bartholomew's church in Cattaro. In her late teens, Katarina felt a call to live the life of an anchoress.

She read religious books in both Latin and Italian, especially the Holy Scriptures. Katarina learned to read and write during her free time. In Cattaro, Katarina abandoned Serbian Orthodoxy and converted to Roman Catholicism, and took the name Katarina ( Catherine Cosie). Her mother did not understand, and grudgingly arranged a position for Jovana as a servant to a the wealthy renown Catholic Bucca family, who allowed the girl as much time as she wished for church visits. When she was 14 years old, her visions began to be followed by an odd desire to travel to the coastal Venetian town of Cattaro in Albania Veneta ( Bay of Kotor, modern-day Montenegro), where she felt she could pray better. Jovana continued to have these apparitions. Attracted by its beauty, she went to pick up the baby, but it disappeared, leaving Jovana with a feeling of great loneliness. A story says that one day while watching the flocks, she saw a child lying asleep on the grass. She was a shepherdess in her youth, and developed the habit of spending her solitary hours in prayer. The name of her grandfather was Aleksa Kosić, an Orthodox priest as well, just like her great grandfather Đuro Kosić too}. Her father was priest Pero Kosić, brother of Marko Kosić, who later became a monk with the name of "Makarije" and later became Orthodox Serbian Bishop of Zeta. Jovana Kosić was born in a village in Zeta to a Serb Orthodox priestly family, and was baptized in that tradition.