Using Catalina and suddenly Safari has become unusable

Using OS 10.15 Catalina, Safari tries to load and then just spins and nothing happens and in Force Quit is shows Safari unresponsive. So you force quit. Went so far as to reload the OS but apparently it did not overwrite or reload Safari so it is still the same. Have switched over to Brave but hate to have something that is unusable on the computer. Is there a cure for this as Safari was my default browser. Thanks for any help. Since you can't load it at all, I can't get to Safari preferences to clear cache etc.